Sometimes Its the Person. Sometimes It's the Conditions.

When someone's performance slips, most managers look first at the person. Often the answer lives in the conditions around them. Telling the two apart is one of the most consequential, and most inclusive, judgments a manager makes.

Picture a manager preparing for a hard conversation. One of her direct reports has missed two deadlines this quarter, and the work that does arrive needs revision. She has her notes and her examples. She is about to tell a capable person that he needs to improve.

What she hasn't asked is what changed.

Plenty did. His project gained a second sponsor in the spring, and the two sponsors want different things. Every draft goes to both, comes back with conflicting edits, and waits for someone to choose between them. Nobody has. He is working harder than he was a year ago and finishing less.

If she has the conversation she planned, he will leave it knowing that his manager thinks he is the problem, and that his manager can't see what he sees every day.

The second lesson lasts longer.

I have watched this scene for 30+ years, in libraries, hospitals, banks, and federal agencies. A capable person struggles, and the organization responds by working on the person.

We observe behavior and conclude character

Managers judge people all day. Is she ready for more responsibility? Can I depend on him? The work requires those judgments.

The trouble is what we build them from. We see behavior and draw conclusions about the person. Someone looks indecisive when nobody has told her what she is allowed to decide. Someone looks disengaged after learning that his input changes nothing. Someone looks underqualified who was never given the access and coaching that made a colleague proficient.

A missed deadline has a name attached. Conflicting direction from two sponsors doesn't. So the evidence always seems to point at someone.

This is an inclusion question as much as a management one. The benefit of the doubt is rarely handed out evenly. Some people have their circumstances considered before a conclusion is drawn about them, and some don't. I have spent much of my career on inclusion, and this is where I would look for it first: in a manager's ordinary judgments about who is competent and who has potential.

There is a cost to the organization as well. When we coach a person for a problem that lives in the conditions, the constraint stays where it was, and the next person in the role runs into it too. Another conversation about time management won't create capacity in a role that holds 60 hours of work.

The Conditions Check

Before you decide how to respond, find out where the problem lives. These five questions take about ten minutes. Ask them of yourself before the conversation, then explore them with the person.

1. Would this person describe good work the way I would? Ask them to. If the two descriptions differ, you have found an expectations gap, and effort can't close a gap a person can't see.
2. Do they have what the work requires? Time, information, and access to the people whose input they need. Look at their calendar before you look at their output.
3. Do they know what they are allowed to decide? Work stalls when people wait for permission they aren't sure they need. Decision Rights is one of the most common places a performance concern turns out to live.
4. What else have I asked of them, and did I say which comes first? If everything you assigned is a priority, they are choosing for you, and you may be evaluating them on a choice you never made. Prioritization is yours to do.
5. Is anyone else struggling in the same way? This question tells you the most. One person missing the mark may be about that person. Three capable people missing it in the same place is information about the conditions.

Sometimes it is the person

The check works in both directions. If expectations are shared, the resources are there, the authority is clear, the priorities are ranked, and others in the role are doing well, you are looking at a skill to build or a role that doesn't fit. Have that conversation, clearly and soon.

Pointing at conditions can become its own way of avoiding it. A manager who says "the system is the issue" for a year, while the rest of the team covers for one person's work, has moved the burden onto the people who reliably pick up the slack. There is nothing inclusive in that.

Inclusion asks whether people have had a fair opportunity to meet the expectations. It never asks you to lower them. Once you have checked the conditions, you can say the hard thing with confidence, and the person hearing it can trust that you looked.

You have more levers than the conversation

Often the check will surface something you don't control: the two sponsors, the budget, priorities set two levels up. You still have a move. Take it upward, with specifics.

"My team is stretched" gets sympathy. "Three projects are waiting on a decision between two sponsors, and each week of waiting costs us a release" gets a decision.

This is the part of management we teach least. We teach coaching, delegation, and feedback, and they are good tools. A manager can also clarify an expectation, change a process, move information, renegotiate priorities, or use influence upward. Reading the situation is what tells you which one the moment calls for.

Managers stand where human capacity meets organizational conditions. You see where capable people get stuck before anyone above you does, and you choose what to do with what you see.

People become more capable inside conditions that allow it.

Think of the person on your team you are most concerned about right now. Before you decide what needs to change about them, ask what needs to change around them.