The Problem

I’ve been carrying someone I should have dealt with a year ago.

You know who it is. You knew last year. The work gets covered because you or somebody else quietly covers it, the conversation keeps getting scheduled and rescheduled, and every month you pay a little more for a decision you have already made privately.

You’ll recognize it by these

• You route work around a person rather than through them, and you have stopped noticing you do it.
• Their peers have stopped raising it with you, which is worse than when they were raising it.
• You catch yourself defending them with the same three sentences you used a year ago.
• When you imagine them gone, your first feeling is relief rather than worry about coverage.
• You have had a version of the hard conversation, and it was soft enough that they left it reassured.

The reframe: carrying is a decision, and you already made it

Leaders describe this as indecision. It is not. Carrying somebody for a year is a decision that gets re-made every single week, and the fact that it is never spoken does not make it less of a choice. The team can see the choice, which is the part that costs the most.

The honest question is not whether to be patient. It is what you are actually being patient about, because the answer is almost always your own discomfort rather than their trajectory.

What’s actually causing it

Before you act, it is worth being certain which of these you are looking at. Three of the four are not a people problem:

They were never given the conditions. Unclear outcome, no decision rights, a moving standard, or a role that changed underneath them without anyone saying so. A capable person in these conditions produces exactly what an incapable person produces, and firing them replaces the person while preserving the result. Check the conditions first, always.

Nobody ever told them the truth. In most cases the person genuinely does not know they are underperforming, because every review was graded on effort and every piece of feedback was cushioned. You cannot hold someone to a standard they have never heard stated. If the standard lives only in your head, this is the cause.

You have been catching, not coaching. Every time you take the work back to protect the outcome, you protect this quarter and prevent the capability. Do it for a year and you produce the exact underperformer you were trying to avoid. That is the whole argument of coaching versus catching.

It is genuinely the wrong seat. Sometimes the conditions were right, the standard was clear, the coaching was real, and the answer is still no. That happens, it is nobody’s moral failing, and at that point the kindest available action is the fast one.

What to do next

Write the standard down first, as an outcome with a number or a dated binary state. Not a list of activities. If you cannot write it, you do not yet have a performance problem you can act on, and any conversation you have will be about feelings.

Then run one clear conversation: here is the outcome, here is where we are, here is what has to be true by this date, here is what I will do to support it. Say the consequence out loud. A conversation that leaves someone reassured has not happened yet.

Set the date and keep it. This is the reset. If the reset works you have saved a person, and that is worth far more than the replacement would have been. If it does not, you have the release, and you have it with a clean conscience and a written record.

At NFFS I watched two capable people argue over whose job something was while the thing sat undone. Neither was an underperformer. The accountability was undefined, and undefined accountability manufactures underperformers faster than bad hiring does. Fixing that is a structural job, not a personnel one.

Most CEOs who have been carrying someone know what the conversation is. What they need is someone to hold them to the date, which is a large part of what Executive Coaching does week to week. If you want to talk through the reset before you run it, book a conversation.