Why your team member isn’t meeting their full potential (and what to do about it)

Are there blockers that you weren’t really realizing, you know, in other places? Okay. And so they are trying so hard to live up to that full potential, but you know, there’s something like a really difficult stakeholder that, you know, every time they get in the meeting with them, that person says no, or they bring up new things, even though you’ve already agreed on something. And this person is actually really a blocker. And maybe your team ever hasn’t shared it with you because they aren’t really sure how to deal with it or they’re trying to deal with it with themselves, but they’re feeling stuck.

They’re feeling stressed. You know, maybe they are overseeing some work or managing influence without authority style, which is like the story of my life when I was in the corporate world. And a lot of times when I couldn’t get something done, it was because other people weren’t following through. Other people weren’t being accountable. Welcome to the managing mid simple podcast. I’m Lia Garvin, your host and team operations consultant through this show and my signature ops playbook.

I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies intact. to save you time, money, and stress. It doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be. Are a new manager looking to learn the ropes or are a seasoned manager ready to up their game? Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. From conflicts to feedback to delegating and more, we leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between.

Let’s go. Entrepreneurs and business owners listening right now, we all started with big dreams, right? Freedom, impact, bringing our visions to life. But there’s a twist many of us didn’t see coming. That managing a team is the hardest thing about running a business. And the words, because I said, so it doesn’t work with children or our employees drawing on my team operations experience in big tech and with business owners, I realized we often complicate how work gets done more than we need to.

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com slash the book or amazon. com and get your copy of the unstoppable team today. Welcome back to the show. One of the biggest frustrations that you have come to me with as a manager, team leader, business owner, is that feeling that you have an awesome team member, but they’re not living up to their full potential. And it’s, it’s a devastating situation because you want to support that person. You want to help them be their best.

You want to help them reach that full potential, but you feel like you’ve tried a lot of things and given a lot of support and they’re just not hitting the mark. So what do you do? And I always say way before we decide that person’s not a fit, we have to do some steps to figure out, Hey, is this salvageable? Can we recover the situation? And when you know, someone’s not reaching their full potential, that means somewhere in there, you know, that there is more potential, that you believe in them, that you have seen something in them.

So that’s awesome, right? Obviously that’s why you hired them. And so I wanted to talk about three things to think through to figure out, Hey, Is this salvageable? Is this something we can do to get that person back on track? Because again, I believe that actually through clear communication, most of these situations are salvageable, at least in the short term, at least until you can figure out a longer term plan for hiring or moving someone and do a different position or whatever.

Okay. So this is like team whispering at work. Okay. Because we are going to get to the bottom of why someone is not living up to their full potential when we know they are capable of more. So what we really want to talk about today is understanding what the barriers are. Okay? Because we’re not going to assume, Nope, they just can’t cut it. We’re going to assume the best and say there must be some kind of barrier getting in the way from them really hitting the mark.

So first question I like to ask is, well,  Did I misunderstand what that person’s strengths even were? What were their superpowers? Did I assume because they came in in this specific role, maybe they came in a marketing role or they came in in a sales role or whatever, that I kind of extrapolated exactly what their strengths would be? And you know, if you had a job description and they interviewed for it and you talked about it and you know, it felt like, well, yeah, I mean, that’s what I need them to be doing.

I understand that. But there’s some nuances there, right? Like I know with folks that come in doing marketing, you know, they might be actually better at strategy or research and analysis than creating social media content, for example, or someone that comes in and kind of program management and operations and They might be very, very detail oriented, but they might not really know how to look at the bigger picture of the team. Right. So it doesn’t mean they’re not equipped for the job, but it might be, you sort of assume that they were going to be tackling certain things that they really didn’t realize that, you know, was part of the job or they, they kind of misunder or they underestimated, I should say themselves.

Now, in this situation, you still need some of those tasks to be accomplished. So it’s really a question for you is, you know, Hey, let’s identify what that person’s superpowers are and see, Hey, is this, is this sufficient to continue doing this role? And I think a lot of times we find that, you know, Hey, when someone’s really leaning into their strengths and superpowers and they are able to get to that full potential, they’re able to really serve our business in a big way, or they’re able to really serve our team in a big way.

And it’s not a lost cause if it means you have to hire, you know, another person to actually do that, that job that you originally needed someone for, that does become problematic because you might be resource constraint, budget constraint or whatever. So it’s a question you’re gonna have to ask yourself of, Hey, now that I understand that person’s superpowers, what do I do next? Okay. Second question is. Was there a disconnect between what the priorities and timelines were from how I understood it and how they understood it.

And this one happens all the time that, you know, we think it was really clear. We think, you know, it’s obvious, you know, there was a discussion about it. We talked about it, but, but some scope has changed. Maybe you’re working in client services and clients have asked for a lot of changes and now it doesn’t feel like the timeline is doable. Maybe you’re working in product development and there’s a ton of stakeholder reviews or executives are out and you’re not able to review stuff.

So that feels like, you know, well, there’s all these barriers to finishing and, and the timelines are a little bit up in the air, maybe not for you, but for the other person. Right? So in this situation, if someone’s not living up to their full potential around, you know, delivering work at the right pace, you know, hitting those deadlines, then it’s a conversation around setting expectations. Right? Right. We say, Hey, here’s what we committed to. Here’s what I need to see.

It’s a feedback conversation, right? And we talk about what we need to do to get back on track. If they understood that or not, what the disconnects were. And then we go from there. Now, in the same vein that I talked about with, uh, you know, understanding superpowers, if someone is, is repeatedly not able to hit timelines and it’s slowing things down, it’s really affecting, you know, the bottom line or production timelines or whatever. Then that creates a bigger issue that needs to be addressed.

But the first thing that we’re doing, and in this episode, we’re just talking about diagnostics. Okay. We are just going to diagnose the issue because solving each of these looks very different. So we have that expectation setting conversation and we hope that, okay, we were just misaligned on deadlines, misaligned on expectations. We talk about it. We set this up station, give that feedback and we’re good to go. Okay. Third. Is are there blockers that you weren’t really realizing, you know, in other places?

Okay. And so they are trying so hard to live up to that full potential, but you know, there’s something like a really difficult stakeholder that, you know, every time they get in the meeting with them, that person says no, or they bring up new things, even though you’ve already agreed on something. And this person is actually really a blocker. And maybe your team ever hasn’t shared it with you because they’re not. They aren’t really sure how to deal with it, or they’re trying to deal with it with themselves, but they’re feeling stuck.

They’re feeling stressed. You know, maybe they are overseeing some work or managing, you know, influence without authority style, which is like the story of my life when I was in the corporate world. And a lot of times when I couldn’t get something done, it was because other people weren’t following through. Other people weren’t being accountable. And when you aren’t in. You know, when you aren’t someone’s manager or somewhere you’re overseeing work for folks that are senior to you or your own leadership chain isn’t holding folks accountable, this can be a really tricky one.

And frankly, that’s why I developed a lot of strategies around influencing without authority to, to help build accountability in teams. But, but this can be a huge blocker for folks is when, when other people aren’t delivering what they said. It can, it can sort of be a huge sticking point. And if we were able to create some more accountability in the team, that stuff, that stuff just is solved right away. And so it’s really not about that team member, not living up to their full potential.

It’s, it’s another issue at play. You know, maybe just maybe you are a bottleneck. Okay. Maybe they have needed you to spend more time reviewing stuff or to respond to emails faster and you’re drowning and you’re, you know, You’re spread too thin or you’re in too deep or wherever you are, or it’s been, she’s been busy with a lot of travel time away, whatever it is. It’s really helpful to take stock on,  wait a second, am I the bottleneck as that manager, as that team leader, as that business owner, whatever my role is, am I actually slowing things down where.

Maybe this team member hasn’t shared feedback with me that, Hey, I kind of keep waiting on you for all of these things. This has happened to me in numerous roles where I, I work really fast. I work at night. I work on weekends when I need to, that was my pace. I was like cranking stuff out when I worked in the corporate world and you know, I might have a manager that doesn’t do that. And that’s fine from a time boundaries perspective.

But when I would finish something and be waiting on them to get back to me, then they became a bottleneck. And it was, that’s the answer of why maybe it wasn’t done the pace that they wanted, which I was living up to on my end. Right. And so, you know, I think we can have a disconnect where we’re asking for something, but then we aren’t, you know, following through with that. Same thing could be, you know, You know, we are just behind on, on emails.

We’re spread thin. We’re in a lot of things, or we’re waiting on information. We haven’t communicated that to our team member yet. So they don’t have all the context. They don’t have all the information and then whatever they come to us, the solution is incomplete and it feels like, well, shouldn’t you have known this? Well, they didn’t have that context. Right? So there are many situations where there’s other blockers that really don’t have a ton to do with that team member.

Yes. They can maybe push harder. They can follow up better. I think a lot of times we have team members that ask something once and then throw their hands up and say, well, I never heard back that then becomes a conversation around team norms or on follow up. Okay. So. Um, you know, with one of my clients that, that runs a law firm, we have made a really clear, you know, expectation or, you know, SOP or protocol that, Hey, we revisit any open task within seven days.

Every single task has to be revisited within seven days so that it’s not a, well, I didn’t hear back. We know that within seven days, every single active task will be actioned. You know, maybe it’s setting up something like that. Maybe it’s saying. Hey, as that manager, I’m spread really thin. If you don’t hear back from me, I, you can always email me again. That’s what I always tell people that are working for me. I say, you know, I’m very, I’m on my emails a lot, but I do miss stuff.

Please. If you haven’t heard from me in two or three days, it’s not, it’s not bothering me. Write me again. So setting expectations on how to remove yourself from being a bottleneck is going to be really important. That manager, when, when I was working for her, when I was working on the weekends a lot, uh, or nights or whatever, she. You know, what could have been really helpful to say, Hey, I’m not going to be looking at this at night or on the weekend.

So you are going to be waiting if you send this stuff, like maybe share it, you know, end of day Thursday, and then I’ll take a look Friday. And then that gives you the time to move forward if you had wanted to be working on over the weekend. Right. So a lot of this, again, team whispering here, this comes down to having a dialogue with your team members. This is how we diagnose the real problem because like I said, you know, I’ve done an episode on when someone’s not hitting the mark and I see it as very different than someone not meeting their full potential because I really believe when we see potential in someone and we know there’s more there, it is really, it’s our responsibility as that leader to be able to unlock some of that and really help them get there because we know it’s, we know they can.

You know, when someone is not hitting the mark, that’s way more around that feedback conversation seeing like, well, is this a team fit thing? But the full potential one here, this is about that diagnosis so that we really make sure we are not, you know, getting in the way of someone actually achieving what could have been phenomenal results on our team. So that’s what I got for today. Give it a try. Ask those questions. Did I misunderstand what their strengths were?

Was there, you know, a disconnect on priorities and timelines, or is there some other obstacle in the way potentially me as the bottleneck? Ask those questions, have a conversation. And I hope, hope, hope you will find that that team member does end up living up to that full potential on your team. See you next time. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning into the Managing Made Simple Podcast, where my goal is to.

Demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive. With that said, let’s spread the word. If you love this episode, please pass it along to someone who might benefit from it. See you next time.