Can you eliminate most of the reasons why people fail?

There was an interesting thread on Linkedin last week that reminded me of a learning i’ve had the last few years. And its on the topic of “why do people fail?”

Or to be more exact... why as a manager do some of the people in your team underperform?

And i'm going to really dig into this and hopefully dispel some myths.

Do note that I've had over 100+ direct reports over my ~20 year career that spanned strategy consulting, corporates, product leadership positions and now my own agency.

I view that there are two main buckets as to why people fail

The first bucket relates to things that are innate to the person.

This refers to their raw intelligence, their education level, experience and knowledge. And also traits like whether they are lazy, a procrastinator, etc.

The second bucket relates to things that have to do with how they are managed.

By this I mean things like:

• Were they clear on what the task was?
• Did they have a clear definition of the level of detail that was needed?
• Were they impacted by things outside their control? Or perhaps politics?
• Did they feel comfortable to reach out and get clarity on key things they were unsure of?

You see the difference between these two buckets is that the first bucket consists of things that I as a manager cannot change. It is innate to who they are.

The second bucket is things that I can change. And in fact if they fail because of one of those reasons.. then I view that I failed as a manager.

Because they were solvable by having the right system and process.

What does it mean to have the right system? My example.

The past three years I work with tons of contractors. And I manage them using Clickup with a system that i’ve devised where I try to write things extremely clearly.

Each card is written with exactly the same format that includes a context (why we are doing the task) and goal (what is the definition of done?).

Here is an example below.

The things that I’d like to draw your attention to is the level of clarity on what is expected. The person doing the task should know exactly why they are doing it and what exactly needs to be done.

I do this for tech tasks as in the example, but also non-tech tasks.

And basically every task I give anyone I manage has a card like this. I also use the status to make it clear what is prioritised to work on and what is not.

We also align our expectations on when it will be done by via the due date.

Lastly, we review these tasks regularly (often daily) via a standup. Where they use comment updates on what was done and what they plan to do today.

So we are completely in synch and they clarify questions they have either during the standup or as comments, which I typically respond to within 1-2 hours max.

How does working like this avoid most forms of failure?

Simple.. we take ambiguity out of the equation. And so they don’t go off in the wrong direction.

They also don’t have misaligned expectations about what the result should look like. Because I make it very clear.

When I reflect on most of the folks i’ve managed in the past before I used this system… I’d say at least 50% of what I deemed “underperformance” was bucket two.

Meaning they went off in the wrong direction, took too long because it wasn’t made explicit, didn’t go to enough depth, didn’t clarify, etc.

And rarely was it simply that they lacked intelligence or desire to succeed.

Lastly, I’d say that from what I’ve seen with most other managers… is that their average is higher than mine. Probably closer to two thirds.

And so my view is that you can remove 2/3 of the reasons why people fail

If managers take the time to make every task explicit and work in a way like this… I literally think the percentage of underperformance drops by at least 66%.

Its game changing.

I couldn’t imagine working in the way I used to work before I adopted this system a few years ago. It’s just so ambiguous and prone to breakage.

Also… even if your team is relatively good and they don’t “fail”… I guarantee if you adopt an approach like this you will get SO MUCH MORE out of them.

I see it time and again the last few years.

Teams are managed relatively ‘high-level’ with no explicit tasks being created and tracked. And then updates are given during a weekly meeting or something like that.

When I listen in to these meetings and hear the updates my reaction is often like “hmmm ok. That update you gave should have taken you about 5 hours max. What the hell did you do with the other 35 working hours of your work week?”

But since there is no transparency on exactly what tasks are to be done and by when… there is no real gauge on how efficient they were.

But are there disadvantages to working this way?

I view there to be almost none. I even had this debate with a friend recently who thought managing at this level of detail is a waste of time and too constrictive.

His challenge: It takes too much time to do this

My rebuttle: It takes a bit more time to write out the tasks upfront but you SAVE so much time in the transparency of the updates you get.

You don’t need to remember what you asked and then check on the status. You just check the tasks in Clickup and get updates automatically real-time on the ones you follow.

With time.. my experience is that lots of time will be saved by adopting my system.

His challenge: He wants to give his team freedom

My rebuttle: You can still give the same exact level of freedom. There is nothing ‘constrictive’ about what I am proposing. Rather in my experience it gives the person much more confidence.

Because now instead of worrying whether they are going in the right direction, they are very confident that they are.

His challenge: Things work well now and so he doesn’t see a point

My rebuttle: The point is that you will get a lot more out of your team. With most teams I observe i’d say if i was managing i’d get on the order of 50 - 100% more out of them by managing them my way.

And in fact I’ve seen this for a fact in at least one client project in the past where I took over a team from someone else. And I deemed the situation previous to be very messy.

My challenge to him: What do you think are the advantages of your ‘loose’ system over my highly structured one?

His answer: He thought his team was very happy doing things the way they are. But mind you that the company was losing money and struggling.

My rebuttle: Twitter lost money for its entire existence since 2006. But the employees were very happy and well taken care of.

Since Elon purchased it about 90% of engineers were either fired or left. Despite this the company is performing just fine and is arguably releasing more new innovations that at any point in its history. Plus I expect they’ll be profitable by next year as Elon promises.

Point is… your job as a manager is not only to make your employees happy. It’s to create kickass results.

But even more than that... if you end up letting someone go and you have not done this... have you really done all you could to make them successful?

My view is NO.

And check out my agency at www.endgameken.com.