Top 5 Symptoms of Your Underperforming Leadership Team

As a leader, you are undoubtedly aware that delegation is an intrinsic component of leadership. When a team starts to underperform, there are warning indicators. Any manager's objective should be to identify and rectify underperformance before it reaches critical mass in the form of diminishing numbers, earnings, and productivity.

Keep an eye out for these subtle signs that your team is underperforming.

Most leaders experience underperformance within their team or organization at some point in their careers. If your leadership team begins to underperform, you will need to act quickly and decisively to address the problem, as the consequences can be dire for your business. 

A few noticeable signs that indicate your leadership team may be underperforming include:

Lack of focus.

Those in a leadership position often have to balance competing issues, challenges, and tasks. To be an effective leader, you must remain focused, which involves having clear work goals and dedicating your work to achieving these goals. If you focus intently on a specific task and filter out all distractions, you will complete the work, and the work you produce will be of high quality.

The primary focus for any team leader should be delivering the highest value for the company and ensuring that their team is working effectively. Suppose your team leader is overburdened with work, juggling multiple projects, and cannot effectively prioritize. In that case, a negative impact is on the horizon that will affect work delivery, quality and demoralize the team, which is detrimental to the entire company.

Poor communication.

A major reason why teams may underperform is a lack of communication. People are unlikely to grasp the duties they are required to do unless good communication is used.

Workers rely on their managers to offer constructive feedback, clear direction, and positive reinforcement. A recent study from the Economist Intelligence Unit found that poor communication leads to low morale, bad performance, and even lost revenues.

On the other hand, effective communication is vital to gaining trust, aligning efforts to pursue goals, and inspiring your team to work to their fullest potential. Effective leadership communication is a decisive cornerstone to business success; without it, workers can't effectively perform their jobs.

Poor job fit.

When workers are assigned to the wrong jobs, it makes work more difficult. The rationale for this is straightforward: people work better when they have jobs that match their skills.

Unfortunately, managers and leaders often lack a clear understanding of the attributes required for certain roles and job fit. Fortunately, behavioral evaluations and other techniques may assist in determining which individuals are most suited for certain tasks.

Not driving cross-departmental collaboration.

Collaboration is more than mere cooperation – it requires mutual respect, an understanding of one another's roles and responsibilities, and a shared vision. Working collaboratively can help improve productivity and give employees a sense of purpose. Nowadays, it is not just collaboration within a single department, but collaboration across the entire company.

When various departmental teams fail to work together or communicate effectively, workplaces often become dysfunctional. Cross-departmental collaboration remains a significant problem despite many organizations harnessing new interconnection technology. You might be experiencing a "Silo Effect" when separate leaders or departments do not adequately communicate because of different goals, priorities, and pet projects. Silos will ultimately constrain your company-level strategies, goals, and objectives.

Team leaders fail to act as managers.

Often the terms between leader and manager may appear interchangeable, yet there are significant differences. Leadership is about motivating people to comprehend and believe in the vision you set for the company and work with you on achieving your goals. While management is more about administering the work and ensuring the day-to-day activities are completed as they should. Some people prioritize leadership rather than management, which can be counterproductive.

Decisiveness is an effective trait in managers and is key to effectively executing plans and achieving goals. Businesses will flounder and achieve very little otherwise. Unfortunately, many leaders fail to take the initiative and instead wait to be given direction by their superiors. This indecisiveness will waste valuable time and result in limiting productivity.

What Can You Do About Underperformance?

Open lines of communication are one of the most important ways to deal with and avoid underperformance concerns. Employees want to feel important and heard. If your staff feels you are uninterested in their ideas, they will refrain from sharing them. They will stop notifying you about a low-performing team member if they feel you will not take action or do something about it. They won't care about you or the organization if they believe you don't care about them or their worries. Participation is a two-way road. And engagement will assist in keeping your personnel involved and working well.

Investigate the causes behind a team member's poor performance. They are sometimes relatively solvable. Poor job quality, for example, may sometimes be attributed to carelessness, but it can also be systematic. If the problem is systemic, organizational changes may be necessary to remedy it.

An essential thing you can do to combat underperformance is to be proactive. This will address the issue of what is causing the underperformance. For example, the performance of the whole team might be harmed by a single ineffective member. In such a case, it is critical to act and make a change to rescue the team as a whole.