When I was gathering material for The Power of Being All In, I asked a group of senior executives what had shifted in their businesses since 2017. Dave Pinder, President of Cardinal Insulated Glass, called the stretch a roller coaster ride. Cardinal opened 2020 with a record first quarter, watched April and May sales fall twenty-five percent when COVID hit, and then saw thirty of the next thirty-one months come in as record sales months. Most of his plants ran six and seven days a week to keep up, and the pace wore on people.

So I asked him what steps he had taken to meet all of it. He did not start with 2020. He took me back to 2017, to the year his team worked out that they were not providing their leaders with the basic leadership skills necessary to succeed. Leaders and the people who worked for them were frustrated and dissatisfied, and turnover was high as a result.

He explained why people were leaving, and the cause he settled on sat above the people who left.

The Diagnosis We Reach for First

When performance falls off during a period of real change, the instinct is to look straight at the individual’s attitude and effort, and to start asking whether this person is still the right fit for where the business is going. Sometimes that read is correct and the conversation needs to happen.

What I find more often is a person being measured against expectations that were set for a version of the job that no longer exists. The operating tempo, the customer, and the shift pattern have all moved, and the standard the person is being held to was written before any of it. That person is performing against a target that moved without telling them.

Sorting one from the other is the first job. Somebody who has the skill, the clarity, and the resources and still will not do the work is a performance conversation, and I would not soften it.

Somebody who has never been given the skill, or has never been told what success looks like now, is a leadership conversation, and treating it as a performance problem will cost you the person and teach everyone watching that effort here is not worth much.

What Never Got Revalidated

This is where Set the Azimuth earns its place among the Big 6 Leadership Principles®. Mission, Intent, Values, and Cultural Behaviors are not a founding document you write once and frame. Inside the Intent sit the End State, the Key Tasks that get you there, and the Purpose behind each one, and every one of those can quietly go out of date in a year like the ones we have all just lived through.

Cardinal established its vision, mission, intent, culture, and values in 2014, and Dave and his plant managers meet every year to review and validate all of it alongside the strategic plan. That habit is the difference between a company where people can name the standard and a company where the standard is whatever the last urgent email said.

They also built a leadership development program in 2018 to teach the basic skills their leaders had not been given, and when I asked what he would change, he said they should have started earlier. Most companies find this out the same way, after the turnover has already been written down as a people problem.

Dave said something else in that conversation that I repeat often. It is what we think we know that prevents us from learning, and that applies to how we read our own numbers as much as anything else.

Before You Have the Performance Conversation

Start by confirming the person heard what you think you said. I spent years gathering soldiers to discuss a mission, asking “Okay, everybody got it?” at the end, getting the nods and the yes sirs, and then watching them go do something different from what I thought we had agreed. It took a commander asking whether I had gotten a Backbrief to fix that. The Backbrief is having people repeat back what they believe they just heard, and it surfaces a misunderstanding while you can still do something about it.

Then ask better questions before you deliver a judgment. I want to know what the biggest challenge is that someone is facing this week, what one resource they do not have that would make them more successful if they did, and what success looks like to them on the project in front of them. Those Power Questions have a way of producing the real answer, which is frequently that the person has been carrying something you did not know about.

Build a rhythm that surfaces problems early rather than at review time. Dave’s managers are on a weekly call to share information, which is how a plant in one state learns what a plant in another already solved. Use the After-Action Review the same way, so the lesson from a bad month belongs to the organization instead of to the person who happened to be standing there.

Be willing to change the conditions rather than only the people. A few of Cardinal’s plants adjusted their schedules to cut overtime and give their people their lives back, and rather than defend a five-day pattern he thought might be outdated, Dave put creative scheduling on the agenda for their next strategic planning session.

When you have done all of that and the gap is still there, have the conversation, and have it directly. It will be a fair one, because by then the person knows the standard, has the skill, and has what they need. That is what accountability looks like inside a Level Five Culture of Commitment.

We hold people to a high bar, and we make sure we have given them everything required to clear it. Dave went looking for the cause of his turnover and found something his company had not provided. That is usually where it is.

I’d love to hear what you found the last time you looked upstream from a performance problem on your team. Leave a comment below and let’s talk about it.

Enjoy the journey!