There’s someone whose performance has become a running problem.
You’ve raised it – more than once. They agree, they mean it, they improve for a week or two, and then it slides back to exactly where it was.
The conversations get shorter and sharper. The relationship starts to fray. And quietly you’ve concluded that this is simply who they are, and they aren’t going to change.
I was called into a financial planning firm as a last resort. The owner put it plainly:
“It’s just the way he is. I doubt he’ll ever change. But he’s too good with clients to lose, and we can’t go on like this.”
His senior consultant was brilliant in the room – a natural with clients, superb at winning their business. But the paperwork that followed each meeting was dreadful, and it regularly undid much of the good work he’d just done. Years of discussions, commitments, and increasingly terse pleading had changed nothing that lasted.
Before you write someone off, be clear about what you’re trying to fix.
The person isn’t the problem. Their behaviour is what you want to change – and their behaviour isn’t who they are. It’s simply the tool they use to do a task, shaped by two things: the processes around them, and the thinking process they bring to it. Change either, and the behaviour changes – without the person having to become someone else.
So, when I sat down with the consultant, I didn’t ask him to try harder. I asked him one question: What’s the process you’re using when you meet with clients? What surfaced was this. Almost every meeting happened in the boardroom, and he loved being there in the meetings with clients. The moment he walked back to his desk, his mind was already on the next client. And the firm’s software, with a couple of steps that felt redundant, gave him one more reason to put the paperwork off.
The good feeling lived in the boardroom in the meetings. The dread waited at his desk. In his own mind, the meeting was finished the moment he left the room.
None of that was a character flaw. It was a process – part external, part internal.
So, we changed it. After showing each client out, I asked him to go back into the boardroom and stay there, treating the meeting as unfinished until the paperwork was done. We escalated the redundant frustrating steps in the system too and got them addressed.
Within a fortnight, the problem that years of pressure hadn’t touched had simply gone – and he was the same person he’d always been.
There’s a saying in AFL: don’t play the person, play the ball. For business I’d put it this way – don’t focus on the person, focus on the process. You can’t fix your people, and the good news is you don’t need to. Find where the behaviour is really coming from – the system they work within, or the thinking they bring to the task – and change that. It’s almost never the person. It’s the process.
Go soft on the person and be relentless on the process.
