Most leaders react to underperformance in ways that only worsen the problem. They blame the people for not being able to deliver without bothering to find the reasons behind the fall in performance. They rush toward the solutions even before fully understanding the problem. Many other leaders are blinded by the belief that they have a great organization that operates on great strategies developed and executed by great people. But they simply fail to understand that organizations are run by feeling, sense and by the very emotional human beings. The persons, who are prone to poignant boutscould easily distract them from their jobs.

Conventional wisdom says that identifying or acknowledging the problems is first step in managing a problem. Therefore, even before a solution is attempted, the causes of the problem have to be pinned down. There may be several reasons for employee underperformance. Most of them have to do with lack of motivation or strong distraction. While motivation can be marred by organizational or leader related reasons, distractions can occur due to the lack of motivation from the side of the organization or due to the employee's own personal problems.

One of the most difficult yet necessary task of a good leader is to tackle underperformance. In fact, the way underperformance is tackled decides the success or failure of a leader.

Mathew Robb, Paul Todd and David Turnbull in their article Untangling underperformance (McKinsey Quarterly, 2003, special edition Issue 2, p.52) say that in most organizations the performance of the people doesn't meet the expectations of their top managers or shareholders. Such disappointment on part of the leader and failure on part of the employees is because leaders often rush to solve problems. The authors say that in their eagerness to solve the problem they ignore the root causes of the problem and thus fail to customize the solution. The authors also give another reason for the failure. They aver that most often the leaders are not involved in the solution. They assign the task to their immediate subordinates or to some team. But unless they personally take interest in the whole process and involve themselves throughout the diagnosis and solution finding and implementation process, underperformance would continue to haunt the organizations.

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