When You Can't Fire the Problem, Change What's Around It
Executive coach Kathryn Landis, writing in HBR, shows how a leader handled an underperformer she couldn't remove — by testing what leadership would actually enforce, then redesigning the role around the answer.
Prompted by “When a Team Member Underperforms—but Has Organizational Capital”, Harvard Business Review (Kathryn Landis).
Most leaders think there's only one fix for an underperformer: get rid of them. Executive coach Kathryn Landis works with plenty of leaders who don't have that option — and her real argument is that removal was never the only lever available.
One of her clients, a chief revenue officer, inherited a VP of sales who wasn't delivering — missed targets, unresolved customer issues, neglected key accounts — but who'd built a twenty-five-year relationship with the CEO that made him effectively unremovable. Instead of pushing for a firing that was never going to happen, she tested something narrower: she asked the CEO to publicly back one specific standard — joining key sales calls, reporting on progress monthly. The CEO agreed, then let the check-ins quietly slide. That answer told her what she needed to know. She stopped trying to change the person and started redistributing the client and pipeline oversight he wasn't handling. The VP eventually moved into an individual-contributor role — no blowup, no political fight she couldn't win, just a clear read on what leadership would actually enforce, and a plan built around the real answer.
What if the person giving the pass is you?
At a smaller company, "leadership" in that test is usually just you. There's no CEO above you to ask for backing — which flips the question: when someone on your team gets a pass because of history or relationship, are you the one giving it? Nobody's watching you do that the way a board would watch a Fortune 500 CEO.
Test it out: name the one person on your team everyone quietly treats as untouchable — not for performance, for relationship or tenure. Ask yourself whether you've ever said that pattern out loud to anyone, including yourself. Then pick one narrow, specific standard for that person and commit to it in writing, the way you'd want any manager reporting to you to do. Your own follow-through is the test.
Saying that pattern out loud to someone outside the org chart is a lot of what 1:1 Coaching is for.
Originally posted on LinkedIn ↗