There’s a particular kind of tired that comes from watching a performance issue unfold in slow motion. Not one dramatic failure you can point to and deal with — a string of small ones. A missed deadline. A tone in a meeting. A commitment quietly dropped, then another. I see this constantly in leaders I coach right now: someone who’s noticed something, let it go a few times, and is now months into a relationship where the unspoken has become normal. Here’s the line I keep coming back to with clients: what we don’t address, we condone.
Not because leaders mean to. Almost none of the leaders I work with are avoiding these conversations out of indifference. They’re avoiding them because the conversation feels risky — they worry about damaging the relationship, being wrong, coming across as harsh, or that too much time has passed and it’s “too late” to bring it up now. So, they wait for a better moment. The better moment rarely comes. And the behavior, without anyone deciding it should, gets quietly reinforced by the silence around it.
The cost is real, and it’s not just to the person
This isn’t just a leadership platitude — the research backs it up. Harvard Business Review has repeatedly identified holding people accountable as one of the most consistently avoided responsibilities in leadership, noting that leaders often talk tough about performance in theory but pull back the moment a real accountability conversation is actually in front of them. Gallup’s research points to the flip side: consistent, quality feedback from a manager is one of the strongest known drivers of employee engagement — and it’s also one of the behaviors managers rate lowest on. Avoiding the hard conversation doesn’t protect the relationship. It quietly erodes the thing that would have strengthened it.
Address it — don’t just resolve it in your head
None of this means every performance issue needs a heavy, formal sit-down. Most of the time, it calls for something smaller and earlier: a direct, specific, low-drama conversation, close to the moment it happened.
The leaders I work with who do this well tend to share a few habits:
- They separate the behavior from the person. The conversation is about what happened, not a verdict on someone’s character.
- They’re specific. “You’ve missed the last two deadlines” is workable. “You’ve seemed checked out lately” isn’t — there’s nothing concrete for the other person to respond to.
- They make it two-way. SHRM’s guidance on these conversations is consistent: approach with curiosity before judgment, ask what might be getting in the way, and treat the conversation as a starting point for problem-solving rather than a verdict being delivered.
- They treat it as the first conversation, not the only one. Accountability isn’t an event — it’s a relationship. That means following up, not filing it away as “handled.”
The conversation you’re avoiding is already having an effect
Here’s what I’d ask any leader sitting on one of these conversations right now: the silence isn’t neutral. It’s already communicating something — to the person, and to everyone around them who’s watching how you handle it.
What are you condoning by not having that conversation?
Sources: Harvard Business Review, “How to Actually Encourage Employee Accountability” (hbr.org); Gallup, workplace research on manager feedback and employee engagement (gallup.com); SHRM, “Ask HR: How to Respond When an Employee’s Performance Declines” (shrm.org).
Deseri Garcia
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