Most performance problems are not people problems.

When a team misses, the first question an owner asks is "who dropped it?" It is the wrong first question, and the research is unusually clear about why.

Team design, meaning who is on the team, what the roles are, whether the goals are written and whether authority is stated, controls 37 to 42 percent of the variance in performance. Coaching the leader controls under 10 percent.^A Over 60 percent of team members credit outcomes to a person anyway. The researchers call it the leader attribution error. Owners call it Tuesday.

So before anyone is blamed, I run five questions against the finding.

1. Was the expectation written, specific and communicated?
2. Did the person have the resources, authority, training and information to meet it?
3. Do the consequences in place actually reward meeting it?
4. Is anyone else meeting it under the same conditions?
5. Only now: is it a skill gap, a fit gap, or a will gap?

A finding that survives all five is an individual finding. Skill gaps are trainable. Fit gaps mean the role is wrong. Will gaps are the only ones that end in a hard conversation. A finding that dies at one to four is a conditions finding, and the report says so in those words.

This is not softness. It is accuracy. If you fire the technician who kept missing a standard that was never written down, you will hire another one and watch it happen again. The audit is the product. The person is the last thing I look at, and by then there is usually not much left to look at.