How to Manage an Underperforming Employee — A Coaching Approach

When it comes to managing an underperforming employee, the instinct is to focus on the output. Set targets. Issue warnings. Put a plan in place. However, the better question — and the one that actually changes things — is: what changed for this person?

People rarely underperform for no reason. Something shifted. The work changed. The environment changed. The relationship changed. Or the person changed and nobody noticed. Managing an underperforming employee effectively starts not with consequences, but with understanding — and the approach that gets there fastest is a coaching one.

Start With Curiosity, Not Consequences

Managing an underperforming employee well starts with the conversation most managers avoid. What they are less certain about is how to create the conditions where the real conversation can happen. Threatening an underperforming employee into compliance rarely produces the growth you need. It produces compliance that lasts until the pressure lifts, or it produces silence, resentment, and an exit letter six months later.

Before any formal process, there needs to be a no-repercussions conversation. Not a legal category — a human one. A conversation where the person can tell you the truth without fear that every word will be used against them. This takes maturity from the manager. It takes the ability to say: I want to understand what is happening for you, and I want to hear it without judgement first. If you have been putting this conversation off, you are not alone — but the longer it waits, the harder it becomes.

Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety is clear on this: people do not tell the truth when they are afraid. If your underperforming employee is already anxious about their standing, your first job is to lower the threat level enough to hear what is actually going on. Consequently, the conversation you need cannot happen in an atmosphere of fear.

Get Their Map First — The NLP Insight

Everyone walks into a job with a map — an internal picture of what the work means, what good looks like, what their contribution is, and how they fit into the organisation. Over time, that map either gets updated and enriched, or it gets distorted, depleted, or simply left behind.

One of the most useful questions when managing an underperforming employee is this: who walked in on the first day, and who is sitting in front of me now? That gap — between the engaged, motivated person who joined and the one who has quietly disengaged — is the territory. And closing it starts with understanding what happened in between.

In NLP coaching, we call this getting the map of their meaning. Before you can help someone perform better, you need to understand how they experience the job, the team, the organisation, and you. Their map is not your map. The only way to find out what theirs looks like is to ask — and then genuinely listen to the answer.

The Questions That Open the Conversation

These are not interrogation questions. They are mapping questions. Use them in sequence, give them space, and resist the urge to jump in with your own assessment before the picture is complete.

The “what else” question is deceptively powerful. It signals that you are not done listening, that you want the full picture, and that the first answer was not necessarily the real one. Furthermore, it often unlocks the thing the person was not sure they were safe to say.

What Is Driving the Underperformance When Managing an Underperforming Employee?

Once you have their map, you can start to diagnose what is actually driving the poor performance. In most cases it falls into one of these categories.

Fear

The employee is afraid — of speaking up, of the politics, of being seen as not good enough, of making a mistake in a culture where mistakes are punished. Consequently, they have gone quiet and safe, which reads as underperformance but is actually self-protection. They may also be afraid of the seniority in the room, or of the strategic direction of the organisation and what it means for their role.

Boredom or being underchallenged

Some of the most talented people in an organisation underperform because they are not stretched enough. They have outgrown the role, or the role has narrowed, or the work has become repetitive. The disengagement this produces can look identical to incompetence. However, the solution is completely different.

Lost — skills gap or strategic confusion

Martin Broadwell’s Four Stages of Competence offers a useful framework here. Some underperforming employees do not know what they do not know — they are in the stage of unconscious incompetence and cannot see the gap themselves. Others know they are struggling but cannot name it. Both need a different kind of support: not pressure, but clarity and skill-building. Additionally, some employees are simply not connected to the strategic landscape. They do not understand how their work connects to the bigger picture, who the key stakeholders are, or what the organisation is trying to achieve. Without that context, it is very difficult to perform with purpose.

Disconnected from meaning

People need their work to matter to them. When that connection breaks — through a change in role, a bad experience, a shift in values alignment, or simply accumulated frustration — performance quietly declines. The person is still there physically. However, they have stopped investing.

A communication breakdown — and it goes both ways

This is the one most managers miss. Your communication is doing something to your underperforming employee too. The way you give feedback, the tone you carry into one-to-ones, the signals you send about whether their voice is welcome — all of it shapes how they show up. Ask yourself honestly: how does this person experience me? Do they trust me enough to tell me when something is not working? If the answer is uncertain, the communication system needs to be examined from both ends, not just one.

The Performance Framework — Done With Them, Not To Them

Once you understand what is actually driving the underperformance, you are ready to build an improvement framework. When managing an underperforming employee, the distinction that matters is whether that framework is done with the person or to them.

When you use the SBI model for feedback — Situation, Behaviour, Impact — it gives the underperforming employee concrete information rather than a generalised assessment. Done with a coaching approach, it sounds like: “When the client asked X and you responded the way you did — what did you have in mind there? I ask because they seemed concerned afterwards, and I want to make sure we’re all on the same page.” That opens the conversation. It does not close it down.

Kim Scott’s Radical Candor framework makes a distinction that matters deeply here: caring personally and challenging directly are not opposites — they are the combination that actually works. Caring personally means you have taken the time to understand what this person needs, what their situation is, and what success looks like for them. Challenging directly means you do not soften feedback to the point where it loses its meaning, or avoid the hard conversation because it is uncomfortable. Most managers land in one of the failure modes: either they care but never challenge, which Scott calls “ruinous empathy,” or they challenge without caring, which lands as aggression. Neither changes an underperforming employee’s behaviour. Both together — holding the person in high regard while being honest about the gap — is what makes the conversation productive rather than damaging. That is what coaching skills for managers are built around.

When You Do Need to Go Further

Sometimes, when managing an underperforming employee, coaching conversations and a co-created improvement plan are not enough. When that is the case, a formal Performance Improvement Plan is appropriate and necessary. However, even the PIP lands better when the employee has been involved in identifying the performance gaps and the improvement steps. A plan that has been built with someone is a shared commitment. A plan that has been imposed on someone is a threat — and threats tend to accelerate exit, not improvement.

HR involvement should come with honesty and not as a surprise. If the coaching approach has not shifted things, the manager should say so clearly: we have had these conversations, here is what we agreed, here is where things still are. That transparency is respectful even when the situation is serious.

What Good Management of Underperformance Looks Like

The manager who approached managing an underperforming employee early, with curiosity and without judgment, often finds that the conversation opens something up. Consider a senior team member who has gone quiet over three months — missing deadlines, contributing less in meetings, producing work that no longer reflects their capability. The instinct is to escalate. However, the coaching conversation reveals that they were passed over for a project they cared about and nobody acknowledged it. They felt invisible. One honest conversation — where the manager asked, genuinely, what was going on — shifted things. The next week they were presenting ideas again. That is not a miracle. That is what happens when you catch it early and take the person seriously enough to ask.

The employee who felt unheard starts contributing again. The one who was lost in the strategic landscape gets a clearer picture and reconnects. The one who was underchallenged gets a stretch assignment and comes alive. None of that happens through threat alone — and all of it requires a manager who has developed the skills to have the conversation well. If that is something you want to build, our coaching skills for managers programme is built precisely around these moments.

The manager who waited until it became a formal HR process often finds the relationship is already beyond repair — not because the employee was unworkable, but because the conversation happened too late, in the wrong register, with too much fear on both sides.

Go early. Go with curiosity. Get their map before you share yours. Managing an underperforming employee well means seeing the whole person, not just the performance problem.

“Shiera has a rare ability to meet each leader exactly where they are. Every session was tailored, strategic, and practical, delivering real transformation at both individual and organisational levels.”
Mohammad Zia, Director of Corporate Services

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