Someone's output dropped and the easy story is that they're slacking
This is for you if someone who used to deliver has slipped. The review is due, and the easy read is that they checked out. Before you act on it, one doubt nags: what if it isn't them?
Here's the trap. A work-type mismatch, the right person in wrong-shaped work, looks exactly like slacking: same slipped deadlines, same flat energy, same quiet 1-1. Act on the wrong one and you lose a good person over a review you can't take back, to a problem two weeks would fix.
So before you write the performance story, rule the fit problem out. It takes half an hour, and only their own results can give you the answer.
Open The Five Types of Work, near the back of their Career Discovery report:
- Analytical: data, logic, the right answer.
- Creative: ideas, design, making something new.
- Integrative: connecting people and pieces, seeing the whole.
- Influential: persuading, rallying people to a direction.
- Operational: running the system, keeping things on track.
Their primary type and complement are where they come alive. Everything else wears them down.
Now run the read.
- Write down their primary and complement, from their results, not your read.
- Pull up their recent work, plus what never hits the calendar: the standing report, the cleanup, the "can you just handle this." Mark each chunk in their grain or against it.
- Ask what changed when the work slid. A reorg, a project that ended, new maintenance? Often the work drifted against their grain and nobody decided it out loud.
- Check Understanding Styles for a second cause: has the work, or how you manage them, moved against how they work best? An Analyst rushed with no thinking time, or a Harmonizer in a room gone tense, reads as a drop and isn't.
A read is still a guess. The swap tells you for sure. This is the line you walk away holding:
> For the next two weeks, [name] takes [one in-grain task] and hands off [one against-grain task]. I keep > everything else steady and watch [one signal: turnaround, energy in our 1-1, the quality of the work].
- If the signal moves, it was the shape of the work, not the person, and the swap that showed you was also the fix.
- If it holds through a fair two weeks, you've ruled out fit, and the conversation you have now is a fair one, on the performance.
You were about to spend a review, or a relationship, on a story before you'd had the chance to check it. Checking first is the cheapest big move you have.
