Someone's output dropped and the easy story is that they're slacking

Here's the trap. A work-type mismatch, the right person in the wrong-shaped work, looks exactly like slacking from the outside. Same slipped deadlines, same flat energy, same quiet person in the 1-1. Act on the wrong one and you can't take a bad review back, and you lose a good person to a problem two weeks would have fixed.

So before you write a word of the performance story, rule the fit problem out. It takes half an hour, and only their own results can give it to you.

Open The Five Types of Work, near the back of their Career Discovery report. It names the work that gives them energy and the work that quietly takes it:

• Analytical: data, logic, getting to the right answer.
• Creative: generating ideas, designing, making something new.
• Integrative: connecting people and pieces, seeing the whole.
• Influential: persuading, rallying people to a direction.
• Operational: running the system, executing, keeping things on track.

Their primary type and natural complement are where they come alive. Everything else taxes them.

Now run the read.

1. Write down their primary and complement, from their results, not your read of them.
2. Pull up their recent work, calendar and all, plus what never hits it: the standing report, the cleanup, the "can you just handle this." Mark each chunk in their grain (primary or complement) or against it (neither).
3. Ask what changed around the time the work slid. A reorg, a project that ended, a pile of new maintenance? Often the work drifted against their grain and nobody decided it out loud.
4. Check Understanding Styles for a second cause: has the shape of 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 that turned tense, reads as a drop and isn't one.

You have a read now, but a read is still a guess. The swap is how you find out for sure, and it costs far less than a review you can't take back. 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].

Then let the two weeks answer, not your gut.

• 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 hard conversation you have now is a fair one, on the performance itself.

You were about to spend a review, or a relationship, on a story you hadn't checked. Checking it first is the cheapest big move you have, and it's one only their real results can hand you.