Four reasons someone is not performing. Two are yours, two are theirs, and you need to know which.
A performance framework used widely in coaching; no single originator.
When somebody is not doing well, the cause is one of four things — and half of them are the employer's responsibility, not the employee's.
Up to them. Attitude — individuals take personal responsibility. And ultimately skill, which no amount of training installs if the person will not practise.
Up to us. Knowledge — delivered through training, mentoring and coaching. And support — delivered through systems and support.
The default management assumption is that underperformance is attitude. Sometimes it is. Often it is knowledge nobody supplied, or support that does not exist — a broken process, no information, no tools.
Firing someone for an attitude problem that was actually a systems problem replaces one person with another who will fail in exactly the same way. This is Deming's point about the system producing the results, in a form a small business can act on.
Ask the four in order and be honest about the middle two before reaching for the first.
Useful for motivation and HR questions: link to training, to Herzberg's hygiene factors, and to whether the fault sits with the individual or the organisation.