Your employees may already know what good performance looks like.
They know they should plan ahead, communicate clearly, take ownership, raise risks early, and follow through. Some have attended several workshops on these subjects. They can explain the models, complete the exercises, and describe the behaviours expected of them.
Yet the same problems continue.
Orders remain late because schedules keep changing. Employees wait for decisions because authority is unclear. Supervisors correct recurring mistakes, but the obsolete instruction or broken system remains. Customer concerns pass between teams because no one owns the next response.
When this happens, organizations often train again.
They teach employees to manage time inside unstable workflows. They teach accountability to people who cannot approve the next move. They teach communication to teams receiving conflicting instructions. They teach resilience to high performers who have spent years compensating for conditions leaders have not repaired.
For CEOs, this creates an expensive illusion. The organization appears to be responding because programs are running, people are attending, and action plans are being submitted. But the real source of the problem remains untouched.
For L&D leaders, it creates an impossible assignment. Training is expected to overcome unclear authority, poor tools, contradictory measures, overloaded workflows, and ownerless handoffs.
People may still need development. But before you train them to respond better, examine what the workplace keeps requiring them to survive.
The Supervisors Were Planning Around a Moving Clock
Elena once worked with a distribution centre where late orders had become a serious concern.
The problem appeared obvious. Supervisors were not planning their work effectively. Orders missed their schedules, teams rushed near the deadline, and managers spent too much time responding to urgent changes.
The company arranged a time-management workshop.
The supervisors attended, made weekly plans, learned prioritization techniques, and rated the instructor highly. The program was not careless. The participants gained useful tools they could apply to their own calendars and routines.
The late orders continued.
Months later, a dispatcher showed Elena what the training request had missed. Three departments released changes at different cut-off times.
One team could revise requirements after the supervisors had finalized the day’s schedule. Another released information later in the afternoon. A third could introduce changes close to dispatch.
The supervisors were not simply failing to plan. They were rebuilding their plans around a clock that kept moving.
“The workshop was not bad,” Elena later explained. “It simply had no chance of fixing the clock.”
The organization had trained people to become better planners inside a system that repeatedly made their plans unreliable.
A Skill Can Be Useful and Still Be the Wrong Response
Time management matters. Supervisors must decide what deserves attention, anticipate deadlines, and organize their work.
But a useful competency is not automatically the right answer to every problem associated with time.
This is where organizations get trapped. They see a performance failure, attach it to a familiar subject, and assume the subject explains the cause.
Late work becomes a time-management problem. Silence becomes a communication problem. Escalation becomes a confidence problem. Missed commitments become an accountability problem.
The labels may describe part of what is happening. They may also hide the conditions shaping the behaviour.
A supervisor can plan well and still receive critical information too late. An employee can communicate clearly and still send the message into an ownerless queue. A manager can accept accountability and still lack the authority to approve the required action.
Training the person may improve one part of the response. It cannot repair a condition owned by another function.
A communication workshop should not be blamed for an ownerless process. A coaching certificate should not be expected to remove an obsolete system choice. A resilience program should not carry the responsibility of resolving an impossible workload.
Do Not Confuse Adaptation With Success
Employees are remarkably capable of adapting to broken systems.
They create personal trackers because the official system cannot be trusted. They build spreadsheets beside the platform. They send private messages to confirm requests that should already be visible. They work after hours because daytime interruptions make focused work impossible.
Over time, these workarounds become normal.
The people who adapt best are praised as dependable. Managers send difficult cases to them. New employees learn to ask them how things are really done.
The workaround keeps the operation moving, which reduces pressure to repair the system.
This creates a dangerous cycle. The stronger the employees become at compensating for the problem, the less visible the problem becomes to leaders.
Organizations may then formalize the workaround through training.
A skilled employee teaches others how to maintain three trackers. Supervisors attend a program on handling conflicting priorities. Managers are coached to become more resilient during peak periods.
The business becomes increasingly skilled at surviving conditions it should have stopped tolerating.
Impact-first leaders ask a harder question:
Are we developing a capability the work genuinely needs, or helping people compensate for a cause we have the power to remove?
Examine the Field Around the Leader
When performance falls short, leaders naturally look at the person closest to the result.
Did the supervisor communicate clearly? Did the employee follow the process? Did the manager act quickly enough?
These questions are legitimate. People have responsibilities, and poor performance should not be excused simply because systems are imperfect.
But the diagnosis cannot stop with the person.
Examine the field around the leader. Did they have accurate information? Was the authority boundary clear? Did the receiving department accept the handoff? Did the measure reward the behaviour being requested? Was there enough capacity to perform the new move?
At Meridian Customer Operations, supervisors were expected to stop recurring errors. In several cases, they corrected the immediate output but discovered that the obsolete code, conflicting instruction, or broken workflow remained.
Some needed practice diagnosing the repeat and checking the next output. But Technology and Operations also had work to do. System owners had to remove obsolete options. Operations and Quality had to reconcile conflicting instructions. Escalated barriers needed owners and response times.
The more complete response was not “train” or “do not train.”
It was to develop the necessary leadership move while repairing the condition that would otherwise defeat it.
Remove the Barrier Without Removing Responsibility
Critiquing broken systems can easily become another form of avoidance.
People may begin blaming the process for every failure. Managers may say they cannot act until the system is perfect. Employees may treat unclear conditions as permission to surrender responsibility.
That is not the point.
The goal is to distinguish between what the person must own and what the organization must repair.
A supervisor may be responsible for recognizing that an error has returned, examining the work with the employee, correcting the next output, and creating a usable escalation.
The supervisor may not have authority to remove an obsolete code from the software.
The first responsibility remains with the supervisor. The second belongs to the system owner.
Accountability becomes credible when both sides are visible.
If leaders blame only the employee, they train people to work around broken conditions forever. If they blame only the system, they remove personal responsibility from the moment where better judgement is still possible.
Impact-first leadership examines the move and the field.
What should this leader do? What currently prevents that move? Which barrier belongs to someone else? How quickly must the handoff be accepted? What proof will show that both the behaviour and the condition changed?
Choose Among Four Responsible Responses
Once the cause becomes clearer, the organization can make a more responsible decision.
Sometimes the answer is to train. People lack a necessary capability and need practice.
Sometimes the answer is to repair. Employees already know what to do, but the environment blocks correct action.
Sometimes the answer is to combine. People need a better play while another function changes the condition that keeps producing failure.
And sometimes the answer is do not train. Another program would add activity without changing the cause.
At Meridian, leaders chose a combined test. Supervisors practised a four-step response using live cases. A cross-functional owner reviewed escalated barriers each week. Content would be added only when evidence showed a recurring capability need, while system conditions would be repaired when they prevented correct action.
The pilot required more than facilitation. Operations had to protect practice time and allow supervisors to expose broken work without being punished for making the numbers uncomfortable. Technology had to provide a service owner who could remove or explain a bad system choice within an agreed time.
This was not less leadership development.
It was a more complete business response.
Stop Asking L&D to Own the Whole Problem
Many leadership programs begin inside HR or L&D and remain there.
L&D designs the content, hires the provider, schedules participants, measures attendance, and prepares the report. When application fails, L&D is asked to add reinforcement, coaching, reminders, and follow-through.
But the desired behaviour may depend on conditions outside L&D’s authority.
A supervisor cannot use a new decision-making method if executives reverse every decision made without approval. A manager cannot build follow-through when another department accepts no ownership for escalated work. An employee cannot communicate clearly enough to repair conflicting instructions issued by two senior leaders.
L&D can help identify these dependencies. It can design practice, build simple tools, prepare managers to observe the behaviour, and follow evidence into the workplace.
It cannot repair every policy, target, system, and workflow.
This is why leadership development must become a cross-functional intervention when the problem crosses functions. Operations, HR, Technology, Finance, and executive sponsors must own the conditions that make the new behaviour possible.
Otherwise, the organization asks L&D to train people to survive decisions made elsewhere.
What CEOs Must Stop Rewarding
CEOs should examine which employees and managers receive praise for keeping broken work alive.
Who is always working late because priorities remain unresolved? Who personally follows every handoff because the process has no reliable owner? Which high performer keeps rescuing a recurring failure?
Their effort may deserve recognition. Their workaround should not become the operating model.
The CEO must ask what would fail if that person stopped compensating tomorrow. That answer often reveals the system the organization has avoided repairing.
Executives should also examine whether targets contradict the behaviour training is trying to produce. If supervisors are told to stop and investigate repeating errors but are punished whenever output pauses, speed will win. If managers are expected to raise risks early but receive criticism for making reports look worse, silence becomes rational.
People follow the consequences more closely than the workshop.
What L&D Should Diagnose Before Designing
Before building another program, L&D should study several real cases.
Follow the sequence. What happened first? What did the employee or leader see? What did they do? Where did the work stop? Which condition made the familiar response easier?
Do not rely only on survey statements such as “managers lack accountability.” Open the cases. Observe the meeting. Trace the handoff. Look at the screen, instruction, approval path, and measure shaping the behaviour.
Then determine what development can credibly contribute.
Perhaps leaders need a small play they can practise. Perhaps the system needs repair. Often, both are true.
This is what impact-focused leadership development should do. It should begin where the game is stuck, identify what leaders must become able to do, and make visible the conditions other functions must change.
The program is no longer expected to perform a miracle.
It has a clear job inside a larger response.
Fix the Clock
The supervisors in Elena’s distribution centre did not need to stop planning.
They needed a clock they could plan around.
Time-management skills might still help them organize their shifts and respond to reasonable changes. But no personal planner could reconcile three departments releasing critical information on different schedules.
The real breakthrough came when someone stopped examining the supervisors long enough to examine the system surrounding them.
That is the discipline organizations need.
Train people where capability is missing. Coach them where judgement needs practice. Hold them accountable for the moves they genuinely own.
But when the workplace repeatedly defeats the right behaviour, do not offer another workshop and call it support.
Fix the clock.
About Jef Menguin
Jef Menguin is a leadership development consultant and motivational speaker. He created The Leader’s Game and Supervisor Factor, practical leadership-development systems that help organizations turn priorities into everyday leadership behavior.
Explore his work in leadership training, discover his motivational speaking programs, or connect with him on LinkedIn.