Things Leaders Do

Performance Issue or Hiring Mistake? Make the Call

• Colby Morris

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How do you know when someone needs more coaching versus when you've made a hiring mistake? Look for three signs: (1) They're missing one of Patrick Lencioni's core virtues (Humble, Hungry, or Smart) and it's not improving, (2) You're having the same coaching conversation on repeat with no change, and (3) Your high performers are asking pointed questions about this person. If it's a hiring mistake, handle the transition with dignity: be clear about the decision, own your part, focus on what's next, and communicate to your team only after the person has left.


Episode Description

How do you know if someone just needs more coaching, or if you made a hiring mistake? When should you stop giving them "more time" and acknowledge it's not a fit? And how do you handle the transition without creating legal liability?

Most leaders wait too long on bad hires because they don't want to give up on people. They keep coaching, keep hoping, keep giving "one more quarter" for things to turn around. But here's the truth: You can coach skills, but you can't coach culture fit, intrinsic motivation, or fundamental character traits.

In this episode, Colby breaks down the critical difference between performance issues (fixable) and hiring mistakes (not fixable). You'll learn Patrick Lencioni's Humble, Hungry, Smart framework for identifying when someone is missing a core virtue, why Kim Scott's "Ruinous Empathy" explains why we avoid these decisions, and Brené Brown's principle that "clear is kind" when it comes to transitions.

Plus, the exact four-step framework for handling the transition with dignity while protecting yourself legally.


Key Takeaways

  • The difference between performance issues (what someone does) and hiring mistakes (who someone is)
  • Patrick Lencioni's three virtues every team player needs: Humble, Hungry, and Smart
  • The three signs it's a hiring mistake, not a performance issue
  • Why "Ruinous Empathy" keeps us coaching too long on bad hires
  • The four-step framework for transitioning someone out with dignity
  • Critical legal consideration: Don't communicate to your team until after the person has left


Who This Episode Is For

Middle managers and executives who've been coaching someone for months with no improvement, who are wondering if they should keep trying or acknowledge it's not a fit, and who need a clear framework for making the call and handling the transition professionally.


Connect with Colby

Coming in April 2026: A second weekly episode featuring interviews with leaders sharing actionable tools they've learned throughout their careers. Plus, the YouTube version of The Things Leaders Do podcast!



SPEAKER_01:

People first leadership. Actionable strategies, real results. This is Things Leaders Do with Colby Morris.

SPEAKER_00:

Everyone tells you to give people more time. No, they just need to ramp up. Give them 90 days. Don't give up on people too soon. You owe them a chance to succeed. Be patient. Rome wasn't built in a day. So you keep coaching. You keep having the conversations. You keep hoping that this time, this week, this month, this quarter, something will finally click. Three months become six months. Six months become a year, and you're exhausted. You're working around them. Your team is silently streaming. Projects are moving at the speed of continental drift. And every one on one feels like you're trying to teach a cat to fetch. Technically possible? Maybe. Likely to happen? Absolutely not. But you keep telling yourself, I just need to give them more time. I can't give up on them. That'd make me a bad leader. Meanwhile, you're laying awake at 2 AM wondering if maybe, just maybe, you should have paid more attention to that red flag in the third interview when they said their biggest weakness was carrying too much. Well, spoiler, it wasn't. But here's what nobody tells you. Sometimes the problem isn't that you're giving up too soon. It's that you're waiting too long to admit it's not a fit. Because here's the truth, and this is hard to hear. You can't coach someone into being a different person. Did you hear me? You can't coach someone into being a different person. You can coach skills. Here's how to use the CRM. Done. You can coach habits. Let's build a system for hitting goals and deadlines. Check. You can even coach mindset to a degree. You know, let's reframe how you think about feedback. Okay, we're stretching it, but sure. But you can't coach culture fit. You can't coach intrinsic motivation, and you can't coach someone into wanting a job they fundamentally don't want. And when you spend six months, a year, 18 months trying to coach those things into someone, you're not being kind. You're actually being cruel. Cruel to them because you're letting them fail publicly in a role that's never going to work, while they could be finding something that actually fits. Cruel to your team because they're picking up the slack and wondering why performance doesn't actually matter. And also quietly updating their LinkedIn profiles because they're tired of carrying the dead weight. And cruel to yourself, because you're spending all your energy managing one person's underperformance instead of leading your entire team. Brene Brown nails it in Dare to lead. She says, clear is kind, unclear is unkind. And continuing, you know, to coach someone who's who's in the wrong role, that's the definition of unclear. Today I'm breaking down the difference between a performance issue you can fix and a hiring mistake you need to address. The three signs that tell you it's time to stop coaching and start transitioning using Patrick Lincioni's framework from the ideal team player. Why moving fast when a bad hire is actually the kind of thing you can do, and how Kim Scott's concept of ruinous empathy from radical candor explains why we avoid these decisions, and how to handle the transition with dignity, clarity, and compassion. By the end of this episode, you'll know exactly how to spot the difference between needs more coaching and wrong hire. You'll have a framework for making the call, not based on gut feeling or guilt, but on clear criteria. And you'll know how to handle the transition in a way that honors their humanity while protecting your team. Because here's what I've learned after 20 plus years in leadership. The longer you wait on a bad hire, the harder it gets for everyone. So let's talk about when to stop coaching and start transitioning. Hey leaders, this is Colby Morris, and this is the Things Leaders Do podcast. As always, this is 15 to 20 minutes of practical, actionable tools. No theory, no fluff, just real guidance. So let's dive in. All right. Let's start with the hardest question in leadership. How do you know if someone just needs more coaching or if you made a hiring mistake? Performance issues are about what someone does. Okay. That skills, execution, results, things you can observe, measure, and coach. You know, someone doesn't know how to use the CRM system, that's a performance issue. You can train them. Boring? Yes. Painful? Also, yes, but doable. And if someone keeps missing deadlines because they're disorganized, that's a performance issue. You can coach time management. But hiring mistakes are about who someone is. Values, motivation, cultural alignment, the intrinsic qualities that make someone successful in your specific environment. And here's the thing: you can't sit someone down and say, hey, I need you to fundamentally care about different things and expect that to work. That's not a Tuesday afternoon conversation. That's years of therapy and maybe a life-altering experience. Patrick Lincioni's book, The Ideal Team Player, Breaks Down with his humble, hungry, smart framework. The ideal team player has three virtues. Humble. They lack excessive ego. When the team wins, they say we, not I led this project, and honestly, I carried the team, but whatever, team effort, I guess. They're hungry. They're self-motivated, always looking for more to do, more to learn, more responsibility to take on. You never have to push them to work harder. They're the ones sending emails at 7 p.m., not because you asked, but because they genuinely want to solve the problem. And they're smart. And he doesn't mean intellectually smart. You can have a genius IQ and Steve still be a you know Sheldon Cooper to work with. Shout out to Big Bang Three. He means emotionally intelligent. They have common sense about people. They understand group dynamics. They know how to read a room. Linchoni says, and I'm quoting here, when a team member significantly lacks one or more of these virtues, the process of building a cohesive team becomes hard and in some cases impossible. And that's the key word in there. I don't know if you saw it. Lacks. Not needs to develop. Not is still learning. Lacks. Like doesn't have it. Never has. Probably never will. I hired someone for an operations role several years ago. Smart guy. Lots of experience. On paper. Perfect. Three months in, I realized he wasn't hungry at all. He did exactly what was asked, but nothing more. It was like working with a very polite robot programmed to do the absolute minimum required to not get fired. I'd walk by his desk and he'd be just sitting there, not stressed, not problem-solving, just existing peacefully. Like he'd achieve enlightenment, but unfortunately, it was at my company's expense. So I coached him. Hey, I need you to be more proactive. I need you to take ownership. And he'd nod and he'd say all the right things. Absolutely. I totally get it. I'll work on that. And then nothing would change. Like, not even a little bit. It was like coaching a goldfish. Enthusiastic nodding, zero retention. Same behavior 30 seconds later. I kept coaching for six months. Six months. Here's what I finally realized. I wasn't coaching a skill gap. I was trying to coach hunger into someone. And you can't do that. That was a hiring mistake. And the six months I spent trying to coach them, that wasn't kind. That was me being too scared to admit I'd made a bad hire. Brene Brown has this quote from her book Rising Strong. She says, We can choose courage or we can choose comfort, but we can't have both, not at the same time. See, continuing to coach that person was the comfortable choice. The courageous choice would have been to acknowledge the truth way earlier. So how do you know? How do you tell the difference? Here are the three signs I look for. One, they're missing one of the core values and it's not improving. So if someone lacks humility, you know, they they take credit for team wins, they they deflect blame when things go wrong, they're defensive when you give feedback. You can coach someone on how to give credit to others, but you can't coach someone into not having a massive ego. If after multiple conversations about sharing credit and being open to feedback, they're still making everything about themselves, that's who they are. If someone lacks hunger, they do the bare minimum. You have to push them constantly. They never volunteer, they watch the clock like it's the only thing that's keeping them alive. You can coach someone on a specific task, but you can't coach someone into caring. If after multiple conversations about ownership and going above and beyond and they're still just phoning it in, that's not a performance issue. That's a motivation problem. And motivation comes from within, not from your inspirational Monday morning pet talks. If someone lacks people smarts, they consistently misread situations. They say wildly inappropriate things in meetings, they don't pick on social cues, they create interpersonal conflict and genuinely seem confused about why everyone's so upset. You can coach someone on specific communication skills, but you can't coach someone into having emotional intelligence that they fundamentally never developed. If after multiple conversations about team dynamics and reading the room and they're still leaving a trail of interpersonal destruction, that's not fixable. Then Jolene actually talks about different combinations. Someone who's humble and hungry but not smart, he calls them an accidental messmaker. They work hard and mean well, but they keep creating problems because they don't understand people. It's like watching someone enthusiastically set fires trying to help put them out. Someone who's hungry and smart but not humble? That's a skillful politician. They get things done and they're great at managing up, but they destroy team culture because everything's about them. Someone who's humble and smart but not hungry, that's a lovable slacker. Everyone likes them, but they're never going to do more than the bare minimum. They're the human equivalent of work smarter, not harder, taken to the extreme. If you find yourself having the same conversation for the third, fourth, fifth time with no meaningful change, that's your neon sign. Performance issues improve with coaching. You see progress. Maybe it's slow, maybe it's incremental, but you see movement like watching a plant grow is happening just very, very slowly. Hiring mistakes don't improve. You have the conversation, they nod, they agree. They maybe even try for a week, and then they're right back to the same behavior. It's groundhog day, except Bill Murray eventually learns and changes. Your team member does not. Because they're not they're not choosing not to change. Okay, they can't change because what you've asked them to change isn't a behavior. It's who they are. Okay, there's a third sign here. If you're high performers, the people who are humble, hungry, and smart are starting to ask pointed questions about this person, you better listen. Hey, is Tom gonna be at this meeting? Translation, I don't want to work with them. Can I take the lead on this project instead of Tom? Translation. I don't trust them to do it well. How long is Tom gonna be on the team? Translation, why are we keeping someone who's clearly not working out? And also, why am I still here when I could work somewhere that actually values performance? High performers don't ask those questions about someone who's just struggling with a performance issue. They ask those questions about someone who's fundamentally not a fit. And when your high performers start asking questions, they're not just asking, they're telling you something. Listen, because the next question they're asking themselves is, should I start looking? So if it's so clear that someone's not a fit, why do we wait so long to do something about it? Because we're being what Kim Scott calls ruinously empathetic. In her book Radical Candor, Kim Scott breaks down the most common mistake managers make: ruinous empathy. Here's how she defines it. Ruinous empathy is what happens when you want to spare someone short-term feelings so you don't tell them something they need to know. Yeah. How many of y'all just felt that? You care about them. You genuinely do. You don't want to hurt their feelings. You don't want to be the reason they lose their job. So you keep coaching. You keep hoping. Because that feels kind. But it's not kind. It's ruinous. Kim Scott tells a story in Radical Kinder about hiring a guy, let's call him Bob, who was charming, funny, likable. Everyone loved Bob. But Bob's work wasn't good, and Kim kept avoiding the conversation. She'd hint, she'd sugarcoat, she'd things like, This is good, but maybe if you can make it a little better. And Bob had no idea he was underperforming. Eventually, she had to fire him. And when she did, Bob was shocked, devastated. He said, Why didn't you tell me sooner? I thought I was doing great. And that's when Kim realized she thought she was being kind by avoiding the hard conversations, but she'd actually been cruel because she let Bob fell publicly for months when she could have been honest with him early. That's ruinous empathy. Caring personally, but failing to challenge directly. So there's a cost of waiting. And here's what happens when you wait. To the person, if you transition someone out after three months, they can chuck it up to a bad fit and move on. If you wait a year and a half, that's on their resume. That's a hit to their confidence they might not recover from. The cost to your team. Every week you wait is another week they're wondering why you're not doing anything about it. And every week you you wait, that erodes your credibility as a leader. And the cost to you, you're spending all your time managing one person who's not working out instead of leading your entire team. All right. So you've realized it's a hiring mistake. You decided it's time to transition this person out. Now what? Because here's the thing: even though it's the right decision, it's still hard. Okay. And it should be. We're talking about someone's livelihood, their career, their sense of identity. So how do you do this in a way that's clear, direct, and compassionate? Well, step one, you need to be clear about the decision. Okay? Don't make this ambiguous. Don't make them think there's still a chance if they just try harder. This isn't a performance conversation. This isn't a, you know, you need to improve or else conversation. The decision is made. Now you're helping them transition with dignity. You may say something like, I need to be direct with you. I've realized this role isn't the right fit. I've tried coaching, I've tried adjusting expectations, and I don't think that's going to change. So we need to talk about next steps. Notice what you're not saying. You're fired effective immediately. And notice what you are saying. This role isn't the right fit. Okay? It's not personal. It's it's not about their worth as a human being. It's about fit. And fit goes both ways. Step two, you need to own your part. If you're being honest, you probably could have acted sooner. You probably could have been clearer earlier. You probably saw signs in the interview process that you ignored. Own that. I should have addressed this sooner. I kept hoping more coaching would help, and I realized now that wasn't fair to you, and I should have been more direct earlier. This isn't about falling on your sword or making excuses. It's about being honest. And it models the kind of accountability that you want on your team. Step three focus on what's next. Don't dwell on what went wrong. Don't relitigate the past six months. Focus on what happens next. Here's what I'm proposing. We'll give you, say, two weeks to transition out. During that time, we'll work together on a communication plan. I'll provide a reference that focuses on your strengths, and we'll make sure you land well. Give them time, give them dignity, and give them support. Here's the thing: just because they weren't a fit for this role doesn't mean they're not going to be great somewhere else. I've had people who didn't work out on my team who went on to thrive in different roles at different companies because the problem wasn't them, the problem was the fit. And the more you can help them see that, the more you can actually help them transition well, the better it is for everyone. And then step four, communicate to your team after they've left. Once the person has transitioned out, your team needs a brief acknowledgement. Not all the details, but confirmation that the situation has been resolved. And keep it simple. Hey y'all, as you know, Tom has moved on to pursue other opportunities. I want to thank them for the contributions and wish them well in their next role. And that's it. Short, professional, no drama. Don't bring up performance issues. Don't justify the decision. Don't invite questions about what happened. Your team already knows. They've been watching. And honestly, they're probably relieved you finally did something about it. While the person is still there, say nothing to the team beyond what's necessary for transition planning. Any communication about why they're leaving should wait until after they're gone. Here's what I want you to hear. Making this decision does not make you a bad leader. It makes you a brave one. Brene Brown talks about finding your strong ground as a leader in her new book. That athletic stance that allows you to be stable, but also ready to move when you need to. And sometimes moving means making a hard call. It means choosing courage over comfort. It means being clear even when it's uncomfortable. Because the kindest thing you can do for someone who's in the wrong role is to free them to find the right one. If you're in this situation right now, if you've been coaching someone for months and is not getting better, ask yourself, is this a skill gap or a virtue gap? Can I teach this or is this about who they fundamentally are? If it's a virtue gap, stop waiting. Have the conversation this week. Handle the transition with dignity, but handle it because clear is kind and freeing someone from the wrong role is the most generous thing you can do. You've got this. Before we wrap up, I have some exciting news to share with you. By April 2026, so in a few months, I'm planning to launch a second podcast episode each week, an interview series where I'll sit down with leaders to discuss the actionable tools they've learned throughout their careers. Not theory, okay? No abstract concepts, just real practical tools they use every day that I think would be valuable for you. And around that same time, I'm also planning to launch the YouTube version of this podcast. So if you're a visual learner, you just want to see my goofy face while I talk about hiring mistakes, that'll be coming your way soon. So some lofty goals for 2026, but I'm excited about where we're headed. Now, if your organization is struggling with hiring performance management or building a culture of accountability, again, I'd love to help. I work with organizations through keynote speaking, executive coaching, leadership training to build people-first cultures that get results. You can connect with me on LinkedIn or visit my website. Both of those links are in the show notes. Hey, if this episode is helpful, would you do me a favor? Man, I'd love it if you would subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts, and please leave me a review. That's how we get more leaders involved. You know, share it with another leader who might be struggling with this right now. And remember, keep having the hard conversations. Okay, keep choosing clarity over comfort and keep showing up for your team. And you know why? Because those are the things that leaders do.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you for listening to Things Leaders Do. If you're looking for more tips on how to be a better leader, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and listen to next week's episode. Until next time, keep working on being a better leader by doing the things that leaders do.