My Team Is Underperforming (And I Might Be Why)

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My team is underperforming.

That’s the thought running on repeat inside your hide. But the numbers also show it. The missed deadlines, the half-baked output, the meetings that go in never-ending circles.

You’ve been patient. You’ve given feedback. You’ve had the hard conversations.
Yet the team is still underperforming.

So you start running through the list.

Maybe it’s a skillset issue? A motivation problem? Do you have the wrong people? Perhaps you need to restructure – or even let someone go.

But here’s the important thought that very few leaders ask themselves:

I know my team is underperforming, but what if it’s because of me?

Don’t think of this as a way to let underperforming people off the hook. Instead, it’s a genuine diagnostic question – one that most leaders won’t ask themselves at all. After all, your brain won’t always think of you as the problem when there’s a perfectly viable explanation that can be blamed on other people.

The Invisible Variable Is The Environment

There’s a leadership concept I continually refer to in my leadership coaching work with executives:

The environment determines performance.

It’s not just about talent or effort.
It’s the environment.

If you put a group of people in a high-performance environment, they’ll achieve things that seem impossible. But put the same people in a broken environment and they’ll struggle to do things that should be easy. The team doesn’t change. The results do.

This brings us right back to your question: My team is underperforming, why?

The uncomfortable answer is that the person who creates the environment is the one to blame.
And that person is you.

Sure, you alone are not defining the entire environment. But you are influencing it more than any other single factor.

So when a leader comes to me and says “My team is underperforming, can you tell me why?” my answer is always going to include holding up a mirror to the leader to help them figure out the problem.

When “my team is underperforming”, the leader’s behavior is always a worth exploring.

What “You’re the Problem” Actually Looks Like

This isn’t about being a bad leader. To the contrary, it’s often about those pesky leadership blind spots.

Most of the leaders I work with in my executive coaching and executive team coaching businesses are smart, well-intentioned, and genuinely trying to do the right thing for their teams.

They also make things harder than they need to be, but they do it in ways they can’t even see.

Here’s what it looks like in the real world.

You’re solving problems your team should be solving. You’re good at what you do. You’ve been doing this a long time. When a problem lands on your desk, your instinct is to solve it – because you can, and because it’s faster than watching someone else struggle through it. But here’s what you’re not seeing (and why you say things like “my team is underperforming“): because you’re solving the problems, your team stopped developing the muscle to solve problems on their own. In fact, over time, they just stopped even trying. After all, if you’re going to fix it, why should they? I’m not saying your a perfectionist leader, I’m just saying…

Your feedback isn’t landing the way you think it is. You think you’re giving clear direction but, spoiler alert, your team thinks they’re being criticized and not given a solution to succeed. Or, even worse, they’ve learned to nod and wait for you to finish your feedback session because nothing they do ever seems to be good enough for you. Keep in mind that feedback which doesn’t improve behavior isn’t feedback – it’s noise. So when you wonder why “my team is underperforming” you may want to consider that they’ve just learned to filter out your noise.

You’ve created a dependency without realizing it. I see this a lot with leaders – decision-making always routes through them. It’s often hard for leaders to see the reality of this themselves, but it’s important for you to determine if your approval is being required for things that really shouldn’t require your approval. If so, I can guarantee that your team spends more time managing up – keeping you informed, anticipating your reactions – than doing the actual work. This isn’t because they’re bad – it’s because you’ve built an environment that rewards it. Next time you say to yourself, “my team is underperforming,” or “I have difficulty delegating,” it is worth doing some self-exploration to see if you’re over-performing in areas you shouldn’t.

The culture you’ve created punishes failure. Of course you wouldn’t explicitly punish failure. Not you. But if people learn that bringing up a problem leads to a difficult conversation, and staying quiet is safer, you can bet they’ll stay quiet. That means you’ll find out about the problems later, when they’ve gotten a lot worse. The team that looks like it’s underperforming is usually a team that’s learned to hide things from its leader. Unfortunately, it’s also the team that is paving the path to leadership burnout.

None of this is malicious. But it all compounds until it can feel overwhelming.
And that’s the point you call me and say things like “My team is underperforming and I don’t know why.”

The Question Most Leaders Don’t Ask When They Think “My Team Is Underperforming”

When your team is underperforming, the instinct is to look at the team. What are they doing wrong? What do they need more of?

That’s nice and fine, but it’s not the way to come up with the right answer. Here’s the better question to ask:

What is hard for my team to do within the environment I’ve created?

It’s a small shift in framing but the implications are huge.

Remember, if the problem is about skillset or capabilities, the fix is either training or replacement. But if the problem is about the environment – the systems, the unspoken rules, the patterns you can’t see that have developed over time – then fixing the people without changing the environment will accomplish nothing in the end. Every new person will walk into the same broken system and start producing the same results.

I’ve seen this happen more times than I can count. And I can count pretty high.

Leaders think “my team is underperforming” and so they look for individuals they think are lacking. They’ll inevitably find somebody struggling and decide to fire them. Then they hire someone they think is amazing and are really excited about. Six months later they’re having the same conversation about the new person who is struggling with similar things as the old one.

It’s not that you’re bad at hiring, it’s that you created a system that will always define that underperforming behavior.
And that’s why “my team is underperforming even after I’ve changed the people,” is one of the most common things I hear from leaders.

How to Actually Figure Out If You’re the Cause

You can’t diagnose yourself from the inside. That’s not a character flaw – it’s just how human cognition works. The blind spots are blind. That’s why they’re named “blind spots” in the first place.

But when you say “my team is underperforming,” there are signals worth paying attention to. And where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire. So you may need to grab the closest fire extinguisher as you read through these.

The team performs differently when you’re not around. If things run better when you’re traveling, or when you’re out of the room, that’s valuable information. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re a bad leader (though it doesn’t mean you aren’t), but it means that your presence is changing how the team operates. That’s important to better understand.

The same problem keeps coming back. If you’ve had a version of the same performance conversation multiple times – with the same person or with different people – the common variable is probably you. The environment you’re operating in hasn’t changed, so the pattern keeps reasserting itself because, yes, many leaders repeat the same mistakes over and over.

Your direct reports don’t push back. A team that never disagrees with the leader isn’t a team that always agrees. Just the opposite. It’s a team that’s learned that disagreement isn’t worth the cost. That’s a culture problem… and the culture, my friend, was set by you.

You’re busier than you should be. If you’re doing work that should be done by people two levels below you, it’s probably not because your team can’t handle it. It’s because somewhere along the line you’ve allowed the system to route that work to you (this one is common among the first-time manager mistakes.)

What To Do With This

The goal isn’t to decide you’re the problem and then spend the next month in a sad spiral of self-examination. The goal is to add yourself to the diagnostic process.

The moment you think “my team is underperforming”, there are two questions you should ask that should run in parallel:

  • What does the team need to change?
  • And what do I need to change?

Sometimes the honest answer is that the team has to improve their skillset. You need to address that. But sometimes the answer is that you’ve been the primary influencer the entire time – and it’s time for you to think “my team is underperforming not because of the people, but because of the environment they’re operating in.” The team would perform differently in a different environment.

Usually the answer is some combination of the two.

The leaders who address this the best are the ones with the open-mindedness to understand that both scenarios can be true. That’s harder than it sounds. It’s also the difference between a leader who develops great teams and a leader who keeps cycling through people wondering why it never quite works.

If you want a clear-eyed look at what you might be contributing to your team’s underperformance – and what to actually do about it – that’s exactly what working with a leadership coach makes possible. Sometimes you need someone outside the system to show you what the system is doing.

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Jeff Matlow is a leadership coach and 3x entrepreneur who helps senior leaders spot the unconscious patterns keeping their teams dependent on them – then redesign the environment so everyone can actually perform. He’s spent 25+ years working with leaders at Disney, Porsche, Nestlé, and hundreds of high-growth companies. Think Ted Lasso meets Brené Brown meets a Navy SEAL. Learn more about working with Jeff or subscribe to The Best Leadership Newsletter Ever.