Covering for a Loyal Underperformer | Full Send Management
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Picture the pitch. You're pitching a prospective client and you say, "You should work with us because we're a solid C." Or you're interviewing a senior candidate and you describe the culture like this: "Around here, 75% of a job well done is good enough for some people, but we'll expect a 95 from you."
No founder, CEO, or leader would ever say either of those out loud. Yet most of us have said it anyway, without the words, and probably more in the last few years than ever. Standards don't drop in an announcement. They dull quietly, one accommodation you're too busy to argue with at a time. For years, I was saying it too.
I had a member of my leadership team who had been with the company longer than almost anyone in the building. They were incredibly effective at the job they were hired for. That phrasing matters, because the role kept growing and the person sitting in it didn't. I was constantly redoing their work, or doing it outright, or guessing which hole I'd need to fill next. They weren't failing in any way you could put on a review. They were incredibly helpful in a dozen directions and very good at maybe 75% of the job. The other 25% kept landing on my desk.
I had a menu of reasons for absorbing it. They'd earned some grace after all those years. They knew where everything was buried. The team loved them. Underneath the menu sat the real reason, which is that redoing the work was easier than the conversation. Fixing a document takes an hour. Telling someone with a decade of loyalty that the job has outgrown them takes something else entirely, and I kept deciding I'd rather spend the hour. In school, a 75 is a solid C. Attached to a loyal person, it feels like a grade you can carry. I carried it while telling clients we were excellent.
The clear underperformer is an easy call. Everyone sees the gap, and half the office has made the decision before you do. The call that kept me up at night was the loyal veteran who was excellent at most of the job and immovable on the rest. You probably have one of these, and if a name crossed your mind a paragraph ago, that's the one.
I eventually let them go. It was not a popular decision, and the backlash wasn't mild. People who only saw the 75% told me I was wrong. But we needed someone in that role who could move us forward, not hold us in the same gear while the company shifted around them. My calendar got lighter immediately.
The lesson wasn't really about them. I never thought of myself as conflict avoidant. I thought of myself as pragmatic. But covering for someone operating at 75 is avoidance, plain and simple, and the alternative, healthy confrontation while there was still time for them to grow, was the one thing I kept declining to do.
So say your standard out loud this week. If "we're a solid C, but we expect a 95 from you" would never leave your mouth, look at whose 25% you're quietly covering. What grade are you actually running, and how long has that conversation been waiting?
