How to Motivate an Underperforming Employee (Before You Give Up on Them)

You've got one person on the team who's slipping. The work comes in late, or half-right, or not at all. You've hinted. You've nudged. You've told yourself it'll turn around on its own. It hasn't. And now the rest of the team is watching to see whether you're actually going to do something about it, because they can see it too, and they're quietly deciding how hard they need to try based on what you tolerate.

Managing an underperforming employee is one of the most avoided jobs in leadership. Not because leaders don’t notice. They always notice. Because the conversation feels risky, and doing nothing feels safe. It isn’t.

The surface problem is the missed deadlines and the sloppy output. But that’s not what’s eating at you. The real weight is quieter: the fear that you’ll handle it wrong and lose them, the resentment building because you’re picking up their slack, and the nagging worry that if you can’t fix this, you’re not much of a leader. That’s the internal problem, and it’s the one that keeps you stuck.

Here’s what I learned leading soldiers and later running a seven-figure company: most underperformers aren’t lost causes. They’re misdiagnosed. You can turn a surprising number of them around, but only if you stop guessing and start figuring out what’s actually going on.

Why “Just Try Harder” Never Works

When someone’s underperforming, the instinct is to push: more pressure, more check-ins, a sterner tone. Sometimes that works for a week. Then it slides right back.

It fails because pressure treats every problem as a motivation problem, and it isn’t. Underperformance almost always comes down to one of two things: the person can’t do the work, or they won’t. Those look identical from the outside and need opposite responses. Push a “can’t” harder and you just humiliate someone who’s already drowning. Coddle a “won’t” and you reward the exact behavior you need to stop.

So before you do anything else, your job as the guide is to find out which one you’re dealing with. Not assume. Find out.

The 4-Step Framework for Turning It Around

You don’t need to be a motivational speaker to pull an employee back from the edge. You need a clear process and the nerve to run it.

Step 1: Diagnose Can’t vs. Won’t

Sit down and get honest about what you’re actually seeing. A can’t problem is a skills or clarity gap: they don’t know how, they were never trained, the expectations were fuzzy, or they’re buried under a workload no one could carry. A won’t problem is a motivation or engagement gap: they’ve checked out, they’re frustrated about something, or they’ve quietly stopped caring. Dealing with underperformance on your team starts here, because everything downstream depends on getting this right.

Step 2: Have the One-on-One You’ve Been Avoiding

Book real time, not a hallway comment, not a Slack message. Sit down face to face. Name what you’re seeing plainly and without spin: “Here’s the pattern I’ve noticed over the last month, and I want to understand what’s going on.” Then stop talking and listen. This is where the diagnosis gets confirmed. A struggling employee will often tell you exactly what’s wrong in the first five minutes, if you make it safe enough for them to be honest. The performance improvement conversation isn’t an ambush. It’s you signaling that you care enough to be straight with them.

Step 3: Take Your Share of the Blame

This is the step most managers skip, and it’s the one that changes everything. If someone’s a bad fit for the role, that’s partly on you. If they were never properly trained, that’s on you. If your expectations were never clear, that’s on you. Owning your piece out loud does two things: it disarms the defensiveness, and it earns you the standing to hold them accountable for theirs. You can’t demand ownership from someone while dodging your own.

Step 4: Set a Clear Bar and a Real Timeline

Vague hope isn’t a plan. Define exactly what “back on track” looks like, what support you’ll provide (training, mentoring, a lighter load while they climb out), and when you’ll check in. Then actually check in, on the calendar, not whenever you happen to remember. Turning around a struggling employee is a series of small course-corrections, not one dramatic talk. And name the stakes honestly: what improvement earns them, and what happens if the pattern continues.

The Mistakes That Turn a Fixable Problem Into a Firing

Waiting for it to fix itself. It won’t. Underperformance left alone doesn’t quietly resolve. It spreads, because the rest of the team is recalibrating their effort to match your tolerance.

Making it about their character. The moment you say “you’re lazy” or “you don’t care,” you’ve lost them. Talk about the behavior and the pattern, not the person. Behavior is a fact you can both look at. Character is a fight.

Confusing kindness with avoidance. Letting someone fail quietly isn’t kind. It’s the least kind thing you can do. Real respect is telling someone the truth early enough that they can still act on it.

Holding underperformers accountable in private only. The standard has to be visible. Your best people need to see that the bar is real, not to shame anyone, but because a standard nobody enforces isn’t a standard.

Start Free, Today

Before you spend a dollar, go watch The Forge, my free 13-part masterclass on leading people. There’s a whole section on accountability, hard conversations, and coaching someone back to their best. No email required, no paywall. You’ll find it next to the free Build Right course on the Services page.

What’s Actually at Stake

Handle this well and you get two wins for the price of one. You might turn someone around, and there’s no leadership moment more satisfying than watching a person you almost gave up on climb back and thank you for not writing them off. But even if it ends in a parting of ways, you’ll have done it cleanly, with your integrity and your team’s trust intact.

Handle it badly (avoid it, sit on it, let the resentment build) and you lose more than one underperformer. You lose the respect of everyone who’s watching you tolerate it. Your strongest people don’t stay on teams where effort and coasting get treated the same.

You already have the instinct that something needs to change, or this wouldn’t be weighing on you. What’s missing is a process and someone in your corner who’s made these calls before. That part, you don’t have to figure out alone.