Development has a Clock
How to Keep Patience from Becoming Avoidance.
Those who work with heads of school often voice the same complaint. The head moves too slowly on a personnel performance problem that most everyone else considers urgent. A teacher habitually underprepares, or an administrator cannot handle the scope of their role. The people around the head see the problem and wait for the head to fire or at least reassign the underperformer. The head does not act. Asked about it, the head explains a reluctance to act rashly and a wish to give the person time to develop. Ending someone’s employment is a serious matter, the head says, and should not be rushed. After all, schools are in the business of human development.
In our study of hundreds of such situations, both accounts are often true: the people around the head are right about the performance issue, and the head is right that haste carries its own costs. The tension between the two has no easy resolution.
The Human Bias Toward Delay
To begin with the question of why delay is so common, the answer is that the costs of the two errors are not felt in the same way. When a leader removes someone, the cost is immediate and visible. There is a difficult conversation, a disrupted team, a search to run, and a story that circulates throughout the school community. Every part of that cost creates acute pain that must be managed. When a leader keeps an underperformer in place, the cost is a dull pain that comes and goes. It is paid in a slightly diminished experience for students, in the extra load that colleagues quietly absorb, or in the moment when more effective staff watch and conclude that performance at this school doesn’t matter to those in charge.
Thus, the leader faces a concentrated cost of acting and a spread-out cost of waiting. In such a scenario, a rational person would wait; why subject oneself to more pain when the dull ache, though uncomfortable at times, seems tolerable? This asymmetry underlies most leader inaction on personnel matters and operates whether or not the leader is consciously aware of it.
Several familiar cognitive and emotional patterns reinforce it. Loss aversion makes it hard to let go of a known employee in favor of an uncertain replacement. Sunk cost (usually called the Sunk Cost Fallacy) makes the years already invested in someone feel like a reason to invest more, and the pull is strongest when the head hired or promoted the person, since removing them reopens a judgment the leader would rather consider closed. Optimism bias sustains the belief that the next evaluation cycle will show a turnaround. Further, the very empathy that makes a person fit to lead a school makes separation from subordinates painful, and that pain is easy to relabel as principle.
Ron Carucci, writing in the Harvard Business Review, catalogs five versions of this hesitation, each placing the difficulty with the leader rather than the underperformer. One deserves particular attention because it is the rationalization most often dressed up as prudence. The leader becomes convinced that the person is, in some way, indispensable, that the disruption of their departure would be ruinous, and therefore tolerates poor performance on that basis. Carucci reports having seen this fear invoked many times, yet never materialize. In one case, a leader endured years of bad behavior from a sales executive on the theory that his customer relationships could not be put at risk. When a successor finally removed him, the organization lost no customers and grew revenue by roughly a third within the year.
The Case for Slowness
Slowness is sometimes the right response, and the pressure to act against a specific individual is sometimes worth resisting. A system under stress tends to project its anxiety onto a person, analogous to the “identified patient” described by family therapy practitioners: the member of a family or organization designates as the problem so the system can avoid examining itself. The chorus around the head calling for a personnel change may be reading the situation accurately, or it may be discharging its own discomfort onto a convenient target. A head who refuses to be swayed by the volume of the complaint is, in some cases, exercising exactly the leadership the role requires. They are declining to let the system’s anxiety make their decision for them.
Is the issue truly an individual one, or does it reflect a larger team dysfunction? The discipline lies in distinguishing between the two situations. Principled patience and anxious avoidance look identical from the outside. Both appear to be inaction, and both elicit similar negative reactions from others in the organization.
The mechanism behind the negative reaction is equity. Felps, Mitchell, and Byington’s 2006 review in Research in Organizational Behavior traces how one member’s behavior elicits psychological states in teammates, including perceptions of inequity and reduced trust, which, in turn, lead to withdrawal and defensive reactions. Basically, when a member chronically underperforms, teammates face the problem of dealing with an imbalance between their own input-to-outcome ratio and that of the other member. In this way, damage is done less by, say, an advancement director’s perpetually weak numbers than by what the rest of the leadership team concludes when they absorb the slack and see no performance standard named or enforced. The workload research arrives at the same conclusion from a different perspective: when strong performers overcompensate for a lagging colleague, the cost appears as their resentment, disengagement, and eventual departure, rather than the underperformer’s.
So, how then should the head deal with others around an underperformer while making up their mind? Handling the team mostly comes down to what to make visible and what to keep private. Be transparent about standards while remaining discreet about the individual’s circumstances, so the team sees that standards are enforced fairly and no one’s dignity is violated. You cannot tell the team that the member is on an improvement plan, or that you are giving them six months to catch up or be fired. Research on workplace communications finds that most people accept that some information cannot be legally disclosed.
A Way to Move Forward
Given all the constraints, what is a head of school to do? Their task is to convert what could appear to be an open-ended drift into a more tightly bounded decision. Several elements make that possible, but it starts with correctly naming the performance gap, both to oneself and to the underperformer.
Ronald Heifetz’s distinction between technical and adaptive challenges is useful here. A technical gap is a matter of skill or knowledge and can be addressed through instruction and practice. An adaptive gap concerns a person’s capability or fit for what the job demands, and no amount of instruction can close it because instruction is not the issue. The common and costly error is to treat an adaptive problem as a technical one, hoping for development in someone whose limitation is not developmental. Time given to such a person defers the decision without changing the outcome.
Decide whether the problem is technical as well as coachable or is adaptive and unlikely to change. This determines whether development is even the right instrument.
If development is warranted, make it explicit and shared. The person should know what is expected, what support is available, and what the standard for success will be. A development plan the employee has not been told about is not a plan.
Set your decision date before the period begins. Decide now what you will need to see and by when, so the future decision is made against criteria set in a calm moment rather than under the anxiety of the moment itself. A predetermined date and a predetermined standard are a defense against the sunk cost fallacy and optimism bias, because they take the judgment out of the hands of the version of you most inclined to lengthen the timeline yet again.
Separate the question of growth from the question of fit. A person can be genuinely capable of development and still be wrong for this role, or unable to grow in the direction the institution requires. Compassion for the individual should govern how a situation of misfit is handled, and is not satisfied by keeping a person in a role that exposes their weakness to the whole community. Often, the person already knows. Carucci describes executives who, given an honest conversation, were relieved to stop pretending and had already been weighing roles for which they were better suited. The head who acts can frequently help the person toward such a role, and the aftermath is not as grim as the guilt assumes.
What Interminable Waiting Teaches
A head who declines to act on what the whole community can see is not only carrying one underperformer. They are also teaching a lesson, and the school is learning it by observation. The lesson is that results are negotiable and that underperformance will be tolerated. It looks weaker to ignore poor performance than to address it, and the community draws its conclusions from inaction as readily as from action. The strongest people on the staff learn the lesson fastest, because they are the ones with somewhere else to go.
The defense against this is the willingness to give a fair and genuinely resourced chance within a fixed window, and then to honor the clock. It does not require severity. A leader who does it has given the person everything patience could legitimately offer and has protected the institution from the version of patience that is only the fear of acting.