Moving Low Performers Around Is Not Leadership

I was recently speaking with a group of senior executives who were swapping stories about how they "move problem people around."

One admitted doing exactly this during a transformation — anyone who "didn't get it" was relocated to teams where the change was not happening. The room nodded. Some applauded.

In another organisation, an entire department had formed from displaced low performers — a kind of organisational limbo with no clear purpose, absorbing people that other managers had decided were too difficult to deal with properly.

Let's be direct: this is not leadership. It is burden passing.

Why shuffling people is burden passing, not problem solving

Moving people around feels convenient. It avoids difficult conversations, preserves political capital, and keeps the org chart tidy. It looks like action. It is not.

The hidden costs accumulate quickly.

Trust erodes when teams notice they are receiving people other managers have given up on. Problems do not disappear — they move, and often compound in their new location.

The individual's dignity is eroded by the implicit message that nobody wants to invest in them. Organisational energy is wasted on the same problems appearing repeatedly in different forms. And the systemic issues that produced the underperformance remain completely untouched.

There is also a communication point that tends to get missed in these conversations. When someone does not "get" a transformation or a new way of working, the instinct is to label them as resistant or slow. But communication is something other people decode — and if they have not understood, the fault lies with how it was communicated, not with the person who did not understand. Moving people who "didn't get it" is often moving people who were never clearly told what was expected of them.

Passing people around is organisational debt. Sooner or later it has to be paid.

Low performance is usually a systemic signal

Most underperformance is not malicious. It is structural. Unclear expectations. Poor onboarding. Roles that do not match the person's strengths. Absent coaching. Broken processes that make good performance structurally difficult.

W. Edwards Deming estimated that 94% of performance outcomes come from the system, not the individual. Moving people around treats the symptom. It leaves the system completely intact.

If someone is underperforming, the responsibility is genuinely shared — between the manager who hired them, the system that failed to support them, and the organisation that designed the role they are struggling in. Pointing at the person and relocating them is the easiest response available. It is also the least honest about where the real problem sits.

The almost universal truth in my experience: the vast majority of people who appear to underperform have simply never been told clearly that they are not meeting the bar — or have never been told what the bar actually is.

Before any other intervention, that conversation needs to happen.

What ethical ownership actually looks like

The process for handling underperformance properly is not complicated, though it requires consistent effort and genuine care.

Start with the bar. Be explicit about what good performance looks like — specific behaviours, not vague qualities. Many managers assume this is understood. It rarely is.

Give timely, behavioural feedback. Not about the person, not about your opinion of them, but about specific observed behaviours and their consequences. Regular, honest, and kind.

Build a coaching plan. Identify the resources, opportunities, and development support that would genuinely help them reach the required standard. Invest in this. Document it.

Keep records. Notes from performance conversations, feedback given, and coaching plans in place. Not for bureaucratic reasons — because if you eventually need to escalate, you will need to demonstrate that you did the work first. Simple notes are sufficient.

Work with HR when the process needs to escalate. Very few HR professionals will refuse to engage when a manager can demonstrate they have already given feedback, built a coaching plan, and supported improvement.

The manager who simply wants to remove someone without evidence of that work is a different conversation.

Throughout all of this: treat the person with dignity. An exit from an organisation causes genuine disruption to a life — bills, family, stability. That does not mean avoiding the conversation. It means having it carefully, clearly, and humanely.

Where most time should go

Deming's point about systems applies here. The majority of managerial attention should go toward fixing systemic issues — the processes, communication failures, unclear priorities, and incentive misalignments that make good performance structurally harder than it needs to be. Most of what looks like a people problem is actually a system problem. Fix the system first.

Then invest deeply in your high performers. These are the people most likely to leave if they feel undervalued, and the people whose departure causes the most damage. Spend time with them. Develop them. Protect their energy and attention.

Low performers deserve coaching and honesty, not abandonment. Moving them around is abandonment dressed as management.

Responsibility over comfort

Leadership is not about avoiding difficult conversations. It is about owning them — clearly, carefully, and in the interest of everyone involved, including the person struggling.

Moving people around is organisational avoidance. Addressing performance with clarity and care is organisational maturity. The difference shows up in the culture — in whether people trust that problems get solved rather than shuffled, and in whether individuals trust that their manager will tell them the truth.

Low performance is not a problem to be passed along. It is a signal to be understood, owned, and addressed.