When a leadership team member brings an issue framed as an employee performance failure, how does the room use IDS to determine whether the root cause is a person issue, a process issue, or an Accountability Chart flaw?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When an employee misses expectations, leadership teams instinctively label it a bad hire or a motivation problem. Jumping straight to discipline or replacement without digging into the root cause burns talent and ignores operational rot. During the Identify phase of IDS, you must test the issue against structure and process before you judge the human.

Start by isolating the seat on the Accountability Chart. Ask three direct diagnostic questions:
- Does the seat have five clearly defined, non-overlapping roles?
- Does the individual genuinely get it, want it, and have the capacity to do it (GWC)?
- Is there a documented Core Process that governs the task, and was the person trained to follow it?

If the roles are ambiguous or shared between two seats, you have a structural problem. No amount of performance coaching fixes structural confusion. If the seat is clear and the person passes GWC, examine the process. Did the handoff fail? Did upstream software corrupt the data? If the process does not exist, the failure belongs to leadership, not the employee.

Only when the seat is crystal clear, the process is documented and followed by all, and the person still fails to deliver results do you conclude it is a People Analyzer issue. Solving the true issue behind the issue usually means clarifying the Accountability Chart or fixing broken handoffs, not firing someone who was set up to fail.