There's someone on your team whose work has slipped.
You know exactly who I mean. The missed deadlines, the stuff coming back not quite right, the feeling they've stopped stepping up. And if you're being honest with yourself, you've already done the diagnosis. It's them.
Hold that thought though, because I want to talk you out of it. Or at least make you check it.
You'll have noticed we've just burned through another prime minister. I'm not adding to the thousand columns on what was wrong with Starmer, and I've already written about Burnham's need to be liked (I still think it'll catch up with him). But one thing has been rattling around my head since June. That's seven prime ministers in ten years. Seven completely different people failing in the same seat. At some point "it's them" stops being an explanation.
Somebody called this nearly seventy years ago. W. Edwards Deming, the American statistician who taught post-war Japan to manufacture things properly. Ignored in his own country for decades, so revered in Japan they named their top quality prize after him. America only rediscovered him when he was 79.
Deming said our favourite mistake is assuming every failure must be somebody's fault. "Usually the one nearest at hand."
He put a number on it too. His estimate, after a lifetime inside factories and businesses, was that about 94% of problems belong to the system, and the system is management's responsibility. The individual accounts for the scraps. Now, that was his professional judgement rather than a measured fact, so hold it loosely. But even if he's half wrong, sit with the maths for a second. Half wrong still means most of what you're currently blaming on people is coming from the machinery around them. And who is responsible for the machinery? Yet we tend to look at the "one nearest at hand".
The one nearest at hand. In politics, that's whoever holds the job when the music stops. In your business, it's whoever is standing closest to the problem when you walk in.
Which brings me back to your struggling team member. Your instinct did what mine does with prime ministers. It went straight for character. Sometimes it's right, to be fair, and I'll get to that. But a decent chunk of the time that person is stuck inside a setup that would make anyone look bad, and all you can see from where you sit is the output. The woolly brief. The decision they're not actually allowed to make. None of it visible from your seat.
And if three different people have struggled in the same role, or perhaps the same thing in the same role, you don't have a hiring problem, you have a systems problem.
So before you act on your next problem, one question for you. Person, or system?
A person problem means a standard has drifted. That's a feedback conversation, and you should have it, properly. A system problem means there's friction in how the work flows, and your job is to go and remove it.
The trap is mixing them up. Feedback conversations about broken processes. Process redesigns built around a person you should be having a word with. Two different problems. Two opposite fixes. Diagnose first. The question is free. Getting it wrong is expensive.
I taught this to the first Foundations cohort earlier this year and it was a bit of an uncomfortable session. Nobody in the room found the idea complicated. The discomfort was about where it points. If most problems live in the system, and you're the one who runs the system, then "it's them" has been doing you a favour. It keeps you out of the frame.
Two things to try this week.
Next time a problem lands on you, ask out loud: person, or system? Then wait thirty seconds before answering, because your instinct has already voted and we both know which way.
And in your next few 1:1s with your team members, ask each one "What slows you down that shouldn't?" Whatever comes back is your friction list. Start at the top of it.
This is one of the core sessions in Foundations, my management programme, where we teach how to do this properly. The next cohort starts in October. Details are here.
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Arran Russell
Founder, Set The Tone
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PS. If you're not sure if you or one of your team are right for the Foundations Programme, reply to this or we can have a chat.
