Working as a Chief People Officer, you’ve seen it all before.
The numbers are flat. Engagement scores wobble. Execution slows. Meetings feel heavier than they used to.And the default diagnosis sounds familiar:
“We need better capability.”
“We need stronger performance management.”
“We need to raise the bar.”
But here’s the compassionately challenging truth:
Underperformance is rarely about effort. And it’s rarely about intelligence.
It’s almost always about something you can’t see.
When a team under performs, most organisations look at what people are doing.
Very few examine how they are thinking. Fewer still examine the energy, maturity, and dynamics driving those behaviours.
Underperformance tends to sit in one (or more) of three hidden layers:
If your leaders are exhausted, no strategy will save you.
Low physiological energy reduces clarity, resilience and emotional regulation. Decision quality drops. Reactivity increases. Strange behaviours creeps in.
You cannot out-train burnout. You cannot performance-manage fatigue.
We consistently see that when leaders increase energy and regulate it effectively, performance shifts fast. In our programmes, leaders have shown a 54% reduction in stress, 25% reduction in fatigue, and a 37% improvement in emotional management within nine months .
Energy isn’t a wellbeing perk. It’s a performance variable.
Most organisations measure personality, strengths or preferences. But descriptive assessments don’t tell you whether someone can actually handle complexity.
The real differentiator is sophistication. How well a leader makes sense of ambiguity, tension and competing priorities.
As complexity rises, sophistication must rise with it. Otherwise leaders feel overwhelmed, defensive, time-poor and stuck. This is why vertical development matters.
Because its not about what a leader knows or what type they are. But how they process their reality. Without greater sophistication, leaders slow the organisation often unintentionally.
Sometimes teams aren’t under performing, they are just misaligned.
If the ambition is unclear, governance muddy, or decision rights ambiguous, even high-calibre leaders drift. We often see leadership teams trying to drive commercial performance without equal clarity on:
Vision, Ambition or Purpose
The organisations strategy
Cultural expectations
Governance rhythms
When those fundamentals aren’t coherent, friction masquerades as under performance. The team might work hard, just not together.
Here’s the uncomfortable part.
When we don’t know the root cause, we guess. We send people on courses. We restructure. We change incentives. We replace individuals. And sometimes we accidentally remove the very people who could have performed brilliantly, if the system had evolved around them.
Under performance is rarely solved with another initiative.
It’s solved with diagnosis. And not a descriptive one but a developmental one.
If you are serious about lifting performance, you need to measure four dimensions:
I - the leader’s inner maturity and energy
WE - relational capability and team dynamics
IT - execution and behavioural effectiveness
Vertical sophistication - the ability to handle increasing complexity
Traditional assessments describe the present moment.
Developmental assessments reveal the next level required for future success.
That shift changes everything.
Because once you know whether the issue is energy, behaviour, or clarity you know where to intervene first. And when you intervene precisely, performance will accelerate.
If your organisation feels like it’s working harder but achieving less, ask three questions:
Do our leaders have the energy to sustain the ambition we’ve set?
Has our sophistication grown in line with our complexity?
Is our team aligned around a genuinely coherent direction?
Be honest.
The only person who can change how you feel is you. The only team who can change how they perform is the team.
As CPO, your role is not to fix people.
It’s to ensure the system enables development.
Because when leaders grow, performance follows.
And when teams evolve, culture transforms.
You don’t need more pressure, more initiatives, more people.
You need more precision.
Under performance isn’t a verdict you need to act on it's feedback from the system you need to listen to. The question is whether you’re willing to look deep enough to hear it.
If you’re ready to stop guessing and start diagnosing what really drives performance, explore how developmental leadership assessments and our Team Development Journey uncover the root cause fast and deliver two years’ progress in six months.