A leader's patience with underperformance doesn't help anyone. It shifts the burden to strong performers who cover the slack, fixes mistakes, and meet deadlines while the struggling person stays stuck. Address the problem first, then be patient.
Patience never happens in isolation. Here's the reality. When one person repeatedly drifts in the same way, somebody else ends up covering the work for them. Someone else has to fix that mistake because you're not going to let your customer remain pissed off. Somebody else has to protect that customer if that person doesn't do it. Someone else has to hit that deadline for that customer. Somebody else has to absorb the frustration. That's going on. Remember this, your patience, my patience in the wrong order is always gonna send somebody else the bill because somebody's still gotta deal with it. I mean, we tell our, our strongest people, we appreciate you. And then the way we reward them is with giving them more work that other people aren't owning because we're not willing to have a recovery conversation. We get pissed off and then we need to have a difficult conversation. We end up protecting the person who continues the drift when our patience comes before recovery. And we end up quietly punishing the people who are actually honoring the standard that we laid out in the first place. And then we wonder why our best people stop trusting leadership. I have created that. I've had to deal with that because I gave— I went from no patience to way too much patience. And I see this happening all the time. It is taught. Patience first. No, patience comes second. Recovery comes first, or we dilute the standard and we create a situation where there's a lack of accountability, and then we complain about it.
