Before you go to sack someone or reach for a PIP, check your clarity
I get approached a lot by founders and operator leaders with the same problem.
Someone on their team is “underperforming”.
The language is often direct:
“I’m thinking about sacking somebody.”
“I need to put them on a PIP.”
“They’re just not performing.”
Those are real signals. Something isn’t working.
But in my experience, they’re usually symptoms - not the diagnosis.
When you go deeper, the same patterns keep popping up. And most of them come back to one thing:
Clarity.
Underperformance is often a leadership problem in disguise
Founders don’t wake up wanting to manage performance issues. Operator leaders don’t enjoy them either. But once you’re building a real company - not a project - you can’t avoid it.
The catch is this:
If the expectations aren’t clear, you can’t diagnose performance.
You might have someone who is genuinely missing the mark. Or you might have someone who is guessing - doing their best, working hard, and still failing because they’re aiming at a target you’ve never properly defined.
And that’s where the “PIP reflex” becomes dangerous.
A PIP is a tool. Exiting is an option. Neither of them fixes a lack of clarity.
A Series A example: capable person, confusing results
A Series A founder reached out to me and opened with:
“ZeShaan, can we speak? I need your help. I’m thinking about sacking somebody.”
This wasn’t a low-effort hire. The founder believed they’d hired a really good person.
The person’s capability wasn’t the question. The founder had seen the quality in how they thought, how they spoke about their craft, the work they were doing in the tech community outside the company.
But in the day-to-day of the role, they weren’t “hitting the markers”.
The founder couldn’t square it.
If they’re this good, why is this not working?
So I started the way I usually do:
“OK. Tell me about the situation. How did we get here?”
Then I went backwards through the system around the person:
Talk me through the interview process
Talk me through the offer process
Talk me through onboarding
Talk me through your one-to-ones and check-ins
As we walked through it, the founder started saying, out loud:
“We didn’t do that.”
“We didn’t do that much of that.”
“We're not doing that.”
That was the flip.
Not from “this person is underperforming” to “this person is perfect”.
But from “this is a them problem” to “this is also a us problem”.
They’d hired a great person and then left them to mind-read.
And in one-to-ones, they weren’t actually leading. They were collecting updates.
One-to-ones were status updates, not expectation-setting or coaching.
What “clarity” actually means (in founder language)
Clarity isn’t a values poster. It isn’t a neat competency framework that no one reads.
It’s the basics, made explicit, repeatedly.
It’s answering questions like:
What are the company goals right now?
How do those translate into department goals?
How do those translate into team priorities?
What does that mean for this role, this quarter?
What does “good” look like - outputs and behaviours?
What are the non-negotiables in how we work here?
If you can’t connect company goals to an individual’s outcomes, the person is left to guess what “moving the needle” even means.
Then you get the worst combo:
the founder feels the person isn’t delivering
the person feels they’re working hard
both are confused, and both are frustrated
That’s not “performance management”.
That’s misalignment.
The probation point founders often miss
In this situation, the person was still in probation.
And a surprising number of founders don’t really understand what probation is for - practically or legally.
They treat it like a “trial before you buy”.
I don’t see it that way.
A probation is a continuation of:
“Now you’re here, let’s see if this works for both sides.”
It’s a structured window to make expectations real in the context of the actual job:
what the work really involves
how decisions actually get made
what pace is required
what “good” looks like in this environment
what support exists, and what doesn’t
Once we established probation was still active, the options opened up. Instead of a rushed decision, we could create a fair, practical reset.
In this case, the founder chose to extend probation - but not as a delay tactic.
As a deliberate move:
reset expectations
evolve their own role into more coach and leader, not just manager
create proper one-to-one conversations that weren’t just updates
and give the person a real chance to deliver with clarity
The skill founders avoid: asking, then shutting up
One of the most useful bits of coaching in this scenario wasn’t a template or a policy.
It was a behaviour change in the founder.
They said something like:
“I’ve kind of asked that question before.”
When I dug in, it was clear what happened next:
They avoided the discomfort of silence.
They filled the gap.
They moved on without getting a real answer.
So we worked on questioning techniques and the power of silence.
If you ask, “What do you think is expected of you right now?” and the person gives a vague answer, you don’t rescue them.
You pause.
You let it hang.
You probe:
“Say more.”
“What makes you think that?”
“What are you optimising for?”
“What would success look like by the end of the month?”
You’re not interrogating them. You’re diagnosing the system.
Because if the person’s mental model of the job is wildly different to yours, you’ve found the real issue.
What happens if you don’t do the clarity work
Here’s the part founders tend to underestimate.
If you don’t do the clarity work, you don’t just risk losing the person.
You risk losing the learning.
You might exit someone who could have been excellent with proper expectations.
And then you hire again - and recreate the same conditions.
So you’ll be back in the same place in 3-6 months, saying:
“Why does this keep happening?”
In the Series A case, if the founder had pushed straight to exit, they likely would have lost a good person and still not known why.
A simple diagnostic before you PIP or exit
Before you go to sack someone or reach for a PIP, run this check:
Can you explain the company goals in one minute?
Can you show how those goals translate to this role’s outcomes?
Have you defined success measures in plain language?
Have you agreed behaviours - how the work gets done - not just tasks?
Do your one-to-ones create clarity, or just collect status?
Have you actually said the expectation out loud, or are you hoping they’ll infer it?
If you can’t answer these cleanly, you’re not ready to call it “underperformance”.
You’re ready to lead.
If you’re thinking about sacking someone or putting them on a PIP right now, what’s the one expectation you haven’t actually said out loud?