How to Manage Underperformers (Without Making It Worse)
David Buirs is a leadership and executive coach based in Amsterdam. This article explores how to manage underperforming team members using insights from psychology and neuroscience, including the Golem effect, the Pygmalion effect, and the role of stress in performance. It offers a practical approach built on small steps and positive reinforcement.
Every team has someone who’s falling behind. If yours doesn’t, your targets are probably too easy.
That sounds blunt. But statistically, it’s simply how performance works. In any group of people, you’ll find a natural spread. Roughly 10 to 20 percent will consistently exceed expectations. The majority will perform around the average. And a similar percentage will struggle. Performance in any team follows a normal distribution. It’s the natural outcome of putting different people with different strengths into complex environments.
The real question is what you do with it.
The Golem Effect: How Your Expectations Make It Worse
There’s a well-documented phenomenon in psychology called the Golem effect. When a manager expects someone to underperform, that expectation gets communicated. Not always in words. Sometimes through tone. Through the projects you assign. Through how much autonomy you give. Through how often you check in.
The person on the receiving end picks up on all of it. And something predictable happens: they start performing in line with your low expectations. They disengage. They stop taking initiative. They become the underperformer you assumed they were.
The Golem effect was first described by Robert Rosenthal, the same psychologist who discovered its opposite: the Pygmalion effect. When managers hold high expectations and communicate genuine belief in someone’s ability, performance goes up. People rise to meet what’s expected of them.
This means that before you address someone’s underperformance, you need to honestly examine your own assumptions. Are you managing this person as someone who’s struggling temporarily? Or have you already written them off?
What Happens in the Brain When Stress Gets Too High
Here’s something that often gets overlooked. Many underperformers aren’t lacking motivation or ability. They’re overwhelmed.
When pressure crosses a certain threshold, something happens in the brain that Daniel Goleman calls an amygdala hijack. The amygdala, the brain’s threat detection system, takes over from the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is where you do your best thinking. Planning, reasoning, problem-solving. All of that goes offline.
What remains is fight, flight, or freeze. In a work context, that looks like someone who shuts down in meetings. Who avoids difficult tasks. Who seems to be reading the same email over and over without actually processing it. Who says yes to everything but delivers on nothing.
If you respond to this by increasing the pressure, by adding more check-ins, tighter deadlines, sharper feedback, you’re feeding the cycle. The amygdala stays activated. The prefrontal cortex stays offline. Performance drops further.
Calm Before Clarity
If someone has the motivation to improve but isn’t there yet, the most effective thing you can do is lower the temperature first.
Your standards stay the same. What changes is the conditions you create so their brain can actually function again. A conversation that starts with “I see you’re struggling, and I want to help you find a way through this” lands very differently than one that starts with a list of everything that’s going wrong.
Once there’s enough safety to think clearly, you can start working on the actual performance. And the approach that works best is surprisingly simple.
Small Steps, Positive Reinforcement
Break the work down into small, measurable goals. Specific, achievable targets that can be reviewed weekly.
When someone has lost confidence in their own ability, they need early wins. Small proof that they can still do this. Every time they hit a target, acknowledge it. Positive reinforcement rewires the brain’s reward system and rebuilds the neural pathways for motivation. The neuroscience on this is clear.
As their confidence returns, you can gradually increase the complexity. The key word is gradually. You’re rebuilding someone’s relationship with their own competence. That takes time.
When It Doesn’t Work
Sometimes, despite everything, it doesn’t work. The motivation isn’t there. The role is genuinely wrong for the person. The gap between what’s needed and what’s being delivered is too wide.
In those cases, the kindest thing you can do is be honest. A clear, respectful conversation about fit is more humane than months of low expectations, growing resentment, and a Golem effect that damages both of you.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Managing underperformers is one of the most common themes in leadership coaching. And one of the most misunderstood. Most managers either avoid the conversation entirely or handle it in a way that triggers exactly the stress response that makes things worse.
For organisations where underperformance is a pattern across multiple teams, management training offers a structural approach to raise the bar. And if you’re a senior leader navigating this at a strategic level, executive coaching provides the space to think through how you shape performance culture from the top.
Curious how this could work for your situation? Plan your free introduction here. No pressure. Just an honest conversation.