A strong answer. “The one I learned most from, I got wrong first.

An engineer's output had dropped over about two months. My initial read was motivation, and I did the standard thing — clearer goals, more frequent check-ins. It did not help, and in hindsight it made things worse because it added scrutiny to someone already struggling.

What I had not done was ask a direct enough question. When I eventually did — not ‘is everything okay’ but ‘something has changed, and I would rather understand it than guess’ — it turned out they had moved onto a part of the system nobody had handed over properly, and had spent six weeks not asking for help because they thought the expectation was that they should already know it.

The fix was structural: an explicit handover, a named person to ask, and I changed how we onboard people onto unfamiliar areas so it was not dependent on someone being confident enough to admit they were lost.

What I take from it is that I now treat a sudden drop as a signal about the system or the situation until proven otherwise, rather than about the person. I have since managed someone out, and that was the right call — but I got there having genuinely ruled out the things that were mine to fix, which is what made it defensible to them and to me.”