Hey, it's Laura and Jason.
Welcome back, and thanks for being here!
This is Issue #3 of The Weekly UNLOK, where human potential meets organizational performance.
In this week’s issue, we get into why the performance problems that keep coming back usually aren't people problems, and what to look for instead.
We spoke with a leader last month who is highly capable and cares deeply about her people, but one of her best employees just resigned.
The employee had been increasingly disengaged over the past six months.
She’d stopped speaking up as much in meetings. She was getting her work done, but just enough to get by, and she passed on a stretch project she’d have jumped at a year prior.
"I thought she was just going through something personal" the leader told us, until the exit interview gave the real reason.
It wasn’t personal; it was organizational.
This is a pattern we’ve seen on repeat throughout our careers.
When a person’s performance breaks down, the instinct is to look at them as the problem.
What are they doing wrong? Don’t they have what it takes? Are they just not in this?
That’s the easy route, though. The harder path is to look at the environment.
Almost every time that’s where the real answer lies, or at least a large part of it.
Look at it this way… when the vegetables in your garden aren’t growing, are they bad vegetables?
Or should we look at the conditions first? Good soil, adequate sunlight, and regular watering?
If you replace the vegetables without honestly looking at the environment, you’re destined for the same cycle.
The same goes for organizations.
We get busy, the pressure is on, and suddenly we’re missing the basics that create the environment for real results.
Decades of behavioral science research point to three fundamental psychological needs that create the foundation for success.
Belonging, Authority, and Mastery.
This is the framework through which we look at everything.
When the operating environment meets them, people perform at their best.
When it undermines them, people disengage, hesitate, escalate decisions upward, and burn out.
Once you know what to look for, you’ll start seeing what’s possible.
BELONGING
Do people feel connected to the mission, to each other, and safe enough to say what they see?
Belonging has three layers, and all three have to be present.
The first is Mission & Values Alignment.
People need to understand why the organization exists and how their work connects to it.
Without that, they just show up and do tasks. They execute, but don’t fully commit.
The second is Connection.
Strong teams don’t happen by accident, they’re intentionally created and nurtured.
If collaboration depends entirely on the right people happening to like each other, that’s not culture, that's luck.
The third layer is a big one… One that most leaders talk about, but few actually have: Safety.
Even in a team with clear mission and values alignment, and healthy connection... if being honest comes with a cost, then people learn fast.
They learn to filter, tell you what you want to hear. Problems surface later, ideas get held back, and mistakes are covered up.
If you’ve ever felt like you’re only getting part of the picture from your team, you probably are.
That’s Belonging breaking down.
You’re hearing it when people say:
- “I feel like I’m the only one who cares about what we’re doing.”
- “We keep dropping the ball on handoffs. Nobody’s sure whose job it is to pick it up.”
- “By the time I hear about a problem, it’s already a crisis.”
- “Something’s off with [name]. I can’t put my finger on it.”
Pay special attention to that last one. By the time disengagement shows up, it’s been building for months.
People don’t stop giving their best all at once. They stop in layers. Belonging is what holds those layers together.
AUTHORITY
Do people have clear ownership, the context to act, and real permission to do their best work?
Most leaders think they’ve given authority, but in fact they’ve only given accountability.
They’re not the same.
Accountability is important, but so is the authority that comes with it.
Authority has three parts.
The first is Clarity.
Who owns which decisions? When should they escalate, and to whom? And do they have the real authority to act on the decisions they own?
The second part is Context.
Giving someone ownership without giving them the judgment tools to use it is like handing someone the wheel without telling them where they’re going.
Too often we give people responsibility without the decision principles that let them act with confidence.
The third part of Authority is Execution Freedom.
Leaders often believe they’ve given their team real latitude, but their teams experience something different.
The micromanagement that creates hesitation. The check-in that sounds like doubt. The moment the leader jumps in with the answer before anyone else gets a chance to find theirs.
You might know the right call, but let them try first. The answer they arrive at might surprise you.
And the solution you build together will almost always be better than the one you handed down.
Accountability without authority is just liability.
You’re hearing this when people say:
- “Everything comes to me. I can’t get out of the weeds.”
- “They make poor judgment calls.” (Often: they’ve never been given the context to make good ones.)
- “I tend to check-in before I act. Better to ask than to assume.”
- “They say I can, but in practice it doesn’t really feel that way.”
If your best people are checking before they act, the environment never showed them it was safe to go.
MASTERY
Do people know what good looks like, consistently get honest feedback, and see a real path to growth?
Working hard in the dark is exhausting, and usually comes with nasty surprises.
Maybe you’ve experienced this yourself.
Where the standard lived in a leader’s head but was inconsistent and rarely made it into conversations.
Mastery has three components.
The first is Clear Standards.
Whether people know what excellent specifically looks like, and receive regular and productive feedback.
In the absence of clear standards, people feel evaluated against moving targets and expectations they can’t fully see.
Then quality becomes inconsistent between people, and gets named as a skills gap. Usually its a clear standards gap.
The second is Support.
Do people have what they need to do the work well? Tools, training, access, time.
A manager who removes obstacles instead of adding them.
Someone in their corner who invests in their growth, not just their output.
This is the component that gets cut first when things get busy.
The third and final component of Mastery is the one that drives retention: Progression.
Can people see where they’re headed? A credible, visible path to growth.
A real picture of what excellent work here leads to, over the next year or two.
High performers don’t need certainty, but they do need to believe the work compounds.
When they can’t see it, they look elsewhere, and the resignation letter follows.
You’re hearing this when people say:
- “It depends on who does it.”
- “People found out they were behind. It was a surprise to them.”
- “We do annual reviews. Beyond that, feedback is pretty informal.”
- “I’m worried I’m going to lose [name]. I just don’t know what to offer them.”
People don't disengage because the work is hard, they disengage because they can't see themselves getting better at it.
We keep coming back to one conviction, across everything we’ve built and everything we’ve seen…
The most competitive organizations of the next decade won’t be the ones that hired the most talented people, or implemented the best AI.
They’ll be the ones who built the conditions for their human talent to truly do what it’s capable of, in partnership with the best tech.
The future of work is human. We don’t believe that’s a new idea, or a soft idea, but we believe it’s the most strategic bet that leaders can make right now.
With belief in our collective rise, one person at a time,
Laura & Jason
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BEFORE YOU GO: HOW WE CAN HELP
FOR COMPANIES: If more than one of these problems sounds familiar, you're not looking at a people problem, you’re looking at a design problem. The UNLOK Self-Assessment covers all three pillars and takes about ten minutes. By the end, you'll know exactly where your organization is getting in its own way [Take the free self-assessment →]
FOR INDIVIDUALS: If you’re looking for one-on-one support, Laura works with a small number of people personally. Book an activation session and let’s get into it.