We don’t always set people up to succeed

I have a question I often ask people:

Do you know what you have to do — and be — to be successful, even wildly successful, in your job?

It sounds simple. But surprisingly often, the answer is not very clear.

I once watched a highly capable graduate join a small, ambitious organisation that was genuinely proud to have recruited its first graduate. The problem was that everyone was so busy that nobody really had time to help them become useful.

There was a buddy, but the buddy was busy too. There was very little onboarding beyond the basics. The graduate was effectively let loose and expected to make themselves busy.

They wanted to contribute and prove themselves, but nobody had really explained what good looked like, what they should prioritise, who they needed to build relationships with, what they were expected to produce, or how they would know whether they were succeeding.

So they tried to work it out.

Fortunately, they had people outside work encouraging them to set up meetings, ask questions and find ways to help. But I kept wondering: what if they hadn’t?

The irony was obvious. The organisation had recruited because people were too busy — but was too busy to invest the time required to make the new recruit productive.

I don’t think this is unusual. And it certainly isn’t only a graduate problem.

Over many years of talking to people about their work, I’ve met experienced, capable people who can tell you what meetings they attend and what documents they produce, but struggle to answer more fundamental questions.

What outcome am I accountable for? What does really good performance look like? What can I control myself? Where do I depend on others? How does my work connect to what the team is trying to achieve? What should I do when I am blocked?

And there are quieter questions too:

Will I look incompetent if I ask this? Surely I should know this already. Who is safe to ask the really basic questions?

That matters. Because when the rules aren’t clear, people tend to write them themselves.

When the rules aren’t clear, people tend to write them themselves

People do not all respond to ambiguity in the same way.

The following are caricatures, of course — exaggerated versions of patterns I’ve seen people adopt when expectations are unclear and the system is hard to read. Most of us could probably recognise a little of more than one.

The Head-Down Survivor

“I come to work, do my bit well, keep my head down, and go home.”

The Head-Down Survivor may be highly capable, conscientious and reliable. They may have deep expertise and produce excellent work within a defined area.

They may also have worked out something quite sensible: what they need to deliver to stay off the radar, avoid unnecessary friction and maintain healthy boundaries around work.

The question is whether that is genuinely a healthy choice — or whether experience has taught them that broader effort is pointless, risky or unrewarded.

Over time, they can absorb a low-bar definition of success: get my piece done, don’t create problems, don’t stick my neck out.

Sometimes disengagement doesn’t look like doing less. It looks like doing one small part extremely well while quietly giving up on the whole.

At team level, that can mean harder silos, less cross-boundary problem-solving and a manager spending more time coordinating strong individual contributors than leading a genuinely connected team.

What’s valuable: deep expertise, reliability, focus and strong boundaries.
What’s at risk: disconnection from purpose, reduced curiosity and narrower contribution.
The leader’s role: respect the depth, but make clear how that expertise contributes to the whole and where broader contribution really matters.

The Anxious Overachiever

“If I work harder, longer and check it three more times, surely I’ll get it right.”

The Anxious Overachiever responds almost oppositely. They are ambitious, conscientious and determined to succeed, so when expectations are unclear they compensate with effort.

They work longer. Refine more. Second-guess themselves. Watch for signs of approval. Try to read the tea leaves of what somebody really wants.

There can be a real upside. These people often learn quickly, stretch themselves and become exceptionally capable.

But success can also become something they feel they must keep earning.

If I keep proving myself, maybe I’ll finally feel that I legitimately belong here.

Recognition can feel enormously rewarding, but if the standard itself remains unclear, the reassurance fades and the striving starts again.

Their willingness to stretch can also make them easy for an organisation to overuse. They become the person who always says yes, rescues the deadline and takes the extra piece — not necessarily because anyone is consciously exploiting them, but because the behaviour gets rewarded and repeated.

What’s valuable: drive, rapid learning, conscientiousness, ambition and willingness to stretch.
What’s at risk: endless proving, overwork, anxiety, perfectionism and burnout.
The leader’s role: make the bar visible. Clarify priorities, what good enough looks like, what to stop doing and how success will be judged. Help ambition become sustainable growth rather than endless proving.

The Silver-Tongued Operator

“I’ll make sure everyone thinks I’m across it — and someone else can sort the detail.”

The Silver-Tongued Operator gets very good at reading the informal system.

If it is unclear what genuinely good performance looks like, they learn what appears to count instead: visibility, confidence, proximity to influential people, saying the right things and being in the right conversations.

They can be socially astute, persuasive and highly confident. Those are useful capabilities.

But at the extreme, they may become better at presenting, positioning and leveraging others’ effort than at doing the substantive work themselves.

When success criteria are vague, confidence can easily be mistaken for competence and visibility for contribution.

What’s valuable: confidence, influence, relationship-building and the ability to read the room.
What’s at risk: perception overtaking substance, weak ownership and politics becoming a substitute for contribution.
The leader’s role: make ownership and contribution visible. Reward substance as well as influence and ensure confidence is matched by delivery.

None of these is necessarily a difficult or underperforming employee. They may simply be capable people adapting quite rationally to conditions that are unclear, unsupported or hard to influence.

The Head-Down Survivor may decide success means staying safe and doing enough. The Anxious Overachiever may decide success means continually getting better, stretching further and being recognised for it. The Silver-Tongued Operator may decide success means being seen as someone who belongs at the top table.

When leaders fail to define success clearly, people do not operate without a definition. They invent one.

And what the organisation loses is performance potential: capability that exists, but is not being fully harnessed, encouraged or grown.

The leader’s role in helping people thrive — and the payoff

Leaders cannot control every factor that shapes how someone experiences work. Some constraints sit elsewhere in the organisation, and some influences sit outside work altogether.

But leaders can still shape a great deal of the day-to-day environment — through clarity, support, feedback, context, development and the way they respond when someone is unsure, stretched or stuck.

This is also where some of the language of psychosocial risk becomes very practical. Role clarity, job control and support may sound technical, but underneath them are very ordinary questions:

Do I know what is expected of me? Do I understand why it matters? Do I have enough control to achieve it? Can I ask for help without being judged? Will somebody help me get better?

And if someone does not know what to do, our first assumption should not automatically be that the problem sits with the worker. Job design and leadership are two obvious places to look as well.

These conditions matter long before anybody becomes psychologically unwell. They can already be changing how people work: initiative can shrink, problem-solving can narrow, people can disconnect from purpose, or huge amounts of energy can be spent navigating the organisation rather than contributing to it.

The tragedy is that organisations recruit people for their capability and initiative, then create conditions that divert both away from where they could add the most value.

We should not have to wait until somebody becomes unwell before we care.

Shared purpose and belonging matter more than we realise — for engagement and performance

People generally want to contribute. They want to do a good job. They want to know that what they do matters, that their effort is connected to a shared purpose, and that they have a legitimate place in the team around them.

Good role clarity is therefore not just about tasks. It is about helping people understand why the work matters, what the team is trying to achieve, and how their contribution fits into the bigger picture.

That is what gives autonomy meaning. If I understand the outcome and why it matters, you do not need to prescribe every step I take to get there. You can give me room to think.

Belonging matters too. When people feel they genuinely belong, they are more likely to ask questions, admit uncertainty, seek help, contribute ideas and take sensible risks. They do not have to spend as much energy protecting their standing or continually proving that they deserve to be there.

Belonging frees up energy for contribution; shared purpose helps focus it.

A leader cannot manufacture belonging on demand. But they can make it much more likely through clear expectations, fair treatment, inclusion in the work, recognition of contribution, and a response to uncertainty or mistakes that does not make people feel their place in the team is suddenly at risk.

And people do not all need to contribute in the same way. Different people bring different strengths. What connects them is a shared understanding of purpose, role and success.

People leadership is real work

Part of the problem, I think, is that we still promote people into leadership roles because they are very good at the work they are already doing.

Then we expect them to keep doing that work — often at an even higher level — and somehow also coach, develop and grow other people.

Many have never been taught how.

So they draw on what they themselves experienced. Sometimes that was excellent. Sometimes it was terrible. And sometimes their conclusion is: Nobody showed me. I worked it out. They should too.

But a people leader is not simply a more senior worker.

A legitimate part of their role is creating the conditions in which other people can succeed: clarifying expectations, explaining context and purpose, coaching, giving feedback, developing capability, helping remove obstacles, and making it safe for someone to say:

“I actually don’t know how to do that yet.”

Good leadership also means noticing how a person is responding to the environment and helping them see the risks in that pattern.

That is not amateur diagnosis. It is developmental leadership.

Good leaders do more than manage outputs. They help people understand their own patterns, use their strengths deliberately, and avoid the predictable risks that can come with those strengths.

That is not peripheral management activity. It is part of the work.

The encouraging part

A lot of the first steps are not complicated. They do, however, require discipline.

Start with the team.

What are we actually here to achieve? What does success look like? Who owns what? Where should people have autonomy? What strengths do we have across the team? Where do we need people to connect across boundaries? What support will they need? How will they know they are progressing?

And then keep talking.

Not once at induction. Not just at annual off-site days. Regularly.

Because clarity is not something leaders announce and then assume everyone has absorbed.

We spend an enormous part of our lives at work. We can do much better than recruiting somebody, handing them a laptop, pointing vaguely towards the work and waiting to see whether they turn out to be good.

So perhaps start with the question I started with:

Do your people know what they have to do — and be — to be wildly successful here?

If the answer is unclear, that is probably a very good place to begin.