Exposing the 'Failing Up' Phenomenon: How to Surface and Address Underperformance
Aug 5, 2025
There’s always one.
The Person Who Fails Up
The person who joins check-ins with confident updates, drops the right buzzwords, maybe even builds their value through hallway influence. But when things fall apart, they’re nowhere near the problem, or the fix.
Everyone knows they’re under-delivering. The team knows. Leadership suspects. Yet months pass, and they’re still around — still failing up.
The cost isn’t just resentment. It’s time lost, trust broken with high-performers, and often, the quiet beginning of top talent walking out.
The Mistake: Hoping Underperformance Will Sort Itself Out
In unscripted post, everyone’s overloaded. You’re juggling deliverables, network notes, clearance issues, last-minute changes. So when someone falls short, it’s easy to rationalize:
“No one’s at their best right now.”
“Maybe they’re just on the wrong series.”
“They’re tight with the EP, we’ll just deal.”
We assume it’ll fix itself. That patterns will reveal the truth over time.
But they already have.
The issue isn’t identifying underperformance. It’s having no structured, shared way to surface it early and objectively — without turning your culture into a blame game.
What We Built: A System That Surfaces Performance Honestly and Early
We wanted to make it easier to see real contribution, and harder to hide behind confidence without delivery. We did this by building visibility into the systems themselves. Here’s how:
✅ Task Lists and Ticket Flows That Highlight Gaps
We moved every post task into a ticketing system. Each ticket captured the request, owner, action taken, and time to completion.
This shift created instant transparency:
You could see who was consistently closing out work and who wasn’t
You could spot the person with no active tasks in their queue
You could identify slowdowns by person, project, or handoff type
This wasn’t for micromanagement — it was clarity. If someone claimed to be slammed but hadn’t touched a task in three days, the data pointed to it. If a team member was getting bogged down, it showed in completion timelines.
No drama. Just signal.
🗓️ Biweekly Pattern Reviews (By Role, Not Person)
Every other Friday, department leads reviewed pattern trends — not with names, but with roles:
Are deliverables coming in clean and on time?
Are there frequent revisits or patch-ups?
Is this function a point of friction or flow?
This helped shape performance conversations anchored in data, not gut feelings. If every edit that went through one AE needed rescue, or one producer’s calendars caused repeated bottlenecks, it came into focus quickly.
This informed one-on-ones and coaching, not public callouts.
🧭 Logged Hand-Offs That Create a Paper Trail
Major handoffs — turnovers, reassignments, creative checkpoints — were tracked inside the ticket chain. Not in a spreadsheet, just in the flow of work:
Who got the task
What the handoff was
What got done and when
If something went wrong repeatedly at a certain handoff point, we had the full context. This turned guessing into actual visibility.
What Changed: Accountability Without Tension
The biggest shift? Conversations got easier. Not because we got tougher, but because the data did the heavy lifting.
High-performers could see their work recognized and not diluted by under-performers skating by
Managers had real signals to open supportive coaching conversations
Underperformers could course-correct with feedback grounded in evidence
The culture didn’t get colder. It got clearer.
The Result: Retention of Your Best People
The top performers didn’t leave. They stopped feeling like they had to carry others in silence. They weren’t frustrated by the gap between effort and reward.
People who’d previously flown under the radar either stepped up or moved on. Without the invisibility cloak of vague check-ins and no task data, you either showed your contribution or didn’t.
And that visibility changed everything.
If You’ve Been Silently Frustrated, You’re Not Alone
Underperformance isn’t hard to spot — it’s just hard to name without tools.
But you don’t need HR escalations or public shaming. You need structure that surfaces the truth, so the right conversations happen early and constructively.
In post, the real win isn’t confrontation. It’s clarity. This system gave us that.
No extra meetings. No drama. Just honest work, honestly tracked.