Sample frameDay 114·Leadership · Diagnosis

Morning. You've coached this person for months. Coaching can't reach what is actually wrong.

Leadership.

Can't, or Won't

5 min read·Apply by lunch

The question

Put Mager's question to yourself about the person whose performance you have given up on: if their life depended on doing this work properly tomorrow, could they do it? If the honest answer is yes, then every hour of coaching you have spent went into a gap that was never there. What needs examining is what happens around here to somebody who gets this right.

The idea

Robert F. Mager was an American psychologist whose Preparing Objectives for Programmed Instruction (1962), later retitled Preparing Instructional Objectives, reshaped how a generation designed training. Eight years later he wrote the book that undoes most of it. Analyzing Performance Problems, written with Peter Pipe (Fearon, 1970), carries the subtitle 'or, You Really Oughta Wanna' — the sentence a manager mutters about someone who could do the job and doesn't. Mager and Pipe start from a performance discrepancy, the gap between what somebody does and what you want them to do, and put one sorting question in front of every response: could they do it if their life depended on it? If the answer is no, it is a skill deficiency, answered with practice, feedback, a smaller task or a different person. If the answer is yes, no amount of training will move it, because the cause sits in the environment you built: doing it right is punished, doing it wrong is rewarded, or doing it right leads to nothing at all. The trap is training as avoidance: it looks like investment in the person, it requires no courage from you, and it postpones the conversation about consequences for another quarter.

The framework

01
The diagnosis starts with two observable lines.
Before anything else, put two lines on paper: what the person actually does, and what you want them to do instead. Both have to be observable, a thing a stranger could watch happening. Not proactive enough, lacks ownership, attitude problem — those are verdicts wearing the costume of a description, and you can't diagnose a verdict. Then ask what it costs while the gap stays open. If the answer is that nothing happens, you are not holding a performance problem; you are holding a preference, and the person has read that correctly.
02
Could they do it if their life depended on it?
Mager's test is deliberately extreme, and the extremity is the point: it strips willingness out of the question and leaves capability standing on its own. If the answer is genuinely no, you have a skill deficiency, and one more question narrows it — have they ever done this well? Someone who once did and no longer does needs practice and feedback rather than a course. Someone who never has needs teaching, or a smaller version of the task. Everything after this depends on answering honestly, and no is the kinder finding, which is exactly why it gets chosen.
03
When capability is not the issue, put your system on trial.
Stop examining the person and examine what your system does when they perform. Ask three things. Is doing it right punished — does whoever clears the queue fastest simply receive more of the queue? Is doing it wrong rewarded — does the missed deadline get rescued at the last minute by someone senior? And does doing it right lead to anything at all, or do excellent work and adequate work land in exactly the same silence? Then look for plain obstacles: a missing approval, a system nobody gave them access to, a rule that makes the right behaviour slower.
04
One response, matched to one cause.
A skill deficiency gets practice, feedback, a simplified task, or in the end a different person in the seat. A consequence problem gets the consequence changed: the reward moved, the rescue withdrawn, the good work noticed publicly and close to when it happened. An obstacle gets deleted, and deleting it is your job rather than theirs. The waste sits entirely in the mismatch — training aimed at a consequence problem teaches the person that you have misread them, and a hard conversation aimed at a genuine skill gap teaches them that trying harder was never the missing piece. Say which one you have concluded, so they can argue with it.

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