The Crash That Wasn't a Competency Problem

In short: When a proven performer's numbers collapse, the presenting complaint — workload, circumstances, health — is often a smokescreen. Ask the state question before the competency question, and make the reset deliberate: a planned pause beats months of unproductive presence.

The situation

Like Case File #4, this one turns the camera on our own team — because the standard we ask of clients has to survive contact with our own people first.

A consultant on our team joined us and had a good first year. By year two he was supervising a team of five to seven, running HR for up to twenty companies. For a client hiring salespeople in volume, he was putting forward 8 candidates to interview for every 80 CVs he processed. He was, by any measure we track, a strong performer on a rising line.

He also hired well. One of his picks was a very junior staff member — previously a matchmaker by profession — and he handed her the sales hiring desk. She ran it successfully.

What was really going on

When she decided to leave, he took the desk back over — and couldn't deliver. Something a junior hire had done well, he could no longer do, and it unsettled him deeply.

He started saying he was overworked. We halved his portfolio — and told him plainly: it's not the amount of work. Take away half your work and the pressure to perform only increases. What people believe is affecting them and what is truly affecting their performance are often two different things, and telling them apart takes a practiced eye. The account load was never the real issue — our model is built so one senior person can track a hundred client accounts by delegating downwards to teams. The "overworked" objection was a smokescreen for the self-doubt he had buried after he couldn't deliver what a junior had delivered.

Months later he was in a funk: performance gone, then COVID, bronchitis, and a dental issue that caused hiccups and two weeks of lost sleep. He crashed out. In recruitment, when you don't nail down your spirit, your integrity, your perspective about people, you can crash — and it is not a competency issue. Because our approach is statistical, it shows in the numbers immediately.

That same year he had also taken two long holidays, and was unproductive anyway. Rest alone wasn't the answer — the reset had to be deliberate.

What we did

First, we separated the competency question from the state question — explicitly, and to his face. This was never about whether he could do the job. He had supervised the desk, hired for it, and watched a junior succeed at it using his own process. Treating a state problem as a competency problem would have started a managed decline: performance plans, reduced confidence, a resignation that "proves" the wrong diagnosis.

Then we prescribed a deliberate pause, not an escape. Two weeks of unpaid leave at the end of the year — framed not as time off to recover from work, but as a planned reset with a return date and a person coming back, not someone quietly fading out. The holidays hadn't worked because a holiday is an escape; a deliberate pause is a decision.

The outcome

He came back refreshed and reset — and went on to have two more strong years. Same person, same desk, same model. The variable that changed was never his capability; it was his state, and the fact that the reset was deliberate rather than accidental.

This is what SME HR actually looks like

In an SME, one person's state is the company's delivery capacity — there is no bench, no redeployment pool, no hiding a bad quarter behind a big team's average. When a proven performer's numbers fall off, the presenting complaint — workload, circumstances, health — is often a smokescreen, and the owner needs the practiced eye to see past it, or someone who brings that eye into the room.

And there is a statistical truth underneath: track the numbers weekly and state problems show up before people can voice them. By the time someone says "I'm overworked", the metrics have usually been telling the real story for months. The dashboard doesn't replace the conversation — but it tells you when to have it, and what it's really about.

The takeaway

When a good person's performance collapses, ask the state question before the competency question — and watch for the smokescreen objection that points away from the real wound. Then make the reset deliberate: a planned pause beats months of unproductive presence, and it beats a performance plan aimed at the wrong diagnosis. Mastery isn't never crashing. It's recognising the trouble early, saying it out loud, and turning around faster each time.

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