Removing Roadblocks for High Performance
Most performance problems get treated as one thing, effort or attitude, when they're actually a mix of belief, skill, structure and relationship, and this sorts which is which before you try to fix it.
Follow the line from naming a roadblock through sorting it into one of four categories to a fix with a named owner.
Reach for this when…
- Someone is capable but consistently underperforming and nobody can say why.
- You've tried motivating a team and it hasn't moved the numbers.
- A blocker keeps getting labelled attitude without anyone checking if that's true.
How to run it
- Introduce roadblocks as internal or systemic barriers to performance.
- Map the top three roadblocks, for a person or a team.
- Categorise each: belief, skill gap, structural barrier, or relationship issue.
- Pick one specific action to start removing each roadblock.
- Agree support and accountability for following through.
A worked example
Situation. Salim Al-Balushi managed a five-person customer support desk for an online electronics retailer in Muscat, Oman, and had one strong agent, Mariam, whose resolution times had been slipping for months.
Applied. Working through the categorisation, they found the real roadblock wasn't skill or effort, it was structural: Mariam had no authority to approve refunds over a small threshold and was escalating everything upward.
Result. They raised her approval limit and agreed a weekly check-in instead. Her resolution times returned to the team's best within a month, and Salim stopped assuming the problem was attitude.
The catch
The four categories overlap in practice, a structural barrier left too long becomes a belief, and it's tempting to reach for skill gap because it's the most comfortable one to name in front of the person. It diagnoses well but doesn't remove anything by itself; that still depends on the manager acting on what's found.
If every roadblock on your list turns out to be a skill gap, check whether you're avoiding the structural ones.
Origin: Various (no single originator)