The firm has twelve people. The second-most-senior person has been there six years. She runs client relationships, attends management meetings, and signs off on work going out the door.
She is coasting.
The owner knows this. Has known it for eighteen months. The pace has dropped. The client feedback has softened. The people below her are picking up the slack and saying nothing, because she outranks them, and the owner hasn’t moved.
The owner keeps waiting for something to make the conversation easier: a bad quarter, a client complaint, a natural moment.
The moment does not arrive. The problem compounds instead.
In the meantime, the owner starts redirecting work. Takes back decisions that should sit in her lane. Steps into client meetings without saying why. The firm keeps functioning. The owner’s week quietly reshapes itself around a problem they haven’t dealt with. Nobody says anything.
Pattern: Carried Performance
Carried Performance is when a senior person’s output falls below what the role requires, and the owner absorbs the shortfall rather than deals with it. The coasting is visible. The conversation is not happening. The owner is compensating; redirecting work, smoothing over client concerns, quietly adjusting what gets delegated.
The business continues to function. The problem continues to grow.
This is not a difficult employee situation. It is a decision the owner has not made.
Analysis
Recognition. The owner registers the drop. Output thins, pace slows, initiative stops. The rationalisation starts: she’s had a hard year, the market is soft, she’ll reset after the busy period.
Accommodation. Work gets quietly redirected. The owner starts making decisions that belong in her lane. Staff notice. Nobody says anything.
Compression. The owner has less room. Time spent covering the gap is time not spent on the work that only the owner can do. The firm loses on both ends.
Corrosion. The people below her watch what happens at the top and adjust accordingly. Some of them ease off. The owner has not done anything about the senior person, so why would anything be expected of them.
Escalation. A client relationship softens enough to become a real commercial risk. A staff member below her leaves. Not loudly, just gone. A competing offer surfaces. The owner is now dealing with three problems instead of one, all of which grew from a conversation that should have happened a year ago.
By the time external help is sought, the owner has spent twelve to eighteen months making a harder problem out of a straightforward one.
Why It Matters
A senior person coasting at $150,000 a year is not a $150,000 problem. It is the owner’s time, diverted. The people below her who watch what’s tolerated at the top and ease off accordingly. The clients who sense something has shifted and start testing whether the relationship still holds. The decisions that slow or stop because no one owns them.
The cost of the silence is higher than the cost of the conversation. It never appears on a P&L, which is part of why owners wait.
Write down what the role requires before you open the conversation. Put what’s agreed in writing the same day.