How to Stop Undermining the Very Performance You're Trying to Build
- Jul 19
- 8 min read
Written by Natasha Wallace, CEO and Executive Coach
Natasha Wallace is a former CPO and globally recognised expert in leadership and organisational performance. She helps executives and senior leaders to catalyse performance, avoid burnout and build healthy cultures using a pioneering and scientifically-backed approach.
Ask most leaders what they want from their team, and you'll hear the same words. Ownership, initiative, accountability, dependability, problem-solving. Watch what they actually do day to day, and you'll often find a string of small, well-intentioned habits quietly working against everything they just described. Here's what that pattern looks like, why it happens without anyone noticing, and what it's actually costing you.
What performance really runs on
High performance was never produced by hours or hustle. It's produced by energy, specifically the discretionary energy people choose to bring, the extra thought behind a decision, the courage to pitch an idea, the ownership that turns a task into something someone actually cares about. That energy is voluntary. Nobody can be made to bring it. They can only be invited to.
According to Gallup's ongoing State of the Global Workplace research, only around one in five employees worldwide is genuinely engaged at work, a gap now estimated to cost the global economy in the region of 10 trillion dollars a year in lost productivity. That isn't a story about laziness. It's a story about energy leaving the building long before people physically do.
Research published in Harvard Business Review, drawing on a meta analysis of 105 separate studies, found that leaders who genuinely empower their teams see markedly higher creativity, more discretionary effort, and significantly greater trust placed in them as leaders. Empowerment isn't a soft add on to performance. It's the mechanism that produces it, which is exactly why it matters so much when leaders say they're doing it and aren't.
As I explored in a previous piece on what conscious leadership requires from the future of work, the leaders who thrive through change are rarely the ones with the best mapped plans. They're the ones who understand what it costs their people, in energy, to execute those plans at all.
Empowerment in theory, not practice
I work with many well intentioned leaders. Ambitious, articulate, genuinely motivated to make a difference. They talk about building an empowered culture, about healthy leadership being role modelled from the very top, about the capable team that already has what it takes to deliver on ambitious plans. They mean it when they say they want people to take ownership and drive success.
Then the working week starts. Someone makes a decision and it gets questioned in front of the room, or quietly put on hold while more thought is gathered. Someone brings a new idea to a meeting and is met with silence, a different idea altogether, or a senior leader who simply doesn't show up to discuss it. A new way of working gets agreed on Monday and reverted to the old way by Thursday, because sticking with a plan under pressure takes a kind of courage this leader hasn't built yet. Decisions meant to sit with one person get spread across so many stakeholders that nobody, including the person meant to own it, can move without permission. The story changes depending on who they spoke to last.
None of this is done with any intention to harm. It's done by a leader who is, in that moment, worried about something going wrong or not being done the way they would have done it. But the effect on the people underneath it is the same either way.
Nine quiet ways leaders undermine performance
Here are the patterns I see most often, almost always from leaders who would be genuinely unsettled to know they were doing them.
Second guessing every decision: You hire bright, capable people and tell them you want them to take ownership. Then the moment they make a call, create something new or move a piece of work forward, you step in, with a question about their reasoning, a request for more information, or a decision quietly put on hold. The courage and energy that went into making that move in the first place gets undone in seconds. Do this once and it looks like diligence. Do it every time someone acts with initiative, and you teach your best people that initiative isn't actually safe.
Ignoring the input you sought: Asking for the team's input feels like good leadership, and it is, right up until their ideas don't show up anywhere in the finished product and nobody explains why. People notice when they've been consulted and then quietly overruled. The fix isn't to use every idea you're given. Some won't make the cut, and that's fine. It's to close the loop, go back to the people whose ideas didn't land and tell them why, so they know they were actually heard rather than simply outvoted in silence.
Sidelining real expertise: You hire someone for the depth of a specific skill or years of experience, and then rarely bring them into the conversations where that expertise would matter most. It happens quietly, a meeting they're not invited to, a decision made without checking in on the one area they know better than anyone else in the room. Beyond wasting the talent you paid for, it sends an unspoken message that their specialism isn't as valuable as you claimed when you hired them, even when they may be the most capable person in the building on that exact subject.
Going cold on good ideas: Someone brings you a genuinely good idea and you get energised about it together in the room. Then they try to follow it up, and you go quiet, meetings avoided, messages unanswered, or a different idea altogether takes its place with no mention of the first one. Whatever the reason, the effect on the person who brought it is the same. They learn that enthusiasm in the room doesn't mean anything will actually happen, and the next good idea gets kept to themselves instead.
Taking over the credit: You hand someone the lead on a piece of work, then start pulling other people in, or quietly taking over the parts that might get noticed, so the effort doesn't stay solely theirs. In trying to make sure everyone's involved, the person who did the original legwork gets crowded out of their own project, and often isn't thanked for the work that started it all. If you gave someone the lead, let the credit for that lead stay with them.
Valuing clients over people: When every decision, every conversation, every ounce of urgency is filtered through what the client or customer needs, the people actually doing the work to keep that client happy quietly get demoted in importance. It's an easy trap, the client pays the bills, so it feels logical to make them the centre of everything. But the people delivering that relationship are the lifeblood of it, and treating them as secondary erodes exactly the effort you're relying on to keep the client happy in the first place.
Withholding thanks and recognition: Someone goes well beyond what was asked, does excellent work, and might even be praised for it by a client, a peer, or someone outside the team, and the leader says nothing. Not because they don't value the work, usually because they assume it's obvious, or they simply forget. This gets worse the more senior or experienced someone is, because leaders quietly presume skilled people don't need it. Recognition costs a leader almost nothing to give and costs a team enormous amounts of energy to go without.
Believing your way is best: Some leaders genuinely struggle to see beyond their own way of doing things, which quietly casts everyone doing it differently as wrong. Scaling a team isn't about everyone converging on your method. It's about being open minded enough to let people put their own stamp on the work, even when that's a real departure from how you'd have done it yourself. The team you're trying to empower can't actually own anything if there's only ever one right way to do it, and it's always yours.
Giving title without power: You promote someone into a leadership role, hand them a title, and then don't let them lead, decisions about their own people, resourcing, how the team is organised, and how effort gets recognised all still run through you, or get slowed down because you want it done another way. Every override does real damage to the morale and motivation that leader was trying to build in their own team. If you've given someone the responsibility, the authority has to travel with it.
What ties all nine together
Every one of these moments costs the same thing, energy. Making a decision, pitching an idea or leading a piece of work draws on a finite reserve of motivation and courage. That's what gets spent every time it's second guessed, ignored or quietly taken over. Once is forgettable. Repeated often enough across a team, it produces exactly the pattern I see constantly in the coaching room, apathy first, then frustration, then a measurable drop in people's critical thinking, confidence and patience. People either stay and disengage, doing only what's asked and nothing more, or they leave, taking their energy and their potential to a leader who won't spend it for them.
Why it keeps happening unnoticed
The behaviour underneath almost all of this is rarely about the team. It's about a leader's own relationship with being wrong. Underneath the language of empowerment often sits a private, rarely examined belief that there is a right way to do this, and that the leader, or someone else in the leader's network, is the one who knows it. Every time someone else makes a move, that belief gets quietly tested, and stepping in, staying silent or changing course in response isn't a strategic choice. It's a reflex protecting the leader from the discomfort of being wrong in front of their own team.
Nobody sets out to build a culture of hesitation. Each moment feels small and justifiable on its own. It's only when you stack them up, day after day, that you can see what they add up to, the same belief level work I go into in my interview on how conscious leadership is transforming workplace culture.
Build the conditions
None of this changes with a better internal memo about empowerment, or a new value on the wall. It changes when a leader gets curious about their own reflex in the exact moment it shows up, the second guess, the silence, the last minute change of plan, and asks what belief is actually driving it. That's uncomfortable work. It's also the only kind of work that produces a team who will genuinely take ownership, because they've tested, repeatedly, that it's safe to.
Where to take this next
This is exactly the territory I explore in my talk, Hardwired to Lead Well™, which unpacks the belief systems sitting underneath high performance leadership, and the daily, often invisible acts that either build or break the workforce the future of work will actually need, people who take real ownership and deliver sustained performance, not because they're told to, but because nothing around them is quietly working against it. If you'd like to bring this talk to your organisation or explore what it uncovers for your own leadership team, get in touch.
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Read more from Natasha Wallace
Natasha Wallace, CEO and Executive Coach
Natasha Wallace is a globally recognised expert in leadership and organisational performance. An award-winning executive coach, speaker, and author of The Conscious Effect, she helps executive teams and leaders achieve sustainable success during and after periods of intense pressure, change, and growth. Creator of the Conscious Leadership Performance System™ and The Calm Leader™ methodology. Natasha delivers evidence-based insights that drive alignment, resilience, and high performance across senior leadership teams and organisations.
