When demanding results is no longer enough
Imagine a team ending yet another week below target.
The indicator shows a gap. The deadline has been missed. Productivity is below plan. The manager gathers the team, reinforces the importance of results, calls for greater commitment, and demands that the situation be corrected.
The following week, the problem remains.
The demand may well have been legitimate. But did leadership understand what was preventing delivery?
That question captures an important distinction between managing indicators and leading people.
Targets are necessary. Indicators help us understand performance. People must assume their responsibilities, and results need to be monitored.
The problem begins when management merely points out the distance between actual and expected performance without investigating what must happen to close that gap.
An organization needs both.
The indicator reveals the gap. Leadership must understand its causes.
When something is not delivered as expected, several explanations are possible.
An employee may not fully understand the process. They may lack a necessary skill. They may be working with incomplete information, unsuitable equipment, or conflicting priorities.
There may also be poor coordination across departments, a pending decision, or a distribution of responsibilities that does not work in practice.
And, of course, some situations require a change in behavior, greater discipline, or fulfillment of commitments already made.
These causes are not equivalent. They should not receive identical responses.
A skill gap calls for development.
A process failure calls for process improvement.
A resource constraint calls for a management decision.
A coordination problem calls for cross-functional action.
And a broken commitment, when the conditions for delivery were in place, calls for accountability.
The leader's role is to distinguish among these situations before deciding how to act.
This does not mean tolerating inadequate results. It means taking responsibility for choosing actions that can address their underlying causes.
Leadership's influence goes beyond personal impressions
The relationship among leadership, motivation, and performance has been studied for decades.
In an analysis published in 2015, Gallup estimated that managers accounted for as much as 70% of the variation in employee engagement across business units. This estimate does not mean that a manager single-handedly controls everyone's performance, but it underscores the importance of day-to-day leadership.
A meta-analysis by Slemp and colleagues (2018), covering 72 studies, also found a positive association between leader autonomy support and employees' autonomous motivation.
This relationship helps explain why delegation should not simply mean handing over tasks.
Autonomy requires clarity about what must be delivered, the knowledge needed to make decisions, defined boundaries, and access to necessary resources.
Without those conditions, what looks like delegation may simply be the transfer of responsibility without the corresponding support.
Amy Edmondson's research (1999) also informs this discussion by linking psychological safety with team learning.
When employees can acknowledge difficulties, ask questions, and raise concerns without fear of humiliation, opportunities to detect failures and learn from them increase.
That does not mean eliminating accountability or accepting any behavior. It means recognizing that organizational learning depends, among other factors, on the quality of interactions among people.
These studies offer relevant foundations, but they cannot replace a diagnosis of each organization. Context, structure, processes, skills, and resources still matter.
The leader as a steward of the daily employee experience
In my book People: Development with Intentionality (Pessoas: Desenvolvimento com Intencionalidade), I introduce the concept of the Leader as Steward of the Daily Experience.
The idea comes from an understanding developed throughout my professional career: a person's experience within an organization is not shaped solely by Human Resources policies or statements made by senior executives.
It is also shaped by everyday interactions with the person leading their work.
This is where priorities acquire meaning, questions are answered, obstacles become visible, performance is reviewed, and opportunities for development can be identified.
That is why I propose three practices that help turn the intention to develop people into a leadership discipline:
• Weekly alignment.
• Individual development conversations.
• Identifying and removing obstacles.
These routines have distinct purposes, but share one essential element: feedback as a mechanism for learning and continuous improvement.
Feedback as the connecting element of leadership routines
Feedback is often associated with an individual conversation in which a leader recognizes a contribution, identifies an area for improvement, or guides an employee's development.
That dimension matters, but it is not the only application of feedback in management.
A team also needs information about its collective performance, an understanding of the outcomes of its decisions, and opportunities to improve how it works.
Likewise, leaders need information about the conditions they provide for their teams to perform.
We can therefore identify three complementary dimensions:
Collective feedback: allows the team to assess deliveries, working practices, collaboration, and shared outcomes.
Individual feedback: provides guidance on behaviors, capabilities, contributions, and development commitments.
Upward feedback: allows employees to share their perceptions of priorities, decisions, obstacles, and working conditions that leadership needs to reconsider.
These dimensions are not isolated compartments. They can reinforce one another in daily work, provided their different purposes are respected.
An individual difficulty need not be exposed publicly for a team to learn from a process problem. Similarly, a collective failure should not automatically be blamed on one person.
Not every status meeting is an effective feedback routine
A meeting that simply communicates targets, displays indicators, and assigns new demands may serve a monitoring purpose.
But it does not necessarily produce learning.
For a review to work as an effective feedback routine, it must connect expectations, actual outcomes, the reasons identified, and the decisions that follow.
A particularly useful sequence is:
1. Observe: revisit facts, deliveries, indicators, and relevant events.
2. Understand: discuss what worked, what did not, and the factors that influenced the outcome.
3. Decide: establish corrections, support, responsibilities, and review criteria.
4. Verify: return to the commitments made and assess whether the changes produced the intended effects.
The first three stages take place during the routine. The fourth shows whether it led to real consequences.
That is where feedback and planning connect: information about what happened informs decisions about what comes next.
Feedback looks at experience; planning uses that learning to guide the next action.
Feedback must also be delivered thoughtfully
Research by Kluger and DeNisi (1996), which synthesized hundreds of effects from feedback interventions, reached an important conclusion: although the average effect was positive, a substantial share of the interventions studied was associated with poorer performance.
The conclusion is not that we should indiscriminately give less feedback.
It is that how feedback directs attention matters.
When a conversation focuses on judgments about a person rather than useful information for understanding and improving the task, it can lose its effectiveness.
A meta-analysis by Tannenbaum and Cerasoli (2013) on structured reviews of individual and team experiences also found favorable outcomes from appropriately conducted debriefings.
Such reviews organize reflection, discussion, and action-setting after an activity or period of work.
These findings do not guarantee that every weekly meeting will improve productivity. They do show that structured reflection on experience has a sound foundation as a learning practice.
In everyday management, this requires clarity, observable facts, listening, and a commitment to follow-through.
The three Leader-Steward routines in practice
1. Weekly alignment: collective feedback on priorities, delivery, and learning
A weekly meeting does not need to become a lengthy presentation of indicators.
It can be built around five questions:
• What did we commit to delivering?
• What did we actually deliver?
• What worked well and should be maintained?
• What made collective performance more difficult?
• What do we need to decide or do differently?
This approach allows the team to compare expectations and outcomes, identify causes, and build commitments.
Collective feedback should also recognize contributions and good practices rather than focusing exclusively on gaps.
A solution found by one employee may help others. A communication failure between departments may reveal an opportunity to standardize a practice. A successful delivery may point to an approach worth incorporating into everyday work.
But there is an indispensable safeguard: the meeting must not become a courtroom for judging individual performance.
It is legitimate to assign owners to actions, require commitments to be met, and clarify responsibilities. That differs from embarrassing someone in public or assigning blame before the facts are understood.
Weekly alignment should focus primarily on how work is functioning and on the team's commitments.
At the end, every action needs an owner, a deadline, and a criterion for verification.
At the next meeting, the cycle is completed: the team revisits the decisions and checks whether progress occurred.
The quality of the routine is not determined by the number of indicators displayed, but by the learning and decisions it produces.
2. Individual conversations: feedback focused on development
Not every difficulty emerges in team meetings.
Some involve specific capabilities, uncertainty about a new responsibility, behaviors that need adjustment, or career aspirations deserving guidance.
This is where individual conversations become important.
A leader can acknowledge a meaningful contribution, discuss the execution of an activity, clarify expectations, and agree on development commitments with the employee.
In my book People: The Art of Attracting, Developing, and Closing Cycles with Excellence (Pessoas: A Arte de Atrair, Desenvolver e Encerrar Ciclos com Excelência), I discuss feedback as part of an ongoing development process, not as an event confined to a formal performance review.
A constructive conversation can follow a simple structure:
• Describe the situation and the observable facts.
• Explain their impact on the work.
• Listen to the employee's perspective.
• Identify what should be maintained or adjusted.
• Agree on an action and follow-up commitment.
The message should be clear, and the approach respectful.
This does not mean softening important issues until they lose their meaning.
Nor does it mean using candor as an excuse to disrespect people.
Individual feedback is particularly valuable when it helps employees understand not only what must change, but also how to develop the conditions needed to make that change.
And it need not occur only when something goes wrong.
Recognizing specific contributions and explaining why they mattered also helps consolidate important practices.
3. Removing obstacles: the feedback leaders need to receive
The third routine is less commonly associated with feedback, but deserves attention.
When a team reports that an activity depends on an approval, that a process creates rework, or that conflicting priorities make delivery impossible, it provides leadership with relevant information about how management is functioning.
This is not necessarily an assessment of the manager's behavior. It is, first and foremost, information about the conditions for execution.
Leadership needs to be able to receive it.
If a manager only asks why a target was missed, they may never learn about the problems they themselves need to address.
More useful questions include:
• What is making execution difficult?
• Which decision is still pending?
• Where are we losing time or producing rework?
• Are there conflicting priorities?
• What support depends on me or another department?
The quality of this routine does not lie in the leader personally solving every problem.
It lies in identifying which obstacles require guidance, which the team can resolve independently, and which require coordination or management decisions.
One distinction is also necessary: listening to a problem does not mean automatically accepting the interpretation offered.
The account must be understood, checked against the facts, and examined in the context of the process.
Sometimes leadership will identify management shortcomings. At other times, the need will be for development, alignment, or accountability among employees themselves.
What matters is not preventing this information from reaching the decision-making process.
Developing autonomy does not mean leaving a team alone with obstacles it has no authority to remove.
An example: when a delay does not begin in execution
Consider a hypothetical situation.
An operations team experiences recurring delays. Its on-time delivery indicator is below target, and pressure on employees grows.
At the weekly meeting, the manager presents the results and reinforces the need to improve deliveries.
If the meeting ends there, the demand will have been repeated, but the problem may remain unexplained.
By expanding the session into structured collective feedback, the team brings forward facts that need to be investigated.
Some work orders arrive incomplete, requiring questions and corrections before execution can begin.
Employees try to compensate with extra effort. Sometimes they manage to deliver. In other cases, delays accumulate.
On the surface, this is a productivity problem. But the investigation also reveals a failure at the interface between departments.
Leadership then organizes a set of actions:
1. Measure the frequency and impact of incomplete work orders.
2. Bring the departments involved together to understand the workflow.
3. Establish minimum quality criteria for incoming information.
4. Adjust responsibilities and guide employees.
5. Monitor whether the changes reduce delays and rework.
At the next meeting, the outcomes of those actions return to the agenda.
If the number of incomplete orders falls but delays persist, other causes must be investigated.
If indicators improve, it is important to check whether the change actually contributed or whether other factors influenced the outcome.
In this way, the team stops using reviews solely to receive demands and also uses them to guide evidence-based decisions.
Accountability remains. The difference is that it is now connected to a more complete process of understanding and correction.
This is not an actual case from Power 4P. It illustrates how a difficulty initially attributed to people may also involve processes and organizational interfaces.
Developing capability must also produce evidence
There is another risk in people management: introducing well-intentioned practices without checking whether they help the work evolve.
An organization may conduct training sessions, meetings, individual conversations, and feedback sessions without necessarily developing the capabilities it needs.
That is why people development also requires follow-up.
A few questions help:
Is the team better prepared to make decisions?
Can employees now resolve situations that previously depended on the manager? Are the boundaries of autonomy clear?
Are problems being identified earlier?
Does the team communicate gaps, risks, and requests for support before they turn into larger incidents?
Have deliveries improved consistently?
Do quality, deadline, rework, and productivity indicators evolve in ways consistent with the actions taken?
Has collaboration across departments become stronger?
Do teams understand the consequences of their decisions for other parts of the organization?
Are commitments made during feedback being followed up?
Are collective decisions revisited? Are individual development plans showing observable progress? Are identified barriers being addressed?
Is learning becoming part of the routine?
Do improvements last after a training course, campaign, or one-off intervention ends?
No single indicator answers all these questions.
Monitoring needs to combine operating results, decision quality, capability development, and actual conditions for execution.
The frequency of feedback, on its own, does not demonstrate its quality.
A team can hold many meetings and learn little from them.
The 6Es as a leadership discipline
Power 4P's 6E methodology can also guide this work.
Its application is not limited to process mapping or process improvement. The six movements help structure decisions across the different dimensions of management.
SEE (ENXERGAR): observe performance, people, and actual working conditions without jumping to conclusions.
UNDERSTAND (ENTENDER): investigate the causes of gaps, distinguishing capability, process, resources, priorities, and behavior.
CHOOSE (ESCOLHER): select interventions using clear criteria, considering urgency, impact, feasibility, and responsibility.
EXECUTE (EXECUTAR): guide, develop, remove obstacles, adjust processes, and implement decisions.
EVIDENCE (EVIDENCIAR): check whether deliveries, team functioning, and individual capability have improved.
EVOLVE (EVOLUIR): incorporate learning, review practices, and expand autonomy responsibly.
Feedback contributes to this sequence by making information about work visible, helping people understand outcomes, and guiding decisions that must subsequently be verified.
It does not replace management. It is a mechanism that feeds it.
This approach also reinforces the integration of Power 4P's four pillars: People, Processes, Products/Services, and Profitability.
Leadership works directly with people, but its decisions must consider the processes that sustain work, the quality of what is delivered, and the consequences for business sustainability.
Developing people is not separate from management. It is part of it.
Leaders also need the conditions to lead
It would be inconsistent to argue that leaders must create the conditions for their teams to work while ignoring the conditions provided to leaders themselves.
An organization cannot demand continuous people development if its managers lack the time, autonomy, resources, or preparation needed to fulfill that responsibility.
Support from senior management and People teams is essential.
Organizations must set achievable priorities, develop their managers, provide monitoring tools, and allow decisions consistent with the responsibilities assigned.
It is also necessary to recognize that feedback does not flow only between manager and direct report.
People teams can support manager development, contribute methodologies for learning, and help interpret issues that go beyond the capability of a single team.
Senior management, in turn, must demonstrate through its decisions that developing capabilities and improving working conditions are organizational responsibilities.
Direct leaders greatly influence the team's experience. But that influence operates within an organizational structure.
Responsibility is shared, even though the roles differ.
Demanding results and developing people are part of the same responsibility
My understanding of leadership began to take shape long before I organized these ideas into books and methodologies.
Throughout my career, including my industrial experience at Samsung SDI between 2004 and 2006, I had important opportunities to deepen my understanding of team development. Leadership training led by Cristiane Marassi helped me mature this perspective.
Over the years, I came to see that leadership quality cannot be judged solely by the ability to demand delivery.
It is also expressed in the ability to guide, develop, make difficult decisions, remove obstacles, and prepare people to take on increasingly significant responsibilities.
Along that journey, feedback came to mean something broader than an occasional conversation about performance.
It is present when a team examines its results, when an employee receives guidance to grow, and when leadership needs to revisit its own decisions in response to reported difficulties.
This does not diminish the importance of targets. On the contrary, it broadens responsibility for the paths used to achieve them.
After all, a team that permanently depends on its leader to understand problems, make decisions, and correct every gap still has important development ahead.
One of leadership's most valuable outcomes is seeing people understand their work better, collaborate with other departments, and resolve situations that once required constant intervention.
Not because the leader has become unnecessary, but because they have fulfilled a fundamental part of their role: developing the collective capability to deliver and evolve.
A leader's role goes beyond demanding results.
It also includes helping build the conditions that make those results possible.
Perhaps one of the most important questions any manager can ask is:
References and further reading
Books by Caê Gomes
• GOMES, Caê. “Pessoas: Desenvolvimento com Intencionalidade” [People: Development with Intentionality]. Power 4P, 2025. Chapter 7 — The Leader as Steward of the Daily Experience; Chapter 4 — The Conversation That Builds.
• GOMES, Caê. “Pessoas: A Arte de Atrair, Desenvolver e Encerrar Ciclos com Excelência” [People: The Art of Attracting, Developing, and Closing Cycles with Excellence]. Power 4P, 2025. Chapter 3 — Developing with Intentionality.
Scientific and management references
• GALLUP. Managers Account for 70% of Variance in Employee Engagement (https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/182792/managers-account-variance.aspx). 2015.
• SLEMP, G. R., et al. Leader Autonomy Support in the Workplace: A Meta-Analytic Review (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-018-9698-y). “Motivation and Emotion”, 2018.
• EDMONDSON, A. Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams (https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999). “Administrative Science Quarterly”, 1999.
• KLUGER, A. N.; DeNISI, A. The Effects of Feedback Interventions on Performance (https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.119.2.254). “Psychological Bulletin”, 1996.
• TANNENBAUM, S. I.; CERASOLI, C. P. Do Team and Individual Debriefs Enhance Performance? A Meta-Analysis (https://doi.org/10.1177/0018720812448394). “Human Factors”, 2013.