There Are People Who Deliver. And There Are People Who Don’t.
Generally, I don’t like black and white thinking.
Most things in business aren’t that simple. People are more complicated than labels, situations have context and almost every problem has (at least 50) shades of grey. But every now and then you come across a rule that, after seeing it repeated enough times, becomes surprisingly difficult to ignore. Today I want to write about one of those rules for me.
I’ve learned over the past twenty years one pattern that appears over and over again, regardless of the company, the industry or the size of the project, and that is:
There are people who deliver, and there are people who don’t.
I’m not talking about intelligence. Some of the smartest people I’ve worked with never consistently delivered. I’m not talking about education either, because I’ve seen people without prestigious degrees outperform those with impressive CVs. Nor am I talking about personality: introverts, extroverts, quiet people, loud people… I’ve seen outstanding performers in every category. What I’m talking about is something much deeper. It is almost a default operating system. Some people naturally move things forward, others naturally don’t.
These days I recognise delivery-focused people remarkably quickly. Not after one meeting, and certainly not after one successful task, but usually within the first few weeks of working together. I watch how they react when something goes wrong. Do they start explaining why it couldn’t be done, or do they immediately start looking for another way? Do they come back with problems, or problems together with options, ideas and possible ways to move forward? Do they wait for instructions, or do they already have the next step in mind before the discussion has finished? After a while you begin to recognise a certain energy around these people. They don’t need to be pushed, they don’t wait for perfect conditions. They simply have an internal drive that keeps moving them towards the objective.
For years I struggled to accept the opposite: when someone doesn’t perform. Whenever someone repeatedly delayed or failed to deliver, I assumed I was the problem. Maybe I hadn’t explained the objective clearly enough? Maybe I hadn’t motivated them sufficiently? Maybe I hadn’t coached them enough? So I invested more time, more 121’s, more follow-ups and coaching, and more encouragement. Sometimes it seemed to work for a while, which only reinforced my belief that I could eventually turn things around.
Then I would join another project with a different team and different objectives, and suddenly everything worked. How’s that? Problems still appeared every single week, but they never became excuses. The team simply dealt with them. Nobody waited to be told what to do. Nobody spent meetings explaining why something couldn’t happen. People trusted each other, challenged each other, solved issues together and kept moving. Looking back, those projects didn’t succeed because I suddenly became a better project manager overnight. They succeeded because they were built around people whose natural instinct was to deliver.
I’m fortunate to be working in exactly this kind of environment today. We still have a quarter left in the year, yet we’ve already achieved more than 90% of our annual objectives and we are on track to exceed our targets comfortably. Of course project management matters! A poorly organised project manager can absolutely slow down a great team. Bad priorities, unclear communication and lack of trust can damage almost any project. But it would also be dishonest to claim that this success is primarily because of me. The biggest reason is much simpler. The team is made up of people who genuinely want to deliver. My job is to align them, remove obstacles and make sure they stay focused. I don’t have to drag them towards the finish line because they are already running in that direction.
That realisation also changed how I deal with the opposite situation. Earlier in my career I genuinely believed almost anyone could be transformed with enough coaching and enough patience. Today I’m far less convinced. If somebody repeatedly fails to deliver while other people, working under exactly the same conditions, consistently do, then at some point you have to stop asking yourself what else you can do and start asking a different question altogether. Is this simply the wrong person for this role?
I know this sounds harsh, and perhaps even unfair, but it comes from experience rather than theory. I’ve seen projects lose months, sometimes years, because leaders refused to make difficult decisions. They kept hoping that one more conversation, one more workshop or one more performance review would suddenly change someone’s default behaviour. Sometimes it did (but only temporarily – I will explain, why, below), but usually it didn’t work out on the long run.
One question that naturally follows is whether people can move from one category to the other? I think they can, but usually only for a while. Delivery-focused people burn out too, or they lose motivation due to some reason. Give them some time and eventually something switches back on. They start creating again, solving problems again and looking for the next challenge because that’s who they are: it is their natural state.
Same with the other category. Someone who doesn’t usually deliver can have an excellent month or couple of weeks. They prove everybody wrong, gain confidence and genuinely believe things have changed. Unfortunately, I’ve often seen the same pattern repeat itself. Gradually they begin waiting for direction again, they need every next step explained, seek constant reassurance and end up to require increasingly close supervision again, until eventually the project lead finds themselves managing every detail again.
None of this means I judge people after a single meeting or one missed deadline. Quite the opposite!
Whenever I join a new project, I deliberately give people time, observe them over multiple deadlines, different situations and changing levels of pressure. Everybody has bad weeks a bad period. One event proves nothing but patterns do. Eventually those patterns become impossible to ignore.
This isn’t a scientific theory, and I’m certainly not claiming it’s universally true. It’s simply one of the strongest observations I’ve made after spending more than two decades leading projects and working with hundreds of people across different countries, cultures and organisations. Every now and then I still discover someone who surprises me, and I hope that never stops happening. But more often than not, this simple rule keeps proving itself right.
This article is the first in a series I want to call Black & White. Most things in business deserve nuance, and I intend to keep looking for it. But every once in a while you encounter a principle that has survived enough real-life testing to become an honest rule of thumb. For me, this is one of them.
There are people who deliver. And there are people who don’t.
I’d be interested to hear whether your own experience has led you to the same conclusion, or whether you’ve seen convincing examples that prove exactly the opposite.
