How long has this pattern been present — and what else was happening when it started?

Under-performance that appears suddenly often traces back to a change in the system: a new hire, a shift in ownership dynamics, a conversation that didn't happen.

Who else in the organization is oriented around this person?

The people who are most invested in managing, protecting, or complaining about the under-performer are often triangulated into a tension that predates the employee.

What would change in the organization if this person were gone — and who would be uncomfortable with that change?

Resistance to resolution is usually resistance to what resolution would require.

Have you had the same conversation with more than one person in this role?

If the seat keeps producing the same problem, the seat — not the person — is the issue.

What haven't you been willing to say or decide that this situation allows you to keep avoiding?

This question is the most important one, and the hardest to answer honestly.

The Employee You Can't Quite Fire

Dr. Sean Stokes
Jun 11
6 min read

The problem employee is not always the problem. They are almost always the symptom.

You know exactly who I'm talking about.

They've been with you long enough that letting them go feels disloyal. Or they're newer, but something keeps you from pulling the trigger — a conversation you haven't had yet, a feeling that they could turn it around, a vague sense that it wouldn't be entirely fair. So you stay in the space between. You accommodate. You adjust responsibilities around them. You explain their behavior to other people on the team. You have versions of the same conversation with them that end in some small improvement, followed by a slow drift back.

And somewhere in the back of your mind, you wonder whether the problem is them — or whether it's you.

Here's what family systems theory would say: it's neither. Or more precisely, it's the system — and that includes both of you, along with everyone else in the room.

The Identified Patient

In family therapy, there's a concept called the identified patient: the family member whose behavior has become the primary focus of concern. They're struggling, visibly. Everyone is oriented around managing, fixing, or working around their symptoms. And on the surface, the logic makes sense — they're the one with the problem.

Except that's almost never the whole story.

Murray Bowen, the psychiatrist who developed family systems theory, argued that the identified patient rarely generates their symptoms in isolation. Their behavior is a response to — and a function of — the emotional system surrounding them. The family (or the organization) has implicitly designated this person to carry something the system needs expressed but cannot address directly: unresolved anxiety, an unnamed tension between two other parties, a conflict that predates this person's arrival entirely.

When you try to fix the identified patient without examining the system that produced them, Bowen would predict one of two things: either the person improves but someone else in the organization begins presenting similar symptoms, or the improvement doesn't hold — because the conditions that created the dynamic remain unchanged.

Edwin Friedman, applying Bowen's framework to organizational leadership in A Failure of Nerve, put it plainly: "A troubled workplace scapegoats an employee. Triangles steady a relationship for a time while preserving the trouble underneath." The under-performer in your business may be steadying a tension you haven't named yet. Their presence — and your inability to act decisively about them — may be serving a function in the system you haven't yet examined.

What the Research Tells Us About Under-performance

The costs of sustained, unaddressed under-performance are concrete.

Global employee engagement fell to 21% in 2024, according to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace — its lowest point since the early pandemic years. Gallup estimates the resulting productivity losses at $438 billion annually. What that number obscures is how uneven the distribution of that disengagement is: disengaged employees aren't evenly distributed across organizations. They concentrate in systems that haven't addressed what's actually driving their disengagement.

Research published in 2026 by IESE Family Business documented something specific about under-performance in small and family-owned businesses: persistent under-performance frequently takes root years earlier, when the company was still performing adequately and had the flexibility to act. Over time, the business grows too comfortable with the way things have always been done, avoiding honest reflection and difficult conversations. Attachment to established patterns — and the relationships embedded in those patterns — makes it harder to see what's

actually happening.

That's a research-language way of saying: by the time under-performance becomes undeniable, the system has usually been producing it for a long time. The employee who can't seem to get it together has often been in an environment that has quietly organized around their limitations rather than addressing them.

A 2023 Psychology Today analysis drawing on Bowen's work described the mechanism directly: organizational systems under anxiety will often target or scapegoat a member, loading collective anxiety onto a single person in order to stabilize the relationships between everyone else. This isn't conscious. It doesn't require bad intentions. It's what anxious systems do.

What You Haven't Looked At Yet

Here is the question most business owners never ask about a chronic under-performer: What function is this person serving that I haven't acknowledged?

Not their job function — their systemic function. What tension are they absorbing? Whose relationship is being stabilized by the presence of a common problem? What difficult conversation hasn't happened that their continued presence allows you to avoid?

Sometimes the under-performer is protecting a relationship between two other people — a long-term employee who resents a newer hire, a family member who doesn't want the role clarified, a partner who prefers things ambiguous. Sometimes they're absorbing anxiety that would otherwise surface somewhere more uncomfortable. Sometimes their performance issues are downstream of a structural problem — unclear expectations, inconsistent accountability, a broken communication pattern — that everyone has learned to attribute to the individual rather than the environment.

And sometimes — this is the hardest one — the owner is participating in the pattern.

The under-performer who doesn't get fired gives the owner a place to put their frustration that isn't the real source. The employee who can't quite meet the standard keeps the owner feeling essential. The person everyone complains about unifies a team that doesn't have much else in common.

None of this means you have to keep someone who genuinely cannot do the job. It means that if you've been trying to solve an individual problem and it keeps returning — in this person or in the people who come after them — the problem may not be in the person.

Five Questions Worth Sitting With

How long has this pattern been present — and what else was happening when it started? Under-performance that appears suddenly often traces back to a change in the system: a new hire, a shift in ownership dynamics, a conversation that didn't happen.
Who else in the organization is oriented around this person? The people who are most invested in managing, protecting, or complaining about the under-performer are often triangulated into a tension that predates the employee.
What would change in the organization if this person were gone — and who would be uncomfortable with that change? Resistance to resolution is usually resistance to what resolution would require.
Have you had the same conversation with more than one person in this role? If the seat keeps producing the same problem, the seat — not the person — is the issue.
What haven't you been willing to say or decide that this situation allows you to keep avoiding? This question is the most important one, and the hardest to answer honestly.

What This Kind of Work Looks Like

Addressing chronic under-performance as a systems problem isn't a performance improvement plan. It isn't a difficult conversation framework. It isn't HR consulting.

It's the work of seeing — clearly and honestly — what function the pattern is serving in your organization, and then addressing that, rather than the presenting behavior. That requires someone who can look at the whole system with you: not just the employee in question, but the relationships around them, the role you're playing in maintaining the dynamic, and what would actually have to change for the pattern to resolve.

That's the work I do with small business owners through the Business Relationship Assessment: a structured diagnostic that maps the relational dynamics of your organization, identifies the patterns that keep producing the same problems, and gives you specific, concrete recommendations for what to address — at the root, not the surface.

If you have an employee you can't quite fix and can't quite release, that ambivalence is worth paying attention to. It's almost always telling you something about the system — something that, once seen, can be changed.

Schedule a Conversation

For those who hold a faith perspective: the wisdom literature speaks about the cost of not addressing under-performance out of comfort or fear. "One who is slack in his work is brother to one who destroys" (Proverbs 18:9) — the problem that keeps returning does so for a reason and will ultimately impact the entire small business. Proverbs returns again and again to the theme of discernment: seeing things as they are, not as we've arranged them to appear. The owner who can look honestly at a recurring pattern — including their own role in sustaining it — is exercising the kind of wisdom that the text treats as foundational to everything else. You can't lead well what you can't see clearly.

If you're ready to see this more clearly, I'd welcome the conversation.