Why Your Employees Aren’t Performing—How to Finally Diagnose the Real Reason

Every leader or talent management professional has been in this position. An employee who looked great on paper is underperforming. A team with strong talent and a supportive manager is stuck. A high-performer who seemed fully engaged hands in their resignation. You know something is wrong. What you don’t always know is why—or where to start fixing it. 

The problem isn’t a lack of effort. It’s usually a lack of the right diagnostic framework. Most organizations reach for the same familiar levers when performance suffers: retrain the employee, adjust the incentives, improve communication, or—if things are bad enough—make a personnel change. These responses can help. But they can also miss the actual source of the problem entirely, which means the same issues resurface, in the same teams, year after year. 

There is a better way to approach this. It starts with a model we call the Performance Framework. 

Four Forces. One Complete Picture. 

The Performance Framework—also known as the May-Must-Can-Want model—is a diagnostic framework built on a deceptively simple premise: functional behavior occurs when four distinct conditions are aligned. When all four are present and working together, performance tends to follow. When even one is missing or misaligned, performance suffers—and the nature of that suffering looks different depending on which dimension is the weak link. 

The four dimensions are May, Must, Can, and Want. 

May: Does the environment permit the behavior? 

May addresses the informal permission structures and cultural conditions that either empower or restrict positive behavior. It operates on three levels: the cultural norms employees observe around them (“the way we do things here”), the social signals they pick up from leaders and peers, and the personal perceptions each individual brings based on their own experiences and values. 

This last layer is easy to overlook. Two employees can sit in the same environment and experience it very differently based on how they interpret what they see. May is not just about what the culture actually is—it is about what employees perceive it to be. And perception, as every leader knows, shapes behavior just as powerfully as reality. 

Must: Do employees know what’s expected of them? 

Must addresses the formal expectations of the role and the organization. At its core is the question of clarity: do employees understand what success looks like, how it will be measured, and what standards they are expected to meet? Must includes organizational strategy and values, role-specific KPIs and job descriptions, and the accountability structures that create meaningful consequence for performance gaps. 

Without a well-defined Must, employees cannot perform well—not because they lack the ability or the motivation, but because they lack the direction. You cannot hit a target that hasn’t been clearly defined. 

Can: Do they have the capability to deliver? 

Can addresses demonstrated competence—the skills, knowledge, and experience a person has actually developed. This is distinct from potential or natural talent. A person may have strong natural aptitude for a competency, but aptitude alone does not produce performance. The Can dimension clarifies where someone currently stands relative to what the role requires, and it is where investments in training, development, coaching, and mentoring must be targeted. 

Can is most commonly assessed through performance reviews, 360-degree feedback, and cognitive ability tests. The important diagnostic question here is not just “what can this person do?” but “what does this role require that this person cannot yet do—and is that gap closable?” 

Want: Are they intrinsically motivated by the work? 

Want is the dimension that is most frequently underestimated—and most costly when ignored. It describes the inborn drives, natural preferences, and motivational orientations that determine whether a person is genuinely energized by the work they are being asked to do. 

When Want is aligned with the role, work feels different. It still requires effort, but the energy spent on it is replenished as it is expended. People in strong Want alignment bring discretionary effort not because they are told to, but because the work itself calls it out of them. When Want is misaligned, performance can persist—sometimes for a long time, in the case of highly capable and conscientious people—but at a mounting cost that eventually surfaces as burnout, quiet disengagement, or the kind of present-but-absent performance that is among the most expensive conditions in organizational life. 

Why All Four Matter 

The power of the Performance Compass is not in any single dimension—it is in how all four interact. An employee can be strong on three of them and still be at meaningful risk, depending on which one is missing. 

When Must is unclear, performance suffers from lack of direction. When May is misaligned, even strong performers are continually undermined by cultural friction. When Can is underdeveloped, there is a skills gap that training and time can close—assuming the talent is there to close it. When Want is absent, you may have a capable, compliant employee, but eventually you will have a burned out one. 

This is what makes the model so practically useful for HR leaders. Rather than applying a generic solution to a vague performance problem, you can identify precisely which dimension is creating the gap—and design a response that actually addresses the root cause. 

Putting It to Work 

The next time you are trying to understand why an individual or team is not performing at the level you know is possible, run them through the four dimensions. Ask: 

• May: Is the culture sending mixed or restrictive signals? Are there unspoken rules that make the desired behavior difficult to display? 

• Must: Do they genuinely understand what success looks like and how it will be measured? 

• Can: Do they have the demonstrated skills and experience the role requires—and if not, is the gap developable? 

• Want: Is this work genuinely aligned with how this person is naturally wired to operate? 

In most cases, you will be able to identify something that a survey score or a performance rating alone never could. The clarity of knowing that a gap exists, where it lives, and what it will take to close it is at the core of your talent management efforts. 

Once you know where the gap lives, you can close it with the right tools. For the Want dimension, talent assessments reveal what genuinely motivates each individual—their inborn drives, natural preferences, and the kind of work that energizes rather than depletes them. For the Can dimension, cognitive ability assessments clarify the capacity someone brings to a role, while 360-degree feedback and competency assessments show where demonstrated skills stand today and where development effort needs to go. For the Must dimension, job profiling, role architecture, and well-designed competency models ensure that expectations are grounded in something more precise than assumption—giving employees a clear and credible picture of what success actually looks like. And for the May dimension, culture surveys and employee engagement tools surface the informal permission structures and environmental signals that either support or quietly undermine the performance you are trying to build. 

No single tool solves every performance challenge. But when the right diagnostic framework points you to the right dimension, the right tools become far more powerful—and far less likely to be wasted on the wrong problem. 

If you are looking for a partner that can support you across all four dimensions—from talent and cognitive assessments to competency models, job architecture, and engagement measurement—TMA has the tools and methodology to help. Reach out to learn how the May-Must-Can-Want model can be put to work in your organization.