Micro simulation · 5 min

Can you bring a quiet high performer back into the room?

Sam is a senior analyst on your hybrid team. For the last two years they have been one of your strongest contributors: confident in meetings, sought out by other parts of the business, and on the shortlist for promotion at the last cycle.

Over the past month, something has changed. The camera stays off in stand-ups. Contributions have dried up. Two deadlines have slipped, one of them client-facing. A team social was declined.

You have heard fragments on the side. The team has been stretched since two analysts left in the January re-org. Sam's recommendation in a recent client review was publicly dismissed by another senior leader. And Sam's collaborator Riya mentioned a disagreement they had over methodology.

Your one-to-one with Sam is tomorrow morning.

Three decisions. Five minutes. How do you bring Sam back?

Sequence your support

You open the one-to-one with curiosity and Sam, after a long pause, opens up. The workload spike is real. The recommendation that was dismissed in the client review still stings. The disagreement with Riya is tangled up in both. There is more here than a single conversation can hold.

Rank the threads below in the order you would address them across the next few weeks; place the one you would address first at the top.

Drag to reorder, or use the ↑↓ buttons.

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Acknowledgement

Naming what you have noticed

Tell Sam what you have seen over the last month, that it matters, and that you should have spotted it sooner.
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Trust repair

The dismissed recommendation

Address the moment in the client review when Sam's recommendation was publicly dismissed and you did not push back.
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Workload relief

Concrete capacity move

Redistribute work from Sam this week to ease the spike caused by the two analysts who left in January.
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Conflict facilitation

The disagreement with Riya

Set up a facilitated conversation with Sam and Riya about the methodology disagreement that has spilled over into how they work together.
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Performance expectations

Resetting on the missed deadlines

Have a direct conversation about the two missed deadlines and what you both expect from one another going forward.

Sequencing your support

There is no single correct answer, but the trust cycle gives you a useful map. Insight and relationship come before influence, and influence comes before intervention. Sequence each thread to follow that arc.

Things to consider

Acknowledgement

Naming what you have noticed is the bridge between a meeting that happens and a meeting that matters. It sits firmly in the insight and relationship phase of the trust cycle. Without it, every later move risks being read as managing the numbers rather than seeing the person.

Trust repair

The withdrawal traces back to a moment of public dismissal. Repair is the deepest wound and needs to be named explicitly: what happened, what it meant, and what you should have done. Until rapport is rebuilt here, the rest of the plan rests on shaky ground.

Workload relief

Concrete capacity action signals that words and deeds align, but the right intervention at the right time is the principle. Move on workload only after Sam feels seen and the trust rupture has been named, otherwise the relief reads as transactional.

Conflict facilitation

A facilitated conversation with Riya involves a third person and a different context. Premature, it can feel like an ambush for both. Better to land it once Sam's footing is steadier and the disagreement can be heard on its merits, not as a proxy for everything else.

Performance expectations

The missed deadlines are a symptom, not the cause. Leading with them turns a coaching conversation into an evaluative one and is the fastest way to lose a high performer. Keep this in view, but only once the foundation is restored, and even then frame it as a shared agreement, not a warning.

When everything comes out at once

Sam, senior analyst

You opened the one-to-one with curiosity rather than a theory. There was a long silence. Then, quietly, Sam started to talk.

'Honestly? It is everything. The workload has been crushing me since we lost Maya and Tom in January. That I could have lived with. The bigger thing is the client review two weeks ago. My recommendation was dismissed in front of the team without discussion, and I have not recovered from it. And then Riya and I had a row about the methodology, which was really about all of this. I have been trying to hold it together and not doing a great job of it.'

How do you respond?

A

Thank Sam for the honesty, name the three threads as tangled together, take responsibility for not pushing back in the client review, and ask Sam where they would like to start.

B

Move quickly to the most fixable thing: redistribute Sam's projects today and promise that everything else will get easier once the workload pressure is off.

C

Push back gently on the client review point, explaining that the timing was not right in the room and the recommendation may be being read more harshly than it was meant.

D

Apologise heavily for the client review and offer to do whatever it takes to repair that trust, including a public correction with the team, before getting to anything else.

When everything comes out at once

Sam has just done something brave. The principle of building rapport before intervention applies even in the middle of a conversation: how you respond now decides whether the next ten minutes feel like coaching or like managing.

Option A

'Thank Sam for the honesty, name the three threads as tangled together, take responsibility for not pushing back in the client review, and ask Sam where they would like to start.'

This is the right intervention at the right time. Naming the threads honours the insight and relationship phase of the trust cycle, taking responsibility opens repair without making the conversation about you, and inviting Sam to choose where to start moves you into understanding and influencing together. Coaching, not managing.

Option B

'Move quickly to the most fixable thing: redistribute Sam's projects today and promise that everything else will get easier once the workload pressure is off.'

Concrete capacity action is welcome and shows you took the disclosure seriously, but acting on a single thread before all three have been heard skips ahead in the trust cycle. Sam may feel relieved and unseen at the same time.

Option C

'Push back gently on the client review point, explaining that the timing was not right in the room and the recommendation may be being read more harshly than it was meant.'

However gently it is delivered, defending the moment Sam just named will be heard as 'you asked, I told you, you defended yourself'. It collapses the rapport you have just built and risks being the conversation Sam never starts again.

Option D

'Apologise heavily for the client review and offer to do whatever it takes to repair that trust, including a public correction with the team, before getting to anything else.'

The instinct is good but the weight is wrong. A heavy apology can make the conversation about you and your guilt rather than about Sam, and it leaves the workload and the Riya disagreement untouched. Repair without practical relief tends to feel hollow within forty-eight hours.

The plan that sticks

The one-to-one is winding down. What you do over the next four weeks will decide whether Sam comes back into the team or quietly drifts further out. Sam is watching for whether words and actions line up, and the team is watching too.

The workload is genuinely too much, two analysts down since January
Stand-ups have changed: cameras off, no contributions
The client review moment was witnessed by the whole team
Riya does not yet know that any of this conversation has happened

What do you do over the next four weeks?

A

Co-design a four-part plan with Sam: redistribute two projects this week, revisit the dismissed recommendation publicly with the team, fortnightly check-ins with an explicit 'what has gone unsaid' question, and a facilitated conversation with Riya in week two.

B

Tell Sam that your door is always open, that you will keep an eye on the workload, and that you trust them to flag it if anything starts slipping again.

C

Escalate to your director, ask to slow two delivery commitments, and cancel the project that is taking the most of Sam's bandwidth so the whole team feels the relief.

D

Set clear written goals with deadlines, deliverables and milestones, and meet weekly to review against them so any slip is visible to both of you early.

The plan that sticks

Sam's situation touches every layer of team cohesion: goals (what we are aiming for and how we hold each other to it), roles (who carries what), and souls (the ground rules that decide whether dissent is safe). A good plan does not have to fix every layer immediately, but it should at least name them and assign each one a path back.

Option A

'Co-design a four-part plan with Sam: redistribute two projects this week, revisit the dismissed recommendation publicly with the team, fortnightly check-ins with an explicit "what has gone unsaid" question, and a facilitated conversation with Riya in week two.'

This plan touches each layer of cohesion: goals (the unsaid question and the public revisit of the dismissed recommendation), roles (workload), and souls (the ground rule that dismissed contributions get a return visit). Co-designing it with Sam moves the conversation into the action phase of the trust cycle without leaving the relationship behind.

Option B

'Tell Sam that your door is always open, that you will keep an eye on the workload, and that you trust them to flag it if anything starts slipping again.'

A warm conversation without a structure to hold it is the most common way these moments quietly fade. The 'open door' puts the burden of raising things back onto the person who has just spent a month going quiet. Patience is a change management principle, but patience without a plan is drift.

Option C

'Escalate to your director, ask to slow two delivery commitments, and cancel the project that is taking the most of Sam's bandwidth so the whole team feels the relief.'

There is real systemic thinking here, and the workload move would land. But the scale of the intervention is not matched to where Sam is, and unilateral cancellations without consultation can leave Sam feeling singled out and the team feeling unsettled. The right intervention, but not at the right scale.

Option D

'Set clear written goals with deadlines, deliverables and milestones, and meet weekly to review against them so any slip is visible to both of you early.'

Goal-setting after this conversation reads as managing, not coaching. Sam will meet the goals, mechanically, and the withdrawal will become formal: high output, no contributions, camera off. You will solve the symptom and lose the person.

Further learning

This simulation draws on frameworks from our Cohesion programme on high performing teams. Each one shaped the choices you just worked through.

The trust cycle Insight and relationship before influence, influence before intervention. The map you used to sequence your support of Sam in decision one. Explore the trust cycle →
Key change management principles Including 'build rapport before intervening' and 'the right intervention at the right time'. The lens we used to read your response to Sam in decision two. Explore the principles →
Goals, roles and souls The three layers of team cohesion: what we are aiming for, who does what, and the ground rules we live by. Used to evaluate your four-week plan in decision three. Explore the model →

Take it further with Cohesion

Cohesion is our full high-performing teams simulation. A leadership team works under pressure over an immersive day or two, navigating conflict, alignment, decision-making and commitment so participants come away with a felt sense of what builds team performance and what corrodes it. The moves you made to support Sam in this micro sim sit inside a much larger picture of how trust, candour and follow-through shape a team's results.

Explore Cohesion →