You cannot manage your peers

How do you manage underperforming peers in a small team with no leadership from above? On the two things make this hard, and what you can actually do when nobody is in charge.

Photo by Glenov Brankovic on Unsplash

A reader asked me: how do you manage underperforming peers, in a small team, with no leadership from above?

There are two things that make this hard, and they are hiding in plain sight. The first is in the word “manage”, and the trap here is that you can’t. A peer is not yours to manage. You have no authority over them, no ability to set their objectives, direct their work, or attach a consequence to anything they do or fail to do. The second part is “no real leadership from above”. This removes the escape hatch for “raise it with their manager”, when clearly there is vacuum where the manager should be. This is pretty much half of the actual problem.

I’m going to throw out the word “manage” here, because it’s just going to keep you attempting things you have no tools for, and replace it with things you can actually do.

You cannot manage a peer. You can influence them, you can supply the structure that is missing from around them, and you can protect yourself and the work from their failure.

That’s more or less the whole toolkit. Everything useful lives in there, and everything that will burn you out lives in trying to do the fourth thing, which is to be the leader that nobody appointed.

First, work out which underperformance you’re dealing with.

Before you do anything, diagnose, because “underperforming” covers a multitude of problems that look identical from the outside but need opposite responses.

There is can’t: a genuine skill or clarity gap where the person would do better if they knew how, or knew what was actually wanted.

There is won’t: someone checked out, coasting, quietly deciding that the effort is not worth it.

There is blocked: someone drowning in something you cannot see - dependencies, overload, or a mess elsewhere.

There is drift: the entirely predictable result of a leadership vacuum, where there is no direction, no clear ownership, no deadlines that mean anything and no consequence for missing them. A normal person would slow to the level the environment rewards, which as it turns out, is not that much,

The last one matters more than the others, because if the real cause is the vacuum, then the person is not the problem and the absence of structure is, and no amount of helping the person will fix a thing that was never about them.

Supply the structure that’s missing, locally.

Confrontation is OUT. In a team with no leadership, the highest-leverage thing you can do is quietly become the source of the structure everyone is missing, without ever calling it that.

No leadership means no clear ownership, no visible commitments, no dates. You can introduce all three, not by decree, which you have no power to issue, but by proposal, which you do. “Shall we just write down who is taking which piece and roughly by when, so we stop treading on each other?” is not you managing anyone. It’s a reasonable colleague suggesting the team get organised, and almost nobody will say no to it because everyone is quietly suffering from its absence.

The trick here is that structure does what authority cannot. A peer will ignore you telling them to work harder. They will, however, find it much harder to ignore a shared and visible list, where they’ve publically taken a piece of work with a date on it, next to everyone else who has done the same. You’re making the absence of delivery visible, and letting the visibility apply the pressure - exactly the job the missing manager was supposed to do.

Make the work visible, because legibility is the manager you don’t have.

In a vacuum, underperfomance thrives because nothing is tracked. A simple shared record of what was committed and what was completed removes the fog. This also protects the person who is doing the work, probably you. The difference between the person carrying the team and the person coasting is invisible to everyone, including any leadership when it (eventually) arrives. Making it legible and the truth becomes self-evident without you having to say a single accusatory word, which is both kinder and far more effective than an argument.

Have the direct conversation, sideways.

You can, and often should, just talk to them. Not as their boss, because you aren’t, but as a colleague the work actually affects, because you are. The skill here is to make it specific, make it about impact rather than character, and bring the problem attached to a way forward.

Not “you need to pull your weight”, which is an attack of character they will defend against. Instead: “When the X piece lands late, I end up blocked on Y and we both miss the deadline. I would rather sort out what is getting in the way than hitting this. What’s going on with it?” That is a peer raising a real, shared, specific problem, and it opens the door rather than starting a fight. Sometimes, nobody has ever told them, plainly and without hostility, that it’s a problem. In a leaderless team the feedback loop that normally delivers that message does not exist. You can be it, once. What you cannot be is their performance manager on a permanent basis, so have the conversation, and then let it go rather than nagging. Nagging is just management without the authority to make it stick, and it’ll make you the villain,

Protect yourself, because their failure will try to become yours.

In a small team with no leadership, when things slip, the blame does not get allocated by anyone sensible, it usually just settles on who is most visible or most conscientious. Don’t let a peer’s underperformance quietly become your reputation.

First, decouple where you can: don’tt run your own critical path through the person who doesn’t deliver, if there’s any way to avoid it, because tying your outcomes to their reliability is volunteering to go down with them. Second, keep a neutral, unemotional record of dependencies and what happened, the same way you would document anything. Not to snitch, and not to build a case out of malice, but so that when the situation is eventually looked at, by a new manager (or anyone tbh), the account is accurate rather than whatever settled in the fog. In a vacuum, the person with the clear record of what actually happened is the person who does not get scapegoated.

The limit (which is the real answer).

The honest part (sorry!) because everything above will help and none of it will fully fix the situation. The problem, at its root, is the thing you were probably hoping was background: there is no leadership. You are being asked, mostly by yourself, to solve a leadership problem with peer toold, and peer tools only reach so far. You can supply structure, apply daylight, have the honest conversation, and protect yourself, and that will genuinely improve things. What you can’t do is be the permanent, unpaid, unacknowledged substitue for the management the team doesn’t have. The person holding it together while nobody notice, will burnout every single time, and their reward for holding it will just be more to hold.

Do the four things, and then watch what happens. The results will tell you what problem you actually have. If the team responds to a bit of structure and daylight, then the underperformance really was drift, and you have more or less fixed it. Congrats. You are the captain now. If it doesn’t, if the coasting continues, then the honest conclusion is that this is not fixable from your seat, because the missing ingredient is authority that you don’t have and can’t manufacture. The useful question stops being “how do I manage my peers” and becomes the harder one: how long am I willing to prop something up that’s not mine to prop up, in a place that has decided leadership is optional. That’s a stay-or-go question, and you should be asking it.