You've Already Decided They're Not Going to Make It

You've got someone on your team right now that you've already given up on. You might not have said it out loud, and you probably haven't started the paperwork, but in your head the decision is made. They're not going to make it.

Maybe it's the kitchen hand who keeps mislabelling the prep containers. Maybe it's the apprentice on site who uses the wrong fixings every second time you check his work. Maybe it's the new cleaner at the property who leaves the same thing undone in every unit, even though you've mentioned it twice. You've tried explaining it. You've tried showing them. At some point you stopped investing energy and started working around them, picking up their slack or quietly redistributing their tasks to someone you trust.

And somewhere in the back of your mind is the thought you don't say in polished company: some people are just shit.

I've heard it from owners in cafes, on construction sites, in trade businesses, in property management offices. The phrasing changes but the feeling is identical. A bone-deep frustration with people who seem unable or unwilling to do the job properly, no matter what you throw at them. And after enough rounds of hiring, training, watching someone fail, and starting again, that frustration starts to calcify into something darker: the belief that the talent pool itself is broken, that good people simply don't exist anymore.

I've felt it too. But there's a question worth sitting with before you act on it.

How do you actually know?

Think about the last person you wrote off. What did their first week actually look like?

If they were in hospitality, they probably shadowed someone for a shift or two. That someone was almost certainly busy, probably a bit annoyed about having to explain things while managing their own workload, and definitely didn't cover everything. The new person picked up fragments, filled in the gaps with guesses, and hoped for the best.

If they were on a construction site, they probably got told "just watch" for a morning, then handed a task and expected to perform it. The person showing them might have been great at the job but had no particular skill or interest in teaching it. Half the steps that mattered were done automatically, without comment, because the experienced person stopped thinking about them years ago.

If they were in property management, they probably got a checklist that was last updated eighteen months ago, a quick walkthrough of one unit, and a set of keys. Everything else was assumed.

Take the kitchen hand mislabelling the prep containers. Was she ever shown clearly what each label means, with a reference she could check when she couldn't remember whether the Tuesday prep gets a green dot or a yellow one? Or was she told once during a busy lunch service by someone who was simultaneously plating three mains, and expected to carry that explanation perfectly from that point forward?

Take the apprentice using the wrong fixings. Did anyone actually walk him through the different types, step by step, explaining which ones go where and why? Or did someone point at a shelf and say "use those ones" without specifying which "those ones" meant, and now he's matching by shape because he never learned to read the sizing codes?

The judgment you've made about these people is based on their output. But the inputs were never controlled. You're looking at the result and concluding the person is the problem, without examining whether the conditions that produced that result were ever good enough to tell you anything useful.

The ones you might be wrong about

Some of the people you've written off would have been fine if they'd had something to refer back to when they got stuck.

Think about learning to drive. Nobody hands you the keys, shows you the car once, and then concludes you can't drive when you stall at the first roundabout. You get instruction, broken into steps, repeated as many times as you need. You get someone in the passenger seat who can catch mistakes before they become dangerous. And between lessons, you can go back over what you learned, think about what went wrong, and come into the next session better prepared. The fact that you stalled on Tuesday doesn't mean you'll never drive. It means you weren't ready yet, and everyone involved understood that.

Your staff don't get any of that. They get shown once, in the middle of a shift, by someone who has their own work to do. If they don't retain it perfectly from that single exposure, the conclusion is that they're slow, or careless, or just not cut out for it. There's no reference material to go back to. There's no way to revisit step four without asking someone to stop what they're doing and explain it again. And after the second or third time they ask, they get the sigh, the slight irritation, the unspoken message that they should already know this. So they stop asking and start guessing instead.

The person who seems slow might be second-guessing themselves because they genuinely can't remember the right order and there's nothing to check against. The one who seems careless might be guessing because the one demonstration they got was too fast, too compressed, and too buried in the chaos of a normal working day for them to absorb properly. And the one you've decided doesn't care might have cared very much three weeks ago, but gave up asking questions because every question felt like an admission of failure.

If you're honest with yourself, you can probably think of at least one person you let go, or mentally gave up on, who might have been fine with better support in those first few weeks. Someone who had the attitude, the willingness, the basic capability, but who never quite got enough input at the right moments to turn all of that into consistent performance.

The ones you're right about

But some people genuinely aren't suited to the role. That's real, and no amount of support changes it. There are people who don't have the aptitude, or the temperament, or the basic interest required to do a particular job well. Pretending otherwise helps nobody.

The difference is how long it takes you to figure that out, and how confident you are in the conclusion when you reach it.

Right now, for most owners, the process looks like this: someone seems off for a few weeks, you can't quite put your finger on why, you give them more time because firing someone is expensive and unpleasant, they continue to underperform, and eventually - after two or three months of accumulated frustration - you make the call. By then you've burned through weeks of your own energy managing around them, your team has been compensating for their gaps, and the whole thing has cost you far more than it needed to.

When someone has a clear reference for every task they're responsible for, with steps they can follow and revisit as many times as they need, the picture becomes much sharper, much sooner. If they had the guide, and they had the steps, and they had something to check every time they were unsure, and they still can't do it or won't do it, that tells you something definitive. You gave them the inputs. The outputs still didn't come. That's a conversation you can have with confidence, without guilt, and weeks earlier than you'd have had it otherwise.

A system that supports the good people also exposes the wrong people faster. You stop spending three months hoping someone will figure it out, because within a few weeks you can see clearly whether the problem was the support or the person.

What this looks like in practice

That's what I built Lattify to do. Your best person films the task once - on any phone camera, in your venue or on your site, with your equipment and your setup. Lattify turns that recording into a step-by-step interactive guide that lives on your team's phones. The kitchen hand with the mislabelled containers can check the guide every time she's unsure instead of guessing or asking someone who's too busy to explain. The apprentice with the wrong fixings can pull up the walkthrough on his phone and match what he sees in front of him to what your best tradesperson showed in the video.

The person you're unsure about gets the same quality of explanation your best person would give - every time, on every shift, whether your best person is there or not.

Either way, you stop guessing

The people who can do the job will show you quickly, because they'll have everything they need and their performance will reflect it. The people who can't will show you just as quickly, because the usual excuse - they weren't shown properly, they didn't have a reference, nobody explained it clearly enough - no longer applies. You controlled the inputs. Now you can trust what the outputs are telling you.

Every owner has someone on their team right now that they've mentally filed under "lost cause." Some of those people deserve that label. But until you've actually given them the tools to succeed and watched what happens, you're making that judgment on instinct. And instinct, on its own, has probably cost you people who would have been worth keeping.