"He's been a little fussy lately," the mom said, handing her baby over to me in the church nursery like it was nothing.
I’ve rocked six grandbabies to sleep over the years, so by the time she passed him to me, I was confident I could handle it.
I know the bounce that works, the hold that works, the lullaby that buys me another ten minutes.
And this baby was normally the calm one, the one who’d smile at you from across the room before you even picked him up.
So when she said “a little fussy,” I wasn’t worried. I had this.
Except nothing worked.
Not the bounce, not the hold, not the lullaby that had never once failed me with any of my six grandsons.
This baby, who usually lit up the second you picked him up, would not settle.
And somewhere in there I remember thinking, this isn’t fussy. This is something else, and none of my tricks are touching it.
I think about that Sunday a lot now, when I talk with managers about high-performing employees who’ve suddenly stopped showing up the way they used to.
Because most managers aren’t new at this either.
They’ve handled missed deadlines, skill gaps, off days.
They’ve got a toolkit too.
But nobody trained them for a high performer who’s quietly unraveling, someone who’s usually the calm, capable one, and none of the usual moves are working.
That’s a different kind of unsettling than a straightforward problem employee.
It’s the gap between what you know how to fix and what’s actually in front of you.
That gap is where most managers make the decision that ends up defining everything that comes after.
Standing there, not knowing what’s actually wrong, feels unbearable.
Doing something, even the wrong something, feels safer than doing nothing... and most managers aren’t careless; they’re just caught in that discomfort.
So they reach for the form. The Performance Improvement Plan (PIP).
The tool that’s already sitting on a shared drive somewhere, filled with deadlines and checkboxes, because at least it looks like leadership.
At least it looks like they’re handling it.
But there's a way to close that gap before it turns into a document. It comes down to three moves, and none of them require you to already have the answer.
The Pause, Plan, Pivot Framework
Most performance issues get documented before anyone actually understands them. That's not because managers are bad at their jobs; it's because there's no built-in step for finding out what's really going on before the process kicks in. This framework gives you that step. It doesn't replace formal processes when they're genuinely needed; it just makes sure you're not reaching for one before you know if it's the right tool.
Pause
Before anything gets documented, there’s a question worth asking that most managers skip entirely:
Is this a performance problem, or is this a human problem showing up as performance?
They look identical on paper.
Missed deadlines are missed deadlines.
But a skill gap and a person quietly struggling through something require completely different responses, and you can’t tell them apart from a spreadsheet.
The pause isn’t about waiting indefinitely.
It’s about resisting the pull to document before you understand what you’re actually documenting.
Sometimes what looks like a sudden drop in performance is actually a nervous system working overtime somewhere else, and the work in front of them just couldn’t compete.
Plan
This is where curiosity gets built into the process instead of skipped over it.
A conversation that starts with “I’ve noticed a change, and I want to understand it” lands entirely differently than one that opens with a PIP already drafted.
The plan isn’t the paperwork.
The plan is deciding how you’re going to find out what’s actually going on before you decide what tool the situation calls for.
This is also where safety matters more than most managers realize.
People don’t tell you what’s really happening in a room that feels like it’s building a case against them.
They tell you in a room that feels like it’s trying to understand them.
Pivot
Sometimes the answer really is a formal process, and that’s fine.
But sometimes the pivot is smaller than that.
An adjusted deadline.
A reduced load for a few weeks.
A direct, human question asked once instead of a form filled out by default.
The pivot is choosing the tool that matches the problem, instead of reaching for the one tool you already know how to use.
That baby in the church nursery wasn’t fussy.
He needed something none of my usual tricks were built for, and I only found out what by staying with him instead of running through the same routine faster and louder.
Employees aren’t babies, and managers aren’t grandmothers with a lifetime of bounces and holds.
But the instinct is the same.
The tools that have always worked will keep getting reached for, right up until someone decides to pause long enough to ask if this situation actually calls for something else.
Bringing it together
Pause before you document, so you find out what’s actually happening instead of assuming you already know.
Plan a conversation built on curiosity, not a case built on evidence.
Pivot toward the response the situation calls for, whether that’s a formal process or something much smaller and more human.
None of it requires you to have the answer before you start. It just requires you to be willing to find out.
That baby settled eventually, not because I found the right bounce or the right hold, but because I finally stopped cycling through my usual moves and just held him, quiet, and let him show me what he needed instead of telling him what I thought that was.
That’s the whole shift.
From having the answer to being willing to find out.
From the tool you already know to the one the moment actually calls for.
Want the full toolkit?
Everything in the Pause, Plan, Pivot framework works on its own, but if you want the scripts, the self-assessment, and the trigger response guide that go deeper into trauma-informed management, I put it all together in the Trauma-Informed Management Quick Reference Guide. It’s available to Paid Members of the Resilient Career Academy.
Joining gets you this guide along with the rest of the Premium Content Library, and it helps keep this work sustainable so I can keep writing pieces like this one.
