Before labeling an employee's actions as "irrational," leaders should investigate the systemic constraints and incentives influencing them. The behavior is often the most logical choice available within a flawed environment.

Before firing someone, leaders should be forced to answer: 'What known structural problem are we choosing not to fix?' This question reframes termination not as a performance issue, but as a conscious leadership decision to accept the cost of turnover over the difficulty of fixing the underlying system.

Many clean-sounding rules for startups, from maximizing output to finding "barrels," share a common flaw: they blame individuals for systemic failures. Effective leadership requires identifying and fixing the underlying organizational issues that cause these problems.

Many team failures attributed to individuals are actually symptoms of flawed organizational structure, such as unclear roles, conflicting goals, or messy design. Firing an employee in this context fails to solve the root problem, leading to a costly cycle of rehiring into the same broken system.

Exceptional people in flawed systems will produce subpar results. Before focusing on individual performance, leaders must ensure the underlying systems are reliable and resilient. As shown by the Southwest Airlines software meltdown, blaming employees for systemic failures masks the root cause and prevents meaningful improvement.

When a team member makes a mistake, leaders should avoid blame. Instead, they should act like a farmer whose crops failed—investigating the environment, process, and support systems to understand the root cause, rather than just blaming the individual plant for not growing.

Instead of blaming individuals for errors, leaders should analyze the systemic conditions that led to the mistake. Error isn't random; it's a patterned outcome. This shifts the focus from 'fixing people' to designing more resilient systems.

Citing family systems psychology, the individual who appears to be a problem is often just the point where underlying systemic stress and dysfunction surface. Instead of trying to fix or fire the person, leaders should investigate what environmental or process issues are causing their behavior.

Inspired by W. Edwards Deming's 85/15 rule, sales should be viewed as a system. Instead of blaming individuals for poor performance, leaders must first fix the underlying process, as it accounts for 85% of outcomes. Most sales floors do the opposite.