As much as we want to be supportive in the workplace, when an employee is messing up, we need to let them know it. While we can try to do it in a positive way that improves their performance, it’s still normal to get frustrated by an underperforming team member. However, if you are going to criticize someone’s performance, make sure you know what you are talking about.

Last week I had a discussion with a recent graduate who had worked at a tech startup as part of his undergraduate education. This “co-op” program was a great way to see the difference between working in the classroom and working in the real world (and it was a great way for the startup to get free labor). It was also a good chance to see a different aspect of business than what he had been studying; though he was an economics major, he was tasked with social media marketing for this young firm.

He said that within the first 3 months of his six-month co-op adventure, his results were not promising. He was learning while doing, and was not getting the response from the market that he had hoped for, nor was he meeting the expectations set by the firm’s leadership. The frustration grew during the rest of his time there, and by the end of his experience it was obvious that they would not be offering to hire him after graduation, nor would he have wanted a job there anyway.

A few months later, after he had graduated, he started getting messages from people back at the firm. Apparently, the marketing campaigns he had put into place had ultimately been successful, blowing past all the targets that had been set. The delay had been caused by the simple fact that the strategy they were pursuing would naturally take a long time before results started showing up…but nobody there knew that.

We like to say that, when you become a leader, your job is no longer to BE the expert as much as it is to LEAD the experts. That being said, though, you still need to know enough about what your people are doing to be able to know if they are doing it well. “Performance management” does not just mean writing performance reviews, it means getting the best performance you can from your employees. If you are not seeing the results you wanted, you need to consider all the reasons that might be happening, and that’s hard to do if you don’t know how something is supposed to work. Are they executing a bad strategy? Were your expectations unrealistic? Do they have a good strategy with reasonable expectations, but they are just bad at carrying it out? Do they simply have a bad attitude? It’s easy to make assumptions about why something is not working, and it’s even easier to make the wrong assumption if you don’t know what you are talking about.

This fellow’s bosses did not know any more about social media marketing than he did; by the end, they actually knew quite a bit less than he did, because he was learning about it along the way. This is especially common in startups, where people become CEOs without necessarily working their way up through different experience levels and learning as they go. If you are in this situation, if something is not working out, don’t be afraid to ask someone for help before assuming your employee is just bad. Read a book. Talk to peers in other companies, through MeetUp groups or StartUp Grind or at your co-working space…reach out into your network (you do have a network, don’t you?) and learn something. If you are criticizing someone from a position of ignorance, there is a very small chance you are saying the right things, and a very, very big chance you are saying the wrong ones.