The assignments were not getting done at the level he expected. The work came back incomplete. The questions were too basic for someone with this much experience. He had reviewed the background. Seen the projects. Built a picture in his mind of who he was dealing with.
The picture was wrong.
Not because anyone had misled him. Because he had never asked the right question in the right setting. Every interaction had been about the work. Deadlines. Deliverables. Status updates. The kind of conversations that confirm what you already believe rather than surface what you do not know.
He scheduled a one on one. Not about the projects. About the person.
Somewhere in that conversation the truth came out quietly. The projects on the resume were real. The environment they came from was not. Academic work and professional work look similar on paper and feel completely different in practice. The expectations, the pace, the ambiguity, the consequences of getting something wrong, none of that had been part of the picture before.
He sat with that for a moment.
Everything he had interpreted as underperformance was actually someone operating at the edge of their actual experience, trying to keep up with assignments calibrated for a version of them that did not quite exist yet.
He adjusted the assignments. Matched them to where the person actually was rather than where he had assumed they were. Added more context. Created more checkpoints. Changed the structure without changing the expectation that this person could grow into the role.
The improvement was almost immediate.
Not because the person changed. Because the environment finally matched the person.
This is what one on ones are actually for. Not status updates. Not performance reviews. The conversation that surfaces what no resume ever could. The thing that is true about this specific human being that you cannot know until you have built enough of a relationship for them to tell you.
The newly promoted technical leader who skips this step is not saving time. He is flying blind at the exact moment when visibility matters most.
If you are developing someone into leadership right now, this week is the right time to ask one question. Not about the roadmap. About the person. What do they feel most confident about. What feels harder than they expected. The answer will change how you support them.
Assumptions fill the space that conversations leave empty.
Fill it with the right conversation.