Something is off. Here's what to do about it.
On trusting your instincts and acting before the cost compounds
You feel it months before you act. Something shifts in the studio: the energy changes, the air feels charged. A dynamic that was not there six months ago has settled, and nobody is naming it. Certainly not you. Your instinct is solid, but you decide to wait, manage around it and hope it resolves.
Instincts are funny things. You know something is up, but you can’t name it explicitly. Or maybe you can, but you won’t. But it’s there. And avoiding it is usually expensive.
Early on, I had a teacher who was exceptional on the floor. She lit up a room and clients adored her. Although she was early in her career, she became the star of my studio, booked out and waitlisted.
She also gradually became a management problem. Not all at once, but incrementally. The kind of behavior that is easy to rationalize in isolation, until one day you are staring down another conflict together and wondering how it evolved here.
I’ll tell you how it got there. It was because of me. Small moments were ignored and instincts were suppressed because she was that good with clients. And at the time, I believed that mattered most.
Eventually, we arrived at a conflict I couldn’t ignore. So I brought it up. I meant it to be casual, but it landed as an admonishment. She resigned four days later. I was heartbroken, embarrassed and terrified of the fallout. And then I was angry. Sitting with it, I knew it was all on me. I allowed the dynamic to fester because of what I tolerated.
And of course my team saw it, too. There was a quiet but mounting toll that my team absorbed as I tolerated something I shouldn’t. The standards I held everyone else to were revealed as negotiable. It turned my leadership into a question mark.
As a learn-by-failure kind of person, I usually have to suffer a bit before something actually sticks. Most situations shouldn’t require that. But if you catch the pattern early enough and do something about it, the suffering is optional.
It’s been many years, and I’ve since nurtured a small but tight team. I’ve gotten better at listening to those early instincts and getting ahead of certain behaviors.
The telltale for leaders is avoidance. Something off-putting happens at the studio and we look the other way, thinking it’s a singular event or something taken out of context. For one of my coaching clients, it was bracing for staff meetings because one person reliably made it harder than it needed to be. And for another client, it was adjusting her own schedule at the studio to avoid another’s behavior.
Of course, it impacts business. Astute clients might notice a changing dynamic in its early stages. And like you, they aren’t saying anything. But they are communicating in other ways. They cancel. They switch teachers. Some just leave altogether.
All the while, our best team members are watching how we handle it. They’re recalibrating their sense of what the standards are based on what we tolerate.
Naturally, the mental energy a studio owner spends managing around this person is exhausting. The low-level vigilance carried into the studio every day is not free. It’s just not visible on the P&L. Every month you wait, the cost compounds.
Most of us eventually act at some point, and when we do, the sequence is straightforward: a compassionate conversation, email follow-up, perhaps a performance improvement plan (PIP) with specific targets and clear consequences if they are not met.
But when someone does leave, I often recommend letting the vacancy sit for a moment. The empty seat often has something to say about what the business needs. Have a listen. Let it resurrect the instincts you initially intuited. What might work better? What standards need refining?
Every element of your business has a season, and that goes for your team, too. So next time something feels off, listen and observe. Look for patterns. Let your instinct guide you toward the conversation you have been avoiding.
-Amanda