Leadership
Georgina Woodley on Why a Struggling Employee Is Not Always a Disengaged One
Capacity and commitment are different things, and treating a drop in capacity as an attitude problem can make the problem worse for staff and customers.
Why Joy at Work Matters More Than Leaders Think
Video from Aurora Training Advantage.
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How can leaders tell reduced capacity apart from low commitment at work?
Separate capability from capacity first. Capability is what a person knows and can do, and it stays fairly stable. Capacity is how much of that they can reach today. Before escalating, ask what changed at work, what may have changed in the person's life, and whether several capable people are struggling at once.
A reliable employee goes quiet. Decisions slow down, small mistakes creep in, and the manager starts to wonder whether this person still cares. On the HR Empowerment podcast, host Wendy asked customer psychology specialist Georgina Woodley how leaders can tell a motivation problem from a temporary drop in what she calls human capacity.
Georgina Woodley is chief insights officer at Custology Insights and has spent more than 20 years in customer psychology and market research. Her work on the link between staff experience and customer experience led her to develop human energy intelligence and a diagnostic tool called the Joyometer, which looks for patterns across an organisation rather than judging individuals.
Her answer starts with a distinction most performance conversations skip. A person can stay fully committed while having far less of their ability available on a given day. Treating that drop as an attitude problem, she argues, often deepens it, and the cost does not stay inside the team. It reaches customers through rushed replies, errors and rework.
Key takeaways
- Capability is what someone knows and can do; capacity is how much of it they can reach right now.
- Before judging behaviour, check what changed at work, what changed at home, and whether the pattern is team-wide.
- Escalating straight to oversight or a formal plan adds cognitive load and can start a downward spiral.
- Stress is physiological first, so a stressed person may lack the capacity to solve problems in the meeting itself.
1. Capability is stable, capacity is not
Georgina Woodley draws a clear line between two words that often get used as if they mean the same thing. Capability is the knowledge and skill a person brings, and it tends to be relatively stable over time. Capacity is how much of that capability they can actually access at a particular moment, and it can expand and contract from day to day.
That is why a sudden change in a previously reliable person is information rather than a verdict. If someone becomes less decisive or more error prone, it does not automatically mean they have stopped caring or that accountability no longer matters. It means the leader needs to understand what has changed before deciding what the behaviour means.
She suggests managers get curious about three things. First, what has shifted in the work itself: unclear priorities, a heavier workload or harder customers. Second, what may have changed in the person's inner world, since people bring health and money pressures to work. Third, whether several capable people are struggling, which points to a systemic cause.
2. Why stress shrinks judgment and trust
Not all stress is harmful, Georgina Woodley notes. A healthy level of pressure can sharpen performance and focus. The trouble comes when stress is sustained and builds up without enough recovery, which is why she treats rest and recharge as critical rather than a nice extra for people who have earned a break.
She describes stress as physiological before it is psychological. When the brain detects a threat, from heavy workload, constant change or trouble at home, it reallocates resources toward survival. Attention narrows, working memory shrinks, and the functions needed for creative thinking, sound decisions and emotional regulation are the first to suffer.
In customer-facing roles that shows up quickly. A stressed staff member is shorter with customers, and a difficult customer adds to that stress, so the exchange feeds itself. Georgina Woodley sees large gaps in customer experience scores between friendly and unfriendly service, and she points out that back-office errors and rework reach customers too.
3. Understand before you escalate
When performance slips, the instinct is often to add meetings, reporting and closer oversight. Georgina Woodley warns that for someone already overloaded, this raises cognitive load, reduces autonomy and signals a lack of trust. A conversation that hints a job may be at risk can trigger a survival response, cutting capacity further before anything improves.
Her advice is to lead with compassion and reassurance. Since the person may not have the capacity to come up with creative fixes in the room, she suggests painting a clear picture of what good performance looks like, offering praise where it is due, and checking that expectations are actually clear before anyone talks about formal plans.
She also argues that human state belongs in workforce planning. Organisations may not create their people's inner state, but they inherit it every day, and turnover, lost productivity and presenteeism carry real costs. Joy works the other way from stress: it expands capacity, helping people reach creativity and complex decisions again.
