Why Your Team is Underperforming: Leadership Lessons from a Bird Feeder
Among the gifts I treasure most from my wedding is something I never expected to love so much: a bird camera feeder.
When I installed it this summer, I did seemingly everything right: I researched placement, height and how to ward off squirrels. I bought what someone assured me was excellent birdseed. And then I waited…fully expecting cardinals, blue jays and goldfinches; the kind of vibrant, varied activity that makes the investment worth it.
What showed up instead? Sparrows. Wall-to-wall sparrows.
Now, I have nothing against sparrows. They're scrappy little birds. But they are also (and I say this with full ornithological respect ) bullies.
Territorial. Loud. Messy.
They dominated the feeder, drove off anything else that tried to land, and turned my beautiful camera into a sparrow surveillance feed.
Sound like any of the folks on your team?
The Birdseed Problem Is a Leadership Problem
Here's what I learned after some research: different birds require different seeds.
Sparrows love millet. Cardinals prefer black oil sunflower and safflower seeds. Blue Jays go for peanuts and mealworms (eww). Some birds want fruit. When you put out one generic seed, you don't attract a diverse, high-performing ecosystem. You attract whoever is hungriest and least particular.
We see this same mistake constantly in talent development and employee engagement and it’s really hard to see. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I made the same mistake in the earliest days of my coaching company.
Companies mistakenly engage or inadvertently design one-size-fits-all training programs and wonder why participation is low. They build uniform experiences and then heads get scratched when only certain personality types respond or no measurable outcomes happen from it all. Often, the people who most need the help are absent from the training altogether.
Lesson: You're not getting the brightest talent because you're still putting average seeds.
What the Research Actually Says About Team Performance
This isn't just a backyard metaphor. The data backs it up.
Gallup's research consistently shows that only about 23% of employees are fully engaged at work - meaning the nearly other 75% are showing up without full investment. The same research identifies manager behavior as the single biggest driver of team engagement, accounting for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement scores.
That's not a small number. That's the ballgame.
What moves that needle? According to decades of organizational psychology research, it's simply this: intrinsic motivators — autonomy, mastery, purpose, belonging, and being genuinely seen are what drive discretionary effort. Bet ya thought it was pay first, eh? Nope, dollars only go so far.
The Energy Ceiling Nobody Talks About in Leadership Development
Here's the coaching principle I come back to again and again with leaders: few people will ever rise above their leader's energy level.
I don't mean this in a motivational poster kind of way. I mean it functionally, neurologically and culturally.
Teams read their leader's signal constantly: the tone of a meeting opening, how a question gets asked, whether curiosity or judgment is the default, what gets celebrated versus what gets quietly ignored. If a leader operates at a consistent 7 out of 10 in terms of engagement, enthusiasm, and intentionality, the team will reliably land around a 4 -5 at best. Not because they're lazy. Because culture takes its cues from the top, and humans are pattern-matchers by design.
This has direct implications for organizational performance and talent retention. When managers and senior leaders run on low energy - showing up as distracted, reactive and transactional - they create a low-signal environment. High performers, who require high-signal environments to thrive, either disengage or leave. What you're left with is the organizational equivalent of a sparrow monoculture: loyal, familiar, but not the ecosystem you were trying to build.
What "Better Seeds" Actually Looks Like for Leaders
Changing your seeds doesn't mean buying everyone coffee or launching another engagement survey. It means examining the inputs you're putting into your leadership before you evaluate your team's outputs.
A few concrete places to start.
1. Audit your communication style.
Are you asking open-ended questions or closed ones?
Do your team members know what you actually think, and do they feel safe disagreeing with it?
Communication that creates psychological safety is a fundamentally different seed than communication that shuts conversations down.
2. Get curious about your people — specifically.
Start “innerviewing” your people.
What’s their actual background?
What do they care about?
What kind of work energizes them versus depletes them?
A good boss knows someone’s title. A great leader knows their story.
3. Examine what you're modeling.
Your team is always watching. Not just for instruction, but for permission. If you want a culture of ownership and initiative, you need to visibly model what that looks like, not just describe it in a values document.
4. Change the reward signal.
What gets celebrated in your organization?
If it's hours logged and visible busyness, you'll get performers who optimize for visibility.
If it's outcomes, innovation, and growth, you'll build a different kind of culture.
Recognizing the right behaviors is one of the highest-leverage, lowest-cost L&D tools available to any manager.
The Risk Is Worth It
Here's the part of the bird feeder story I haven't told you yet: When I switched seeds, I had no guarantee the cardinals would show up. The new seed was more expensive. It was a risk. I might have spent the money and still gotten sparrows.
I did it anyway…because I wanted a different outcome badly enough to invest in one. And I DID get that outcome. About a half an hour after putting out that new seed, it was cardinals galore - along with blue jays, some red-winged black birds and even a happy little hummingbird stopped by.
The HR & Leadership Development Conversation
The leadership development conversation HR and talent officers need to be having with their managers isn’t "are you mentoring" but - rather - "are you / we willing to be uncomfortable enough to get a different result?"
Organizational transformation doesn't happen from training programs and mentoring alone. It happens when leaders decide, specifically and deliberately, to change what they're putting out — and to trust that what they want to attract will eventually show up.
The Bottom Line
If your team's performance isn't where you want it, start by auditing the inputs before you evaluate the outputs.
►Look at the seeds.
►Look at who's setting the energy level in the room.
►Look at whether your managers are creating an environment that attracts and retains high performance — or one that selects for whoever is most tolerant of a low-signal culture.
The birds you attract are a direct reflection of what you're putting on the table.
The only question left to ask is: What are you feeding?
