How to Get People to Do What You Want
Getting other people to do what you want is arguably the most important skill you can develop — because if you have it, it unlocks every other skill that every other person around you potentially has. The problem is most people have no system for it. They ask, they hope, and then they're confused when nothing happens. That changes with the STAR system: a five-step diagnostic framework for figuring out exactly why someone didn't do what you asked — and what to do about it.
Here's the core insight: when someone doesn't follow through, it almost never comes down to laziness or bad attitude. It almost always comes down to one of five very specific, very fixable gaps. Work through them in order, and you'll solve the problem almost every time.
How to Influence People at Work Without Conflict
Before diving into the steps, here's the mindset shift that makes all of this work. Most leaders approach non-performance as a character problem. They think the employee is difficult, lazy, or disrespectful. But that framing puts you across the table from the person — and that's where conversations go sideways.
The better frame: you and your employee are both on the same side of the table, jointly attacking a performance gap. Your job is to diagnose the gap, not prosecute the person. That one shift alone will make you dramatically more effective at getting people to do what you want.
Why Most Managers Delegate Wrong (And How to Fix It)
Most managers delegate like this: they say something out loud, assume it was heard, and then wonder why it didn't get done. Sound familiar? The root problem is that verbal instructions are fragile. They disappear the moment the conversation ends. People remember them differently. Priorities blur. And without a paper trail, there's no accountability — for either side.
The fix is simple but non-negotiable: if it isn't written, it never happened. Every meaningful task needs to be memorialized — an email, a message, a shared doc — with a timestamp. This isn't bureaucracy. It's the foundation of every functional team. When something's written down, both parties have the same reference point. Disagreements about what was asked become rare. Follow-through becomes the default.
How to Give Clear Instructions Employees Actually Follow
Here's where most delegation breaks down even when it is written down: the what is vague. You asked for a TPS report. They sent you a KPI summary. You asked someone to "be nicer to Courtney." They have no idea what that means in practice.
The solution is to define every request in terms of specific behaviors or outcomes — not labels or feelings. Don't say "be professional." Say "when a client emails you, respond within four hours with a greeting, a solution, and a next step." Don't say "stop being creepy." Say "do not touch coworkers, do not comment on their appearance, and keep conversations work-related."
Think about how AI works. Prompt engineering is a valuable skill right now because the quality of your output is entirely determined by the quality of your input. The same is true with humans. We communicate like we assume people can read minds — and then we're shocked when they can't. Clarity is high-leverage work. Two extra minutes of specificity upfront saves two hours of rework on the back end.
- Bad instruction: "Get me that report."
- Good instruction: "Email me the TPS report as a PDF, formatted with last week's data, by Monday at 9am."
The more skilled the person, the vaguer you can be. A senior operator can take a loosely defined challenge and run with it. A junior employee needs step-by-step clarity. Match your instruction detail to their expertise level.
Is Everything Trainable? What Leaders Get Wrong About Skill
If someone knows what you want and they still can't deliver, the next question is: do they know how to do it? And here's where a lot of managers throw up their hands and say "this stuff just isn't trainable." That belief is wrong — and it's costing them.
Everything is trainable. Not everything is worth training. Those are two very different statements. How do humans learn anything? The same way babies learn to walk: through demonstration, repetition, and feedback. Some things have more sub-skills underneath them, which makes them feel harder to train. But that's a complexity issue, not a trainability issue.
The framework for transferring any skill is three steps:
- Document: Write down every step of the process.
- Demonstrate: Do the task in front of them, following the steps you wrote.
- Duplicate: Have them do it in front of you, following those same steps.
If someone can't do the full task, get specific about which step breaks down. Can they turn on the computer? Yes. Can they access the data? Yes. Can they format the output? No. Now you know exactly what to train. You don't need to question their intelligence — you need to fill one gap in one step.
How to Set Deadlines Your Team Will Actually Meet
Even when someone knows what to do and how to do it, tasks still slip through the cracks — because the deadline was never real. "Get it to me by Monday" feels like a soft target when Monday is five days away and there's no plan attached to it.
Here's a better approach. When you assign something, ask three questions:
- When can you get this to me?
- How long will the actual work take?
- What else do you have going on between now and then?
Those three questions give you a live view of someone's workload and let you catch scheduling conflicts before they become missed deadlines. More importantly, they create buy-in. When an employee chooses the deadline, they own it.
Beyond that, build a culture where end of day is the default — not end of week, not end of month. The difference in organizational velocity is staggering. An end-of-month team moves at roughly 1/30th the speed of an end-of-day team. Some companies really do grow 30 times faster than their competitors. This is a big part of why.
How to Talk to an Underperforming Employee Without Drama
The fifth step of the STAR system is circumstances — something external that blocked the person from getting it done. This is the last step on purpose, because it's the easiest one for people to hide behind. Work through the first four gaps first. Then, if none of those explain the failure, ask what got in the way.
Sometimes the answer is legitimate. They had too much on their plate. A tool was broken. A dependency fell through. Those are real obstacles worth solving. But sometimes the answer is an excuse — and this is where your judgment as a leader matters. "I didn't have any eggs" is technically a valid reason not to make an omelette. It's not a valid reason if you had three days and a grocery store nearby.
When you do need to have a harder conversation, here's a framing that works. Instead of saying "you're underperforming," try: "I haven't felt like I've seen a lot of production from you compared to what I think you're capable of. Is it that you don't know what I want, what it should look like, how to do it, when I need it, or is something blocking you?"
That framing does several things at once. It separates the person from the performance. It implies belief in their potential. And it turns the conversation into a collaborative diagnosis rather than a disciplinary hearing. The result: people open up, you find the real issue faster, and you actually solve it.
The STAR System: A Quick Reference
Run through these five questions every time something doesn't get done:
- S — Signal: Did they know you wanted it done?
- T — Task: Did they know what exactly you wanted?
- A — Ability: Did they know how to do it?
- R — Runtime: Did they know when you needed it?
- Circumstances: Was something blocking them — and was that block legitimate?
Most performance problems live in one of these five boxes. Find the box, fix the box. Stop making it about character when it's almost always about clarity. Use the STAR system consistently, and watch how fast your team — and your results — transform.
