When underperformance starts to feel normal

From Chapter 1: The Personality Trap

The passage below is reproduced verbatim from Leadership Isn't Personal.

Not in a dramatic way. There were no catastrophic failures. No moment that forced everyone to stop what they were doing and acknowledge that something fundamental was broken. What we experienced instead was something slower and far more difficult to notice from the inside. Discipline eroded gradually. Not because people didn’t care. Not because anyone was lazy or incompetent. But because nothing in the system demanded that discipline be preserved. There was no pressure pushing behavior back toward a standard once it drifted. Over time, small compromises accumulated and then normalized.

If you had taken the time to look closely, the signs were everywhere. Schedules were built, but rarely held. Planned work gave way to break-ins so often that it stopped raising eyebrows. Firefighting became the rhythm of the day, not the exception. Preventive maintenance slipped — not because it wasn’t valued, but because nothing actively protected it when priorities shifted.

Standards still existed, at least in theory. People talked about them. They cared about them. But they lived mostly in conversation and intent rather than execution. And without reinforcement, intent slowly gave way to whatever was most convenient in the moment.

From the inside, it didn’t feel like failure.

It felt like normal.

Still, none of this felt alarming at the time. In fact, we believed we were doing well.

Compared to other areas, we thought we were ahead. We told ourselves this was simply what maintenance looked like in the real world—reactive, pressured, imperfect. We took pride in adapting, in surviving the week, in making things work despite the odds. Endurance became evidence of competence, and over time, we stopped questioning whether survival was enough.

Looking back now, I can see that survival had slowly become our definition of success.

End of excerpt · © Ivan Getov