Part 4 of 5 · The 5R Leadership Framework by Nelson Fernandes
Your job as a leader isn’t to do the work. It’s to make it possible for your team to do theirs. If they’re underdelivering, ask what’s blocking them before you ask what’s wrong with them.
There’s a question most managers never ask often enough:
“What’s slowing you down?”
It’s not a complicated question. But the answers change everything. Because behind most performance gaps there’s a blocker the manager either doesn’t know about or has stopped noticing.
Broken systems. Missing information. Delayed approvals. A process that made sense two years ago but now adds friction to every task. A dependency on another team that never delivers on time. These things accumulate silently. And capable people, people who want to do good work, become frustrated, then disengaged, then labelled as underperformers.
The fourth R in the 5R Leadership Framework is Resource. It means one thing: remove the obstacles between your team and their best work.
The root cause is not always the work
When something keeps slowing a person down, find the root cause, and remember it may not be at work at all. People bring things with them: caring for someone, their health, a worry they have not mentioned. Resourcing means seeing the whole person. Ask how they are, not only how the task is going, and offer what you can: some flexibility, a lighter week, a pointer to support.
Why People Stop Telling You What’s Wrong
Early on, they tell you. “This system doesn’t work.” “I’m waiting on approvals that take three days.” “I don’t have the information I need.” They flag it. They expect action.
If nothing changes, they stop flagging. Not because the problem went away, because they’ve learned that raising it achieves nothing. The blocker becomes the norm. Workarounds become standard practice. And performance settles at a level well below what’s possible.
As a manager, you may not even see this happening. The work still gets done, just slower, harder, and with less quality than it should. The frustration is invisible until someone either disengages completely or leaves.
Signs Your Team Is Blocked
- Tasks that should take an hour take a day, and nobody can quite say why.
- People have stopped telling you about problems.
- Workarounds have become the normal way of doing things.
- Capable people are being described as slow or difficult.
- Someone who was reliable has changed, and the work itself has not.
What the research says
Blockers wear people down. Gallup finds that having the materials and equipment to do the job well is the strongest indicator of job stress among its 12 engagement elements, and globally only one in three employees strongly agree they have what they need.
Source: Gallup, How to Measure Employee Engagement With the Q12
How to Resource Your Team Effectively
How to Open the Conversation
Resourcing in Practice: The Hidden Approval Step
I noticed a team member was consistently finishing tasks late. Before I addressed the time management, I asked what their process looked like step by step. Turns out, a single approval step was adding a day to every task, and they’d been working around it for months.
I escalated the approval process, got it streamlined within a week, and suddenly the “underperformer” was the fastest person on the team. The problem was never the person. It was the bottleneck nobody had removed.
When Blockers Are Behind the Problem
These situations often come back to something standing in the way. Start here if one of them sounds like your week.
How Resourcing Connects to the Rest of the 5R
One Thing to Do Today to Clear a Blocker
Free Tools for Clearing Blockers
Free AI coach · built on the 5R
Is it a blocker, or something else?
Describe what is happening in a few sentences. The free Leadership Diagnostic finds which of the five Rs has broken down, then gives you three lines to say tomorrow, one thing not to say, and one action for the next 24 hours.
Diagnose a team problem →Free to start · about 2 minutes · no names needed
Next in the 5R Series After Resource
Want the templates? The 5R Toolkit (£12) has priority templates, conversation scripts and the one-page reference.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does it mean to resource a team?
It means removing the obstacles between your team and their best work: missing information, slow approvals, broken systems, the wrong tools. It is the fourth R in the 5R Leadership Framework.
What is the best question to find blockers?
“What is slowing you down?” Ask it regularly, in one-to-ones and on the floor, and only ask if you are ready to act on the answer.
What if the blocker is outside my control?
Chase it on your team’s behalf and escalate it. If the same issue comes up three times, treat it as a system failure and push for a fix to the root cause rather than another workaround.
Is this the same as the 5R model of identity leadership?
No. The 5R programme in academic research is about building a shared team identity. The 5R Leadership Framework by Nelson Fernandes is a practical habit system for frontline managers: Reprioritise, Reset Expectations, Recognise, Resource and Role Model.
