It’s hard when you have someone sandbagging your team. The underperformer is dragging everyone down with their performance – but it’s also hard to eliminate them. You know them, and you’ve built up a rapport. You know about their family and their struggles over the past few years.
Ideally, we shouldn’t be here. Everyone should be living up to their potential, but we are human. We will make mistakes. We will have ups and downs as we take on different responsibilities. Maybe those late nights with a baby are taking a toll on their work at the office. Perhaps that second freelance job the person took to support their family is eating into their main job’s productivity.
Your first responsibility will always be to the team. You can be empathetic and understand someone’s situation. You can put yourself in their shoes and see things from their point of view, but ultimately, your actions affect everyone else.
Set Expectations
Knowing how you’re doing is hard if your manager doesn’t tell you. We need to nip it in the bud before we set someone up officially within the company’s HR policy for low performance. You must let your direct report know when you notice something is off.
Hard conversations. When you’re interviewing for leadership positions, they ask about how hard conversations you have. Hard conversations are conversations where you need to give negative (or constructive) feedback. I tend to be very specific about the behaviour I want changed. You can follow the Situation-Behaviour-Impact framework to provide feedback. Set clear expectations of what you expect.
For example, let’s take an engineer who isn’t putting as much effort into their work as the others in the team. Specifically, you can mention that they promised the PR would be delivered by Tuesday, but it’s still Friday, and the PR is not yet ready. The impact is that the feature release has been delayed by four days, which was promised to three of our customers by our sales team. The engineer will have their side of the story – but if it wasn’t raised earlier, that’s also a point for them to own.
You might set the expectation that if they say they will deliver by a specific date, they should or they need to let you know earlier what the blockers are. If there are no blockers, we should look at what skills the engineer needs to learn to improve. Maybe they need mentoring in the front end or some infrastructure guidance. So long as the engineer is curious and willing to learn, their situation can be improved, and you can keep the low performance informal.
This Is Not The End
Being put into a low-performance bucket at your company is not the end of your career or job. Typically, the first time you’re put into this means your manager has noticed you are falling behind your peers and the competencies/expectations of the company at your current level. This is your chance to take a hard look at yourself and try to understand where you are failing.
On the other side of the picture, you shouldn’t use low performance to try to change someone’s personality or other attributes you might not like. It should be strictly performance-based, where the person in this bucket can change their behaviours and turn around their careers.
Communicating Low Performance
Ideally, it should not be surprising that this person is underperforming. You should have solid evidence and previous communication from you to change their behaviour, as above. If they are not changing based on your input, then you can officially start the process with your human resources team. I use this as a last resort if mentoring, coaching, or skill acquisition has not worked. Sometimes, people don’t want to change.
Ensure you are setting the right bar for your team by calibrating across the organization that you work in. Are they not meeting the expectations for the role, or are you expecting too much? What are the competencies? The higher up you go on the ladder, the vaguer these become. That’s why you will need leaders comfortable in a VUCA world.
PIP – Performance Improvement Plan
You should initiate a performance improvement plan when you notice consistent underperformance without adhering to your feedback. This is an official warning from the company that the person is underperforming, but you want them to improve.
Being in a performance improvement plan doesn’t mean you’re about to be fired (at least not at the companies I’ve worked at). It means your manager has failed to change your behaviour informally. Now, they need professional help to ensure clarity and a path forward for both of you.
A performance improvement plan usually includes a set date, check-in interval, and clear expectations. The expectations should be achievable and within your scope/role. If anything is unclear, it can lead to missed expectations and poor performance (focusing on the wrong thing). The expectations will be written down and must be agreed upon by the manager and employee.
Throughout this experience, ensure you support your employee (or if you’re the employee, check what support you can access). Knowing you’re being watched can change how you perform (both good and bad). Keep this in mind when checking in with the employee. Getting mental help is especially important as you want to stay positive and motivated.
Assuming the person passes the PIP, we can move on to post-monitoring. This is an informal way of checking that the performance continues and is not just for the monitored stage. Setting goals for the rest of the quarter or year will help keep motivation high.
I want to note that when you are on a PIP, and it is formally recorded, it will affect your end-of-year performance. Even if you go on to do great things, your performance may be weighed against the earlier PIP you had. This should also ideally be communicated to set expectations for the upcoming Performance Appraisal. We don’t want our teams to be surprised by the result.
Alternatively, an employee failing a PIP will likely lead to an official warning letter. These letters help the company gather evidence to end the employment relationship. However, regulations differ from country to country, so I cannot generalize here.
Using Performance Reviews
Using performance reviews to escalate low performance is very common across the industry. This comes down to the fact that many managers seek to avoid conflict until they have to. Perhaps the managers avoid reviewing performances until they have to. This is a terrible practice.
- It sets up missed expectations, as we touched on earlier. They will be caught by surprise.
- You have left an underperformer in your team.
- Likely, the whole team will suffer from ineffective performance because of them. i.e. Missed team goals.
Sometimes, managers don’t know the bar. They don’t know engineers’ expectations at each level, and calibration across the company is required to diagnose and fix these errors. Missing the bar typically happens when a new manager or new expectations/career frameworks are in place.
It is a hard place for a manager to be in when they don’t know they have an underperformer. Ideally, the manager would have read about the expectations and looked for similar people within their group to understand how their team should perform. From now on, this manager needs to own the new rating and communicate the behaviours that need to change.
The other tricky thing about using performance reviews to manage people is that money is at stake. It’s not just their job but also their bonus money and raises. People are funny when it comes to compensation. If you have been giving them no performance feedback and they suddenly get nothing, prepare for that person to poison your team. If things turn sour, they will have to be managed quickly.
Communication
It all comes down to clear communication. You need to set expectations that cannot be misinterpreted. You cannot change someone’s personality, but you can set out to change behaviours. For example, if you give me feedback that I’m too serious, I cannot change that. But if you give me feedback, I don’t smile when greeting people; I can practice and change that.
The more frequent your run-ins and private conversations are with the person, the more likely they will be encouraged to perform better (anecdotally, from my experience – no study behind it that I know of). So, you must ensure you follow up on the conversation and performance feedback. You need to note when good behaviour change has happened and when it is repeated. Stick to what you see and not what you think happened.
Under Performing Leaders
Another topic I want to touch upon briefly is leadership underperformance. This can be tricky to spot, but it needs to be corrected as soon as possible to reduce the damage to your organization. An underperforming leader can let down their entire team and their network of peers.
Leaders are trained to give feedback and have hard conversations (hopefully). However, we should be mindful that they aren’t trained to receive feedback. This can be challenging, especially when the underperformance is vague and based on soft skills without hard evidence.
One method you can use to detect underperforming managers is talking with their subordinates and peers. This 360 feedback will help guide you to a better picture. If everyone on the team is struggling and the team is missing project release dates, you know there’s something up. Usually, this 360 feedback is part of the end-of-year performance review, but you should actively seek feedback throughout the year.
Another way to spot an underperforming leader is if their team has a lot of underperformers and/or missed expectations. Poor leadership and direction can lead to poor execution. For example, we noticed a manager (under a manager) had a lot of poor performers on his team. When we dug deeper, we found out the manager was not putting in the effort to find new work and set a clear direction for his team. Eventually, this manager was let go, but we also followed up with the manager of this manager to be more hands-on and understand the work his teams were doing.
Be Clear
The point I want to make here is that you need to clarify your expectations. As a manager, you need to set clear boundaries for what good work looks like. As an employee, you need to follow up on the expectations of your role and what that looks like.
You must also be swift with your actions and follow up on any unmet expectations or behaviours. If you are not careful, underperformance can affect your entire organization. Lowering your performance bar will only show others that you don’t care about what they do.
Lastly, remember to be kind and stick to the facts. It’s easy to get caught up in the moment. Remember that everyone on your team is human (for now), and they are usually not intending to perform poorly. Giving direction early can help ease the pressure and reduce the stress for everyone.
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