Handling performance problems with curiosity and empathy
Dealing with situations when someone is not performing as expected or needed– when for instance their work is not prompt enough, or high-quality enough, or broad-scope enough for their role or for their team– is one of the commonest things I get asked about as a coach, and one of the hardest things we do as managers. We’re usually quite bad at it, frankly. But if you’re asking yourself “this person might have a performance problem, should I intervene?” the answer is almost always yes. Even flawed intervention is better than none, and the vast majority of the time, when managers I know look back on low-performance situations, we wish we’d acted earlier.
You’ll note that I take care to speak of low performance as a situation or behavior, not an attribute or identity of a person. Even as managers are too slow to address low performance, we are too quick to pigeonhole people as “low performers,” which can bias and demoralize both employee and manager. Labeling people so generically makes it harder for you to get curious about their specific circumstances. And that curiosity is key to effective performance management, because the world is complicated and performance problems can have widely varying causes.
To craft an effective course of action, you need to have a meeting of minds with the employee on the reality and importance of the problem. Ask yourself:
Is the employee self-aware? Would they themselves agree, if asked compassionately but forthrightly, that they’ve fallen short? Or would they be unpleasantly surprised to hear your verdict on their performance? If you’re not sure, an open-ended “how do you think your work has gone lately” question in a 1-1 is a fine place to start. I find that in most cases people are self-aware, and often relieved to have you say what they may have been afraid to admit, especially if you lead with a clearly expressed intent to help fix it. But sometimes you have to reset, or restate, or renegotiate expectations to align on what needs fixing.
Does the employee understand the consequences of their underperformance– and can you express them clearly? Can you readily say, “you didn’t deliver feature X by date Y as agreed, and that held up release Z by N weeks” or similarly concrete things? Before a difficult low performance conversation, you want to be sure you can articulate your judgment in the “Situation-Behavior-Impact” feedback model. This is important for:
Avoiding unnecessary blame that can cause friction and demoralization
Making your feedback actionable and motivating
Starting a formal feedback record that your organization may require for performance plans and/or termination, if it comes to that.
Framing the issue in terms of impact on co-workers the employee respects, or on an inspiring team mission they’ve bought into, can be particularly helpful here. In engineering jobs as elsewhere, team camaraderie and mission devotion are perhaps the most powerful motivators we know.
Now if you and the employee agree there is a problem which really needs fixing, how can you dig into causes enough to know what to do? Here are some general areas to investigate:
What blockers does the employee think affect their performance, and could they be more empowered to unblock or route around them? It is surprisingly common even for fairly senior engineers to lack a sense of agency to address their own blockers. Often they have unarticulated assumptions about what is “just not done,” or fears about the risks they’d take in doing it, which you need to dispel. It can be liberating, for example, to let them know that you’d rather they make some mistakes trying hard to unblock themselves than stay blocked and delay deliverables.
What does the employee’s social support structure at work look like? What collaborative relationships do they have? What are their regular opportunities to interact with others? People feeling siloed and/or “lost” is another super common cause of low performance, and guiding them to better mentors, reviewers, etc. can help address that. Relationship building is also critical to having enough “accountability buddies” to feel socially motivated. All this goes double for people working remotely rather than in-office together, and triple for those working many timezones away from other team members.
What else is going on in the employee’s life that you may not know about? What might be taking their head out of the game, so to speak? All kinds of outside factors can impact a person’s productivity. It’s often emotionally difficult for an employee to volunteer information to their manager in those situations, so inquiring kindly and respectfully, out of genuine concern for their welfare, can be crucial. Some common issues include:
Family or other personal relationship troubles
Problems with the employee’s health or a loved one’s health
Finally, you have to know what you want out of a plan to fix the issue. This is the time to be unsparingly honest with yourself about how much you value that employee remaining on the team– which is not the same as how much you value or esteem them as a person. It takes effort on your part, not just the employee’s part, to turn around a performance problem. Will you be motivated to make that effort? How would the difficulty, risk, and reward of addressing the current employee’s performance compare to that of finding a replacement? The higher the stakes are for your team or company, the more your self-awareness on those questions matters.
Getting clear on the questions above probably won’t make your job easy, but it’ll greatly increase the chances that both you and the employee will be happy with the outcome. I’ve been on all sides of this: not only have I dealt with low performance among my reports, and mentored managers on my teams who struggled with their low-performing reports, I’ve been the low-performing employee myself. The above guidance represents the most important things I would have wanted in all those positions. I hope it helps you whichever position you find yourself in.
And as always, if you’d like more specific guidance from me on your particular situation, the first step is to set up a free intro chat at calendly.com/nweininger!
