How to Help Underperformers 📉
On systemic performance, the accountability dial, feedback, and the underperformance checklist.
Every week I decide what to write about taking into account requests I receive via email and on the community.
For a good while now, one of the most frequent asks has been about underperformers, and how to help them get back on track. This request is two-sided:
As a manager — you are bound to have some reports that don’t match your expectations. That’s where you pull your weight. There is nothing more rewarding than working with them to turn things around and see them blossom into awesome professionals.
As an individual — you may feel like you are struggling sometimes. You may be stressed, disengaged, or don’t know exactly what is expected of you.
I want to help with this. So this article will cover:
📈 Performance is systemic — an opinionated take on what performance is and where it comes from.
📉 How to address underperformance — let’s talk about good feedback, the accountability dial, and how to catch bad things early and gradually.
📋 Underperformance checklist — if you had enough of the theory, we wrap up with a list of practical questions you may ask yourself to figure out where the problem is.
📚 Resources — as always, more articles and points of view to learn more.
Let’s dive in!
📈 Performance is systemic
You can’t call someone an underperformer till you have a definition of a “performer”
— Hasitha Pathiraja, Senior EM at Shopify
Once of the most frequent mistakes in dealing with underperformers is not to address issues early, when they are easier to solve.
In many cases, this happens because it is not 100% clear what is expected of people, so, conversely, managers can’t easily point their finger at what is not working.
Good performance is about matching (or exceeding) expectations about some behaviour or output. In situations where there is clarity about these and people are put in the condition to go after them, underperformance is rare.
In fact, I believe 80% of performance is systemic, rather than individual. There is a lot of talk around finding 10x engineers, but we should rather focus on building 10x teams.
Great teams make great engineers, while the opposite is not always true.
Great performance is enabled by several factors, that work like layers of a pyramid, each building on top of the previous one 👇
1) Culture 🌟
Culture is a broad word. In this context, I refer to the principles and values that the company embodies.