The further someone is off the pace, the easier it is to handle their low performance. This is as true for you as it is for your managers. In this article I run through the performance management gap that comes as a result, why managers rarely take action without prompting, and why you need to build a culture that is willing to act autonomously.

The low performance management gap

Clear cases of underperformance are often handled by managers without prompting. Less clearcut, marginal cases of underperformance present a greater problem IMO:

1. The majority of low performance cases are marginal, not clearcut
2. Marginal cases have a less obvious negative impact
3. Marginal cases are much harder to deal with

Where the difficulty to action it is much higher, and the perceived negative impact of leaving things alone much lower (‘…they’re only just off pace’), it’s no surprise that managers need prompting for the majority of low performance cases. In low trust environments, this can be obscured or ‘umbrella’d’ by managers who want to avoid any processes for their own sake as well as the individual.

What makes these situations hard?

It’s first important to distinguish between consistent low performers and individuals who experience temporary performance dips. Marginal low performance refers to individuals consistently falling just below expectations, making it harder to address due to the subtle nature of their underperformance:

• Harder to justify a need to take action to yourself
• Harder to quantify and communicate the issue to the individual
• Harder to progress beyond continual feedback / never-ending target setting
• Harder to align the team after cases of dismissal

The 80/20 rule and root of low performance

80% of low performers are <20% off the pace (MLPs). This comes about for three key reasons:

• Interview accuracy: Interviews typically identify clear mismatches, but no interview is perfect and MLP’s will get through. This especially where hiring is rushed.
• Team/business growth: As teams and businesses expand, the average performance level tends to rise. This can lead to previously satisfactory performers becoming MLPs as the team’s standards increase. Everything should be done to give existing engineers the opportunity to grow with the business, but not everyone is motivated to do so.
• Individual circumstance: There are many reasons why an individual can become demotivated/jaded/unproductive over time. Maybe it’s the third pivot they’ve seen and they just aren’t fired up about the new direction. Again, it’s on the manager to do everything to keep them onboard, but sometimes a gradual mismatch develops.

If you are in a growth business (startup/scaleup), these three things will happen. There is no avoiding it no matter how much effort you put into hiring / developing / motivating individuals. All three lead to marginal, rather than clear cut, low performance.

The impact: Long term downward trajectory

Hiring or maintaining MLPs will ultimately lead to a downward trajectory for the performance and morale of your team. This come from a few places:

• Simple maths: The aggregate performance of your team is lower.
• Fairness: Low performers increase the pressure on everyone else.
• Team cohesion: A large in-team spread in performance will lead to division.
• Talent retention: Great engineers want to work with other great engineers.
• Leadership burden: Low performers will take a disproportionate amount of your time, and cause you a disproportionate amount of stress.
• Eroded Trust: Inaction by managers can erode the trust of disgruntled team members who have to compensate for low performers.

The motivation gap

For managers I’ve worked with, knowing the above doesn’t typically drive action alone. We’re all broadly aware of it, this isn’t news, the same way we all know certain foods are bad for us.

Much like an unhealthy diet, an awareness of potential and incremental issues in the future won’t always motivate difficult healthy behaviours now. Especially when that long term issue could be considered:

• Marginal on aggregate: a ~20% reduction in overall team effectiveness
• Indirect: Ultimately a problem for the business, not for me
• Opaque: Not immediately obvious to external stakeholders

Finding real motivation

For a rare few, long term business success can form enough of a motivation by itself to face short term discomfort and manage MLPs on a continual basis. I’ve found that this motivation generally diminishes the further removed you are from the founders/C-suite.

For most, I’ve found that more direct and immediate motivations are needed, that touch on more immediate, tangible and personal concerns. Namely a manager’s care for others, sense of fairness, personal growth and fear of tangible outcomes. To this end, I like to keep four motivations in mind, outlined below.

1) The stress on the individual

At a past leaving do, a high performing developer came up and started chatting. You will never get a more honest appraisal than an inebriated high performer on your final day, this man had nothing to lose... He proceeded to identify every MLP in the team and talk to an overall drop in quality. It transpired that this was a regular discussion topic among a certain disgruntled sub-group.

I have never held a low performance discussion where the individual themself was not aware, at least in part, of some dissatisfaction with their performance among stakeholders or peers.

People are exceptionally perceptive, assume everyone already knows.

The cruelest thing a manager can do is to leave someone in a position where they are overwhelmed, know they are off the pace and know that their peers are also (silently) aware. Hesitation to act is often mistaken for kindness, compassion or grace. But it is dishonest not to address the situation and unkind not to help guide or support the individual through it.

If you truly care about this individual, your primary goal should be to get them into a position where they are flourishing. That might not be in the same company.

2) The stress imposed on others

If your team has an MLP onboard, one of two things is true:

• Expectations (proportionate to team size) are being missed
• Other team members are picking up the slack

In the more visible latter case, it’s going to be another team member. In the former case, there is someone facing additional pressure elsewhere in the business for the lack of progress against expectations (be it a product lead, sales rep or executive). This is often harder to see directly, but someone always pays.

3) Mass corrections

I have experienced a few ‘mass corrections’ in my time and they are a terrible experience all round. Bad enough never to want to face one ever again, enough to overcome discomfort in the short term.

Mass corrections are times where there is a drastic shift in performance policy, often resulting in a shock clearance of multiple team members in a short space of time. This comes either through layoffs or a step change in performance management culture. In my experience, two events typically trigger these corrections:

• A step change in leadership (e.g. new C-executive)
• A business shift from ‘peacetime’ to ‘wartime’ (see this article)

We’ve recently seen both happen very publicly (FAANG layoffs / Twitter leadership changes etc). But this happens all the time in smaller growth businesses. No startup or scaleup grows without going through market turns, setbacks and subsequent changes in the prioritisation of efficiency.

When this happens the rug is lifted, the long form decline of the team laid bare and drastic action pushed. This is an awful experience for teams and managers alike. For those impacted, the process can be graceless and abrupt. For those staying, their trust in leadership, sense of safety and confidence in the culture often disappears overnight. This can take months or years to recover.

It’s easy to absolve responsibility and paint the exec team as cutthroat in these situations. But this is often made necessary where the efficiency of a team (defined by average performance) has degraded to such an extent that it threatens the continuity of the business. Ultimately this accrued debt is the responsibility of all of management.

Many more positive concepts motivate me to stay on top of performance, but if I’m honest with myself, a fear of mass corrections ranks pretty high.

4) Personal growth and becoming a ‘source’

When I develop leaders and (in particular) senior leaders, I talk about two types of leadership:

• Vector Leadership: Driving established perspectives, opinions and standards
• Source Leadership: Forming and driving personal perspectives, opinions and standards

By its very nature, vector leadership has a glass ceiling in middle management. Standards are set by a higher power and ‘Vectors’ align people on those standards, ensuring they are met. This is the default behaviour for most engineering managers.

Senior / executive leadership is by its very nature a form of source leadership, there is no higher power for your domain, you are the source of all standards.

Source leadership can happen at any level, in any position. A junior engineer could develop their own strong opinion on a particular facet of css formatting and get everyone aligned. This type of leadership is a muscle that needs to be exercised if you want to progress towards senior leadership. Given the high stakes and universal requirement, performance is the best area to exercise and grow this mindset.

In conclusion

Addressing low performance is essential for maintaining team effectiveness and morale. While the challenges of managing marginal low performers may be greater, the long-term negative consequences are arguably the worst. By recognising the motivations that resonate with you the most, whether it be a sincere care for others, fairness, fear of mass corrections, or personal growth, you can find the drive to act independently and ensure that your team’s performance remains on an upward trajectory.\