TPM’s work spans multiple teams and projects; it is not rare to come across under-performing team members. Your impact and influence may vary significantly viz a viz these under-performing teams/workers. For this article, we will focus mostly on the engineers in the immediate team(s) or squads that a TPM is leading. Depending on the organizational structure and your responsibilities, some of the techniques discussed below can be extended to partners.

Below are some best practices to follow when you ‘feel’ like you may be dealing with an under-performance situation:

Management Perspective:

Performance Calibration: Performance is determined by multiple factors. It involves career stage, opportunity, project complexity, team dynamics etc. Expectations from team members are different based on their level and seniority. It is important to not compare people across different career stage profiles as that may throw you off. Enough evidence should be in place before labeling anyone an underperformer. Someone’s career is at stake and getting labelled as an underperformer can shake employee confidence.

Partnership with People Manager (EM): TPM and EM need to be on the same page regarding under-performance of an engineer as handling of this situation can get tricky if there is significant difference of opinion between them. EM can share if a resource is being re-skilled, ramping up or going through a personal challenge impacting the performance. EM may also have a plan to bring the performance to the optimum level. To an extent, underperforming engineer is a ding to the EM because it raises flags on the hiring process, EM’s ability to grow people and the overall management style. Knowledge of this sensitivity will help you navigate these waters better!

Holistic Evaluation: Performance has multiple aspects; individual performance is only a portion of it.  Employee should be holistically evaluated on individual performance, leveraging other team members as well as being leveraged by others to achieve project objectives.

Employee Perspective:

To get to the root cause of the performance problem, you can use following criteria:

Clarity: Does the employee have clear understanding of what is expected from him/her? When multiple people are working on a project, it may get a bit hazy on individual responsibilities and accountabilities. EM and TPM need to partner to make sure the employee has clear direction on the deliverables and timelines. In case a resource is working on multiple projects then having an idea of relative time division between the two is good e.g. an employee may be 70% allocated to one project and remaining 30% allocated to the other.

Competence: Does the employee have competence to do the job? Does the current skillset match with project requirements? Is reskilling needed?  Will any Training/ Knowledge Transfer or Initial hand holding help to get the employee going. Mentorship and Coaching from senior coworkers can also be very helpful.

Enablement: Does the employee have the tools and resources to do the work? Has the initial onboarding been done properly? Has the employee been successful in setting of the environment? Does he/she have access to all security groups, code repositories, SharePoint/Confluence Sites, Agile Tools, Cloud resources etc.

Motivation: Is the employee motivated to do the job? Does she understand the big picture and how her work may impact it? Are there enough rewards to motivate the employee? It is critical to keep the employees motivated for optimum productivity and motivators vary significantly between employees.

As part of the continuous improvement philosophy, teams should always be working on raising the bar. It is ok to have a stack ranking within the team as it may come handy in case of budget cuts and you must let some team members.  Just because someone is at the bottom of the stack ranking doesn’t mean he/she is an underperformer.

Every team is different, and performance is relative, so a good performer may slide to the bottom of stack ranking if rest of the team is constituted by over achievers. Keeping things in perspective, focusing on the big picture and dealing with empathy are critical while handling any underperforming employees.