alt Hacker NewsSome good advice. It’s missing one of the most difficult topics: Performance Management.
Most first-time managers have already read a lot of advice about being humble, delegating, celebrating your team’s wins, and the other feel good topics.
If you want to write internet advice that gets upvoted and shared you almost have to avoid the difficult conversation topics and assume that the team is full of perfect people that the manager just needs to serve.
I’m in a semi-private peer group for managers and the number one most common struggle for new managers is their first encounter with employees who aren’t working unless a manager is standing over their shoulder, or who are causing problems within the team. Books like “The Managers Path” can help, but in my experience the best help is to find a more experienced manager you can talk to for advice. A lot of the difficult realities of managing people are messy or even painful and are often intentionally avoided in feel-good internet advice.
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It's a good point but I'll add the problem is also the system/incentives of whatever org you are in.
Some shops its easy enough to manage someone out and bring in a new team member who will contribute more. This is a health environment and generally free of the boom-bust hire/fire cycle.
Other shops have very top down hire/fire cycles where if you fire someone now you have no ability to replace them, and worse yet.. when you HAVE to fire someone, you want the low performer around to hit your metrics..
So a lot of shops carry around a lot of dead weight for different reasons, as long as the person is not a net negative contributor.
Aside from that, yeah, how to deal with poor performers is as much an art as a science. I often find, aside from exceptional cases, most of them actually have some part of the job they prefer & are good at, so modifying the task allocation can go a long way.
For anyone struggling with this:
https://www.manager-tools.com/map-universe/hall-fame-highly-...
This podcast has made me a 10x better manager.
Good starters:
- https://www.manager-tools.com/2007/04/effective-hiring-set-t...
- https://www.manager-tools.com/2008/03/the-management-trinity...
- https://www.manager-tools.com/2010/01/how-manage-arrogant-pr...
- https://www.manager-tools.com/2008/02/the-management-trinity...
- https://www.manager-tools.com/2018/06/manager-tools-onboardi...
In today's corporate world, it can be difficult or impossible to fire people. It's important to understand that actually removing someone from the organization is a totally separate problem from managing the performance of the team.
People who don't contribute or cause problems need to be sequestered as much as possible. Don't let them bring down the rest of the team. I think "managed out" is the term that's being used now. That is a skill that a manager of any level can use to keep their team performing even when they don't have the authority to remove someone, or the process to remove someone is many months long.
Agree 100%.
This is the difficult conversation template I put together and use:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gHyfR0XAc5ehRoqRImV1yAFh...
Performance management is challenging and has been a problem with my previous managers. I point out that person X is not doing their job well, not reviewing PRs (stamping LGTM on everything after about 30 seconds), writing buggy code, writing zero tests, no updating existing tests, not responsive to communication, not receptive to feedback. "I'll talk to him." No change. Two months later, I have the same discussion.
Agile Coach / Scrum Master chiming in - I switched from an engineering position to this more people-centric role, and completely agree with you.
What I find fascinating about this is how predictable people become once you know the different personalities and their nuances. It helps tremendously to also be interested in getting to know people. And yes, you will encounter people that are disruptive. Usually, and I can only speak for my environment, the team itself is quite good at handling that. I just need to give them room and provide a setting where they can talk about the issues at hand on a constructive base.
That's why I love my job, and it may sound weird - but I'm the guy who can ask all the obvious questions that come to mind and others don't dare to ask. I love that I can build myself a toolbox to use in different (and difficult) situations. And I love to see my team succeed on the one hand, and learn from failure on the other.
Yeah, went down that road too. It's really emotionnally difficult/grinding. And I still don't have a clue: you have to find how each person behaves. Lots of talk, influence, repeating the same thing every day, etc. Unfortunately, I've never taken any pleasure in doing that, it was just difficult and exhausting to me...
Your insight is true enough that almost every recruiter asks a manager "have you PIP'd someone before?" in the first phone screen. It's a hard experience that some junior managers cannot, or will not, do for a variety of reasons.
IMHO, besides the messiness, performance management is unspeakable because people generally hate authority. We've all had bad experiences with authority figures. We're also told many fantasies about the morality of groups of people. If the people are blameless, then the the fault lies with the manager who resembles (or opposes) our teacher, our parents, our government. And so forth.
I use to subconsciously think that until I learned, the hard way, it was irresponsible blame-shifting. A recent HN discussion demonstrated some of those dynamics at play https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42273798
It also can be very awkward when you're chosen for a promotion over someone who has been there longer for you. Suddenly you're managing and giving reviews to someone who was sitting next to you for years. I went through this but was extremely lucky that I had a wonderful mentor. It wasn't a big deal, but the first performance review, while it went well, definitely felt strange.
Isnt this just the definition of check-ins? Simply document how many check-ins have not had progress and be done, no need to stand over anybody's shoulder
just ordered "The Managers Path" because of your post here, looking forward to read it.
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This is really nice. I've been doing this for quite a while (and also ping pong ic-em and back). Oh and I've also been "the" poor performer. A couple of observations:
1. Performance management is never easy and I don't think it should be. I don't mean the technique or process of it bit the mental weighing of it. You are affecting a person's livelihood so you don't want to approach it robotically always (despite what the hr training tells you about it not being personal etc)
2. This is a big one. Performance has a huge under rated aspect that is environmental and circumstantial. I've seen really strong performers drop and fail because of personal situations and not being able (or rather not given the space and bandwidth to recover organically). And similarly those with a poor perf in one company go to a supposedly "higher tier" company and really thrive and sky rocket.
Management is really a mixed bag. I loved the coaching, direction setting, strategy, etc but always having to sell opaque higher up decisions as your own and being an inverted $hit umbrella for leadership can be draining. I guess the solution is to just join executive leadership ha.