Gain insights into performance management for engineering teams. Discover how to set clear expectations, design performance metrics, and provide constructive feedback to enhance team productivity and accountability.

Performance Management for Engineering Management.png

A manager is responsible for assigning tasks to the team members, keeping tabs on the progress, and analyzing their performance. A good manager must know their strengths and use them accordingly.

This course covers the essentials of performance management in engineering teams. You’ll learn the importance of setting clear expectations and the difference between individual and collective accountability. You’ll learn the importance of performance metrics and design them for your team. Next, you’ll explore ways to keep your team motivated and provide each team member with constructive feedback. You’ll learn how to decide when to let a team member go, including planning for a successor.

By the end of this course, you’ll have learned to apply processes and practices to monitor the performance of your team. You’ll be able to provide timely and constructive feedback to your team, including performance reviews. In addition, you’ll be able to balance a team with members having varying performances and competencies.

Effective Performance Management for Engineering Teams

Once you've created your clear expectations, make sure your team sees them on a regular basis. Put them into documentation the team can refer to regularly, post the rubric (if you've made one) for each expectation, reference the expectations as part of your regular 1:1s with each employee, and so on. Ideally, work with your HR partners to have these expectations be a part of the job description (the one posted to the Careers page of your company's website or on job sites like LinkedIn) so that incoming candidates know the expectations for the role from the very beginning. (Having clear expectations is going to help immensely with interviewing candidates, too, but that is the subject of a different course.) 

Wherever they end up, remember this: "Document, document, document." Not only will it make it easier on you---try juggling seven different sets of expectations and goals in your head and you'll quickly see the value of writing it down!---but also it will help identify any gaps in your shared understanding. As a bonus, it acts as a written record that stays with the employee. When you leave your current seat running this team, somebody else will step in. If that new manager is going to have any reasonable chance of success in their first performance review with their new team, they need to know the goals and standard(s) against which your team was measuring themselves all along. (We'll talk more about succession planning in another course.)

Periodically review these expectations to make sure they're still relevant. Personally, I recommend reviewing the expectations with your employees as part of their performance review, as a way to get their buy-in for the *next* performance review cycle. If your employees disagree strongly with the expectations, it's important to hear their concerns and look for ways to reconcile the differences and/or adjust the expectations as necessary. Review them with your peers---both those inside the company and those from the outside---to see what other teams are doing and expecting. Review them with your boss, too, so that your boss is aware of, and can provide support for, the decisions you're making or can provide suggestions to bring your thinking more in line with the rest of the company's.

Remember, a building's longevity rests in its foundation, and the foundation of a successful performance review program is in the expectations you set for the team. All the performance improvement plans or promises of promotion in the world won't mean a thing if your team members don't know by what standard they're being measured. Your own performance will be measured in large part by theirs, so giving them the best tools to succeed will help you do so as well.


Remember this advice when you're creating and sharing your clear expectations.

Introduction

Overview of Performance Management

The Need for Clear Expectations

Accountability

Metrics

Motivation

Feedback

Performance Reviews

Corrections

Termination/Separation

Rewards

The Development of Talent

Conclusion

Advice for When You Apply These Ideas