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.

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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

> With a sense of dread permeating her soul, Greeshma fired up the dashboard to look over Joshua's work. She'd been hopeful that the performance-improvement plan she and Morgan had established for Joshua would give him some solid guidelines on how to improve, but... looking at the numbers and the code commits from the rest of the team, it clearly wasn't taking root. His work continued to be shoddy, and the two-month period of the PIP was over.

Being terminated from your job is one of the worst feelings ever. Perhaps the only thing worse than that feeling is being the one doing the terminating.



When we step back and examine most situations in which an employee needs to be separated from the company, there's really two different kinds of scenarios.


The first is the on-the-spot termination for drastic behavior: Your employee makes a grossly unacceptable comment to another employee. Your employee openly threatens---or worse, carries out---an act of violence against another employee. Your employee tries to access sensitive company information (company secrets or perhaps financial information) that they have absolutely zero right or need to access. There's a variety of situations, usually described in the company handbook written and distributed by HR, that will merit an immediate termination. Much of the time, your job will consist of contacting HR, providing evidence to the misdeed, and allowing them to handle the situation from there. If your employee does something that's even tangentially mentioned in the employee handbook, and particularly anything that touches on race, gender, religion, politics, or any of a half-dozen other sensitive topics, contact HR to see if it's a concern. ***When in doubt, call HR, and follow their lead.***

Having gotten that out of the way, though, these are the rarest sorts of termination scenarios, and (strangely) the most well-documented and well-discussed among HR teams. It's pretty unlikely you'll need to deal with this more than once in your career.
 

The other scenario is the performance-related termination, in which you've steadily tried to guide, then warn, your employee to improve their performance, all for naught. You've worked with them to craft the performance improvement plan (PIP), but the individual still isn't measuring up, and now... it's time.


> **Layoffs.**
> Truthfully, there's a third scenario, in which you are required to lay some of your people off due to a larger, executive decision from above you. Usually this is something that you will find out because your boss hands down the requirement, and often there will be some additional considerations around that---sometimes who needs to be laid off will be a part of the message, for example, or what criteria needs to be used for selecting who gets laid off. This is a little outside the scope of this course, since we're considering performance management here, but suffice it to say that having to terminate somebody whose performance has actually met your expectations is a fair sight worse than firing somebody whose performance hasn't. About the only positive thing to say about it is that usually the terminated individual doesn't hold you personally responsible for it, and that means you can take them out for a beer after work and commiserate together.


Get introduced to different scenarios under which the termination process might need to be initiated. 

Introduction

Get introduced to different scenarios under which the termination process might need to be initiated.

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

Introduction