Review the Situation

First off, keep an open mind. As much as it may be tempting to come up with a simple solution: “This is just a bad attitude” or “Clearly they lack the passion to work here,” most people are vastly more complex than that, and most of the time it’s a multi-layered scenario going on. Don’t fall victim to the fundamental attribution error, wherein if you do something, you have a good reason, but if somebody else does something, it’s because of who they are: unintelligent, or just a jerk. Remember to think about the circumstances and context, and not just ascribe the reason behind someone’s actions entirely to their personality.

Secondly, make sure you can describe—with supporting evidence—how long it’s been going on. The “supporting evidence” part here is important, because it’s all too easy to fall into a trap of allowing our own fallible memories to serve as a self-reinforcing bias. “Dang, Darcy was late today. Seems like he’s been late a lot—remember when he was always late six months ago?” What your brain isn’t tracking is the fact that Darcy has also been on time—or early—the past six months, ever since he got a new car, and that this is just the random blip that we would excuse from any other employee. You need to make sure you’re looking at evidence, not just your memory, when you look to see how long this is going on. Again, your metrics will help with this, and if you spot something, jotting it down in your notes can help spot patterns rather than letting your memory “fill in the gaps” erroneously.

Third, it’s time for a more formal sit-down with your employee to try and investigate what’s going on. You can choose to get HR involved or not, but generally for this conversation I choose not to—I want the opportunity to have an informal conversation, just the two of us, to try and clear the air or do some research. This can either be as part of one of your 1:1s or a separately-scheduled meeting, depending on how much “weight” you want to attach to the meeting. In truth, you’ll probably be doing smaller versions of this meeting in your regular 1:1s leading up to this moment, but sometimes it helps to put a “Performance discussion” meeting on the books so your report begins to sense that you’re “getting serious” about their performance. (Happily, or perhaps sadly, sometimes all it takes is that signal for employees to realize they need to make some adjustments.)

Within this meeting, you generally want to spend about 25% of the time talking, and the rest listening. Ask questions like:

• How well are you handling your current workload?
• Do you see any areas where your performance could improve?
• Do you see how your work benefits others or the organization?
• Is there something “going on” outside of work?
• Do you feel optimistic about your future with the company?
• Do you feel optimistic about the company’s future?
• What frustrates you about your job? Are there areas that you feel ill-equipped to handle?
• Do you feel like you’re playing to your strengths?
• What part of your job do you enjoy and feel the most satisfaction from?

Your goal here is to understand the situation, not find a solution. This will be hard, because as an engineer, you’ll want to dive into working on a solution right away—resist. Give it time. You may need to do some research before you can come up with something. If, for example, your direct mentions that they’re wrestling with aging parents moving into a care facility, for example, your first inclination may be to immediately let them take the time off to help Mom and Dad get settled, but hold off for just a day or two to give yourself time to talk to HR and see what programs the company may offer in a situation like this. Or, if your direct report tells you they’re unexpectedly pregnant, HR may have some medical and/or psychological support they can offer. Your natural inclination will be to want to help—and that’s a good thing—but if you promise something that the company doesn’t offer, you could be putting yourself in a legal bind that could create more problems.

Sometimes the poor performance stems from deep miscommunication about what the employee expected the job to be and the reality of what the job is. If they were expecting that they would be able to own an entire project by themselves, for example, and you’ve got your whole team working on one feature within a much larger software package, that’s not going to fix itself anytime soon. The employee is going to need to decide if they can adjust their expectations, and/or you will need to decide if you can meet them, or if the two of you can meet somewhere in the middle. Getting “inside their head” is an important part of this conversation. (And if you see a regular pattern of misaligned expectations, it may be time to have a long chat with your recruiters and/or whomever is managing the job descriptions!)

Above all, stress to your employee—and to yourself—that your goal here is to work with your employee to get their performance back to an acceptable level. You’re not here to punish them, you’re here to join forces to figure out what the obstacle is and overcome it. You are partners in this struggle. They will need to “do the work,” as the psychologists say, but your job is to help get them the resources, find the allies, create the space, and/or provide the moral support that will help them be successful in turning this around.