[Yhippa]

> and when they are being under productive (not challenging their own self perceived limitations)

I'm a fairly new manager and I'm working really hard on how to word something like this to my devs. Do you have any advice for that?

[effhaa]

Be honest with them, and MUCH more important: Be kind, when discussing this. Something along the lines of 'Hey, I realized that something seems to be off since a while, is there anything I can help or change, because I really want you to be happy and productive' works best for me.

Pretty much everyone wants to be recognized, happy and productive in their lives, and this usually extends in their jobs, so most likely, that person needs help, to recognize or solve the situation.

Sometimes, they just dread for whatever reason the task they have ahead of them, and need someone to talk to. Sometimes it is some time to solve a challenge in their live outside of work - then it might be your job to shield that person to some extent, while also making sure this does not take a toll on your remaining team. Sometimes it is a social problem in your team. Sometimes the assignments for that person dont match what they can and want to do. And of course, sometimes the team, the job, or the company is just no fit, and it is perfectly fine to help there as well.

But again, above all: When talking about this, when trying to help, keep in mind that you are the manager, which always implies a power imbalance, no matter what. Such can easily be perceived as a threat instead of help, and if it is perceived like that, you will make the situation just worse. So be kind, listen, try to coach and help, even if your inner self is annoyed with this. It rarely helps to play the testosterone driven top-down approach, unless, of course, you tried the other ways before with no success.

[ChuckMcM]

It is something you have to develop an intuition for.

There are two very different areas that you might find yourself in with performance management, employees that slow down, and ones that never speed up.

The first is an employee who was getting lots done and always could be counted on that becomes slower and less reliable. If you have developed trust with your employees then they will be more likely to share with you something going on that has changed or otherwise effected their work effectiveness. I have experienced situations where spouses have become quite ill and needed more attention, and people who have had their teenage kids take a hard turn down an unproductive, if not destructive path. If it is situational then you work with your employee to rebalance their needs, they may need to take some time off to find a new equilibrium or get things into a new normal. Give them the space, and let them find their new groove. If on the other hand it isn't a situational thing, perhaps they just don't like what they are doing any more or, as one of my reports discovered, they like doing something else better (in this case music), the right thing to do is to help them move on to that new activity. That can be really hard if they are hoping the can work part time on a full time salary while pursuing this new passion of theirs, at the end of the day you need people who are as committed to working for you as you are in managing them to be successful in their job.

The other situation is someone who is exhibits potential but keeps holding themselves back. Intel used "managing by objectives" and their mantra was if you met all of your objectives you probably had not set a high enough bar. The tool here is to talk with them about what needs to be done and when, push them out of their comfort zone, and then watch closely how that works out. Keep in mind that the goal isn't to get someone to work 60 hrs a week (this will burn them out), the goal is to work with them so that they can make as much of the time at work productive. I really only have seen this reliably in new college graduates. They have study skills but not "design" skills.

A session might be like this; Start by giving them a task and a deadline, ask them to identify as many different series of steps (plans) that they think will get them from today to done. Then ask them how they might recognize that a plan isn't working. Once they have that in their head they can go forward on the chosen route, and ideally let you know if they discover it was a dead end. If it was, talk about how it ended up becoming blocked and think about some ways you might test at the beginning if that was going to be the case. All of this hand holding at first is to train someone to think about solving problems where there isn't a "known solution" sitting in some grading manual somewhere. Engineers need to develop an intuition about the "design space" things can be pushed and things that can't, and how those freedoms or constraints are going to make it easier or harder to get done what they need to get done. These are the kinds of things you will end up talking with them about in your 1:1's.

Always remember, that because we're talking about people here and not machines, they all respond a bit differently, have different reasons for being there, and different definitions of success or failure. Your job as their manager is to translate things the company needs to get done, into requests that your team can deliver.