[xivzgrev]

As a manager I’m going thru performance management myself. It’s a hard experience.

What I learned is: you need to hold a high bar, because people can do anything to keep their job, and often not what you want them to do

What you want is someone who is open to feedback, understands it, and takes effective action.

Outside of that, there’s a whole gamut of people. Some get defensive. Some are politely open to feedback but don’t actually try to understand. Some understand but don’t care enough to follow thru. And some try hard but aren’t effective. All of that is bad for your team, and unlikely to change. Just need to cut your losses to open your seat for someone who can do it.

The current person i have is open to feedback, but doesn’t fully understand it and doesn’t care to. It’s like dragging a horse to water. After doing that for six months my manager pointed that out, it’s just not a good fit. I like to see the best in people, and even a little bit of improvement gives me hope. But it’s dragging down our team potential. It’s a hard truth.

[Esophagus4]

Well said.

And what I’ve found is your team knows who is and who is not performing. And if you fail to do something about the low performer under the guise of being a nice person (or hoping they’ll eventually figure it out), your team will lose respect for you.

A team of high performers does not want to have to carry along a straggler, no matter how nice they are.

In my experience, I wish I’d made those hard decisions sooner in hindsight, rather than hoping they’d get where I wanted them to be.

It can create some weird unintended consequences though. Like if people know you regularly manage out low performers, they might be risk averse to try something difficult for fear of failing and losing their job. They need to be able to see exactly why someone didn’t make the cut.

It’s a difficult line, especially when complicated by blunt corporate incentives like stack ranking and PIP’ing the bottom 10%, etc where it can be less than clear sometimes.

[cheschire]

I would much rather work for a place where the culture allows people to be humans, and 1x and 10x people can coexist under the same management.

But hey I am judging off of basically one sentence you wrote so what do I really know about your situation?

[giingyui]

You are not being paid by a company “to be human”. You are being paid to produce. If you don’t produce it makes sense they don’t want to pay you, especially if it’s easy to find someone else to produce in your place.

[piva00]

You've perfectly described why most corporations get low-engagement employees producing whatever is asked without much questioning because they simply don't care. You pay me, I produce what you asked, no matter how shit it is since I'm not paid to be a human with qualities that could produce something better.

It's a two-way street.