[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.