Ask the Geezers

When is the Time for a Weak Performer to 'Time-Out'?

Question: I have a team member who is "hopeless". I have given him chances but he hasn't made significant progress at all. I can't hire his replacement because all our head-counts are frozen. What should I do?

Amiram: If you take no action you will
1. not get the work done,
2. may face a morale issue with the team ("why should I work so hard when others can get away with poor performance?"),
3. lose respect from the team members for the inability to "make things right".
Bottom line: poor performance should not be tolerated regardless of hiring freeze.

As a manager, you have a variety of actions to take: from an improvement plan all the way to management initiated separation. Taking no action at all is not a good idea.

Sin-Yaw: Remember that your own time and energy is a precious commodity that you must manage too. A good manager allocates most resources to the project, or person, that gives him or her the most returns. He or she continues this investment strategy until all the resources are allocated. Whatever is left gets nothing.

It is not smart to allocate your time and energy on a person who is not giving back commensurate productivity. If you "cut your losses", your team's average productivity goes up. That's a good thing. Show your "management courage".

Mike: The first thing to think about is how much the person has invested in their work. Are they taking responsibility for their own behavior? At Sun, an individual's career is more than half their own responsibility. A person's ability to progress depends on how they can drive their own career plans. We are not a company where people are told what they need to do.

Secondly, the manager has to assess the situation and make sure that when they are giving someone an opportunity, they don't give them something too big, or too small, or something that is not spelled out correctly. They have to give the person challenges that he can handle.

If you have really done every thing including giving them appropriate opportunities, coaching, and explaining why they are not performing, and they are still not improving, you will eventually have to manage them out.

Some managers might think it is better to have an under-performer in the team than have that under-performer removed. But the under-performer will be draining the team's productivity. You are better off having managed them out than having that one drag the whole team down.

It's almost never that a person is a zero contributor. They are either positive contributor or negative contributor. What you want is to invest money, effort and reward on the positive contributors and manage the negative contributors out.

Posted at 08:03AM Feb 28, 2007 by Wen Michelle Lei in General  |  Comments[1]