Dealing with underperformance

It’s not fun, but it needs to be done well, lest the results be terrible…

(Like this article? Read more Wednesday Wisdom!)

A late Wednesday Wisdom this week. Even though it’s still Wednesday where I am, I appreciate that it might be Thursday wherever you are. My apologies. I typically write Wednesday Wisdom over the weekend, but last weekend I instead spent considerable time proof-reading chapters from the upcoming book Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview by (among other people) my friend Aline Lerner from interviewing.io. She’s quoting me in the introductory chapter, so the book is a total winner already 🙂.  She also recently published the ultimate article on DEI in interviewing. Read that after you read this week’s Wednesday Wisdom and don’t forget to preorder the book!

Good morning. Today I want to write about a topic that I find terrible but that nevertheless is very near and dear to my heart: Dealing (well) with underperformance.

Over my career I have tried to save a few underperformers and the results have been, at best, mixed. The reasons for that are mixed too. Of course, some people were beyond saving, but just as important is that at the beginning of this journey I sucked at mentoring and coaching underperformers. From a career perspective, mentoring underperformers is a mixed bag too; given the often less than optimal results, I have never gotten any career recognition for any work with underperformers. Really, the only reason I am doing it is that I actually care about people and I want to help them. 

“Fortunately” (mind the quotes), the fact that I used to be terrible at mentoring underperformers is matched by the fact that most companies and managers are even worse at dealing with them. For years I used to say that one of the reasons we should apply a very high hiring bar was that we were so terrible at firing!

It might seem that companies have recently gotten better at firing people but a lot of them still manage to eff that up. For instance one of my associates found out the other week that he was laid off from his big tech job of over seventeen years (not for performance reasons by the way) from the fact that his badge didn’t work anymore when he came into the office. That is stuff that I had last seen in the early 2000s in the financial district in London. Seems the tech industry is aspiring to meet the same low bar.

Let’s start with some reasons for underperformance. In my experience the reason people don’t always perform as well as others think they should, is typically not that people are not smart enough or cannot code. That is not surprising because, for all of its well-known flaws, that is something that tech interviewing typically manages to figure out. I have read a few interview packets of underperformers and in all cases these were people who were smart and understood computers; it was definitely not a fluke that they got hired.

Instead, underperformance is typically related to the nebulous quality of “getting shit done”. There are a lot of gripes that modern tech interviewing does not test the skills that are important in the workplace and underperformance is where we find that out. The underperformers I worked with were without fail smart and knowledgeable, but failed to deliver results in the actual workplace they found themselves in.

Digging a bit deeper: I often find that problems in the “delivering results” category stem from one or more of the following underlying reasons: Problems in the colleague’s private life, generic lack of motivation, suboptimal work processes, burnout, and, last but not least, bad management and/or a toxic work environment. This list immediately explains why it is so difficult to mentor underperformers back to adequate performance, as at most one-and-a-half of these reasons are something that an outsider can do something about. Actually, the only thing that a mentor can really do something about is helping the underperformer get better work processes; most everything else is outside of the mentor’s control.

In most cases of underperformance there is more than one factor at play. For instance, I once mentored an underperformer with terrible work processes who also suffered tremendously from a wreck of a private life, with an estranged wife and son living abroad in a house that was “under water” (meaning that the outstanding mortgage value was more than the market price of the house). It is not surprising that with that on your mind, performance at work drops.

I remember my own period of divorce and the resulting depression all too well and I could hardly get out of bed in the morning. To survive work-wise, I took a straightforward contract as a Java programmer and eventually took a sabbatical in Spain to recover from it all. These are not times of optimal performance and with the benefit of hindsight I should count myself very lucky that I was not working in the dog-eat-dog world of big tech.

Life tip: In a dog-eat-dog world, be more cat.

In most cases of underperformance there is a general lack of motivation at work. That can come from many places and the aforementioned category of personal problems is definitely one of the possible causes, as it is obviously hard to be motivated to get something done if there are other more pressing issues screaming for your attention.

Another source of lack of motivation is that you just don’t care about the problems the organization is solving. In the magnificent book “The way we are working, isn’t working” Tony Schwartz and his co-authors identify four “types” of energy that sustain our performance. One of these is “Energy of the human spirit” (the book is full of actual science and not woo, I promise). Energy of the human spirit is the energy you get from working on things you care about and that are meaningful to you. If you are working on something that you fundamentally do not care about, or worse, that you fundamentally disagree with, it is hard to get motivated to work on it. And without that motivation, how are you going to suffer through the meetings, code reviews, OKR setting, the yearly-not-to-be-missed employee happiness survey, and all of the other drudgery of modern work life?

Another common cause of low performance is burnout. A lot has been written about burnout and unfortunately, as with most terms, the use of the term has recently suffered from considerable inflation as these days it is often also applied to severe, but otherwise normal, tiredness. A real burnout is a life changing event that lasts for months and that sometimes results in people having to file for disability as their mental capacity to deal with any kind of stress is permanently destroyed.

Specialists recognize three types of burnouts; the one that is most commonly associated with work is the “overload burnout”, which “occurs when you work harder and more frantically [than normal] to achieve success, often to the detriment of your health and personal life” (source). The overload burnout comes about from hard work and getting more done, often leading to temporary stellar performance. But, as pilots know, nothing ever stays up, so eventually the burnout sets in, leading to a level of fatigue that makes it impossible to get anything done.

The most “treatable” cause of underperformance (by the casual mentor, that is) is the use of suboptimal work processes. People who suffer from that often work hard, but they are not getting anything done because they just don’t go about it in the right way, leading to lots of speed but no velocity.

If you are running in circles very fast you have lots of speed but you are not going anywhere anytime soon.

For example: I mentored this colleague who we called “the depth-first guy”. When confronted with a complex problem consisting of multiple things that needed to be done, he tended to dive down one branch of the tree and stay there, optimizing the hell out of the sub-problem that he was focused on, never to come back up again. Whenever we would ask how he was doing with the entire problem he would say that he hadn’t made progress on these other five things that needed to be done because his work on the first item was still not perfect. This specific problem is something that can potentially be interviewed on and, lo and behold, when I read this colleague’s interview packet there were examples of this behavior in there too!

I have written before on how to work and the sad fact is that most schools don’t teach people tangible work skills that are required in the workplace to get shit done. To make matters worse, we don’t teach people that at work either; everyone is just supposed to know it, or learn by osmosis, or something. 

The last sources of underperformance that I would like to mention are bad management and toxic workplaces. There is of course a lot to be said about that, but generally spoken it is just hard to perform well in an environment where it is not clear what you are supposed to achieve, where you are not put on meaningful projects, where you get no support, where your performance is reviewed unkindly, and where you are not just happy. The best advice to an underperformer who finds themselves in this position is to get the hell out of there! Really, nobody is going to change that situation, especially not an underling, but also not the outside mentor.

A problem with the “get the hell out of there” strategy is that many companies have a standing rule not to transfer underperformers to other teams, lest these underperformers become hot potatoes that are shoved from team to team. This is a rule that I generally agree with, but it would be cool if there were good mechanisms in place to rescue people from bad managers and toxic teams. Unfortunately, these mechanisms are so rare that they can be considered practically nonexistent. That doesn’t change the validity of the advice, but makes the consequences much less trivial, as leaving the company often comes with financial and other consequences. That said, I cannot stress enough how severe the mental health consequences of a suboptimal work situation can be.

The reason I am theoretically in favor of the “don’t transfer underperformers” rule is that I have seen the dire consequences of it, with people being transferred from one team to another without fundamentally addressing the underlying reasons for their underperformance, not living up to expectations anywhere, You might think it is not cool to lay someone off, but believe me, keeping someone around and stuck in a situation where they are at the bottom of every stack rank also does not do wonders for someone’s mental health. Dealing with underperformers is tough and if you give managers an easy way out by making them someone else’s problem, they will do so nine times out of ten, leading to a never-ending spiral of despair for the underperfomer.

Cue feedback of people who transferred out of a sucky team to a better one. I know, it happens, I have caused it to happen, but it is rare. If you are one of the lucky few for whom it worked: Chapeau and stop buying lottery tickets!

Dealing well with underperformers is hard because it requires a rare amount of honesty on the side of the report and that of the manager. As I indicated above, really the only cause of underperformance that can be addressed effectively is that of suboptimal work processes. If that is what is happening, then by all means put someone on a performance improvement plan and go for it. But if there is something else going on, that needs to be recognized and then addressed. The problem with that level of honesty is that in that case one or both of the parties needs to acknowledge their part in the underperformance and then admit there is not a lot that is going to be done about it. In case of burnout you might want to consider a medical leave, or in case of personal troubles maybe a leave of absence can help, but the sad fact is that most companies do not have what it takes to deal effectively with the more involved reasons for underperformance.

If I find myself in one of these cases, I must honestly admit that I advocate strongly for letting people go quickly and as painlessly as possible. I know that’s terrible, I would love to be able to help everyone with whatever they are dealing with, but the reality of the situation is that in our hyper-capitalist “winner takes most” society most companies have neither the will nor the opportunity to do anything else.

Because this is potentially somewhat upsetting to people, let me expound a bit.

Underperformance is a temporary state of affairs that comes about because there is a mismatch between where a person is in their life and what the company needs. There are usually a variety of factors in play, but it is definitely not the underperformers “fault”. And even though the company can often be reproached for being such a mess, it is not practical to assume that they will quickly see and fix the many, many, errors of their ways. So what are you going to do? If you are, for whatever reason, not at the right spot for you at this time of your life, what action are you going to take? Are you going to hang back and wait for things to fix themselves? Or are you going to submit yourself to a soul-crushing and never ending process of performance improvement that will at the same time increase your stress and most likely not address your problems? If that happens, the best you can hope for is to become a “serial skimmer” who constantly hovers in the gray zone between “needs improvement” and “low meets expectations”. Apart from the stress that this brings, it will totally destroy your credibility with the managers because you will become a permanent fixture in the calibration meetings.

I have seen the outcomes of this approach and it’s not nice. It’s tough to be tough, but I truly believe that it is really in the best interest of everyone if “unfixable” underperformance is addressed quickly and firmly. It sucks to be laid off, it doubly sucks to be laid off because you are not meeting expectations, but remember that it is totally possible that, looking at the totality of the circumstances, these expectations are unreasonable and that the employer is just a hot mess that only sociopaths can thrive at.

Per usual, the Romans said it best: “He that fights and runs away, may turn and fight another day. But he that is in battle slain, will never rise to fight again” (Tacitus).