Performance Management
As a manager, you only produce as much as the people on your team. So inevitably, it's also your responsibility to make sure each individual contributor is working to their full potential — and coaching them on how to improve over time. In this lesson, we'll review some of the key topics in performance management.
What they're looking for
Interviewers want to see that you have a process for monitoring and improving your team's performance over time. They also want to know that you have the experience identifying signs of poor performance and can address them when they arise. Questions often fall into one of two categories:
- Structure and process. Methods for tracking and improving performance, such as career ladders, annual performance reviews, and performance improvement plans.
- Handling difficult situations. Experience navigating challenging scenarios, such as letting a team member go or explaining why someone didn't receive a promotion.
Career ladders
What's the difference between a junior and senior engineer? At a certain size — typically 50 to 100 employees — companies often decide to create a career progression process, also known as a career ladder. In its purest sense, the career ladder is meant to establish a framework for employee performance and a merit-based promotion process.
For software engineering, the levels of the ladder often map to concrete skills, scope of impact, and degree of ownership. Note, however, that since level definitions differ, the companies you're interviewing for may not prioritize the same skills at each level.
Since career ladders provide a shared definition of success, they are also a useful performance management tool that you should be familiar with. The skills outlined in each level can be used as a template for setting expectations, self-reflection, constructive feedback, and steps to promotion.
Note: Career ladders are never simply "checklists" that lead to guaranteed promotions. Promotions may be contingent on performance reviews, discussed next, or a separate promotion process.
Performance reviews
At around the same time a company implements career levels (if not earlier), most teams will also formalize this feedback process into a regular annual or biannual event known as the performance review cycle. The structure of performance reviews differs somewhat between companies. When you join as an engineering manager, it's unlikely you'd be expected to create a new performance review process, but you'll certainly be responsible for deploying the company's process for your team.
Even with a formal review process, feedback and communication should remain frequent between the manager and their employee. A good manager has a sense of his or her team members' individual strengths and weaknesses and should ask for feedback often as well. One common piece of advice is that employees should never be "surprised" during their review, i.e. they shouldn't be hearing anything new.
The performance review process may include a 360 review where peers and coworkers are asked to provide feedback on high and low performance areas for each individual. In addition, the manager will write reviews for each of their reports, and the reports write feedback for the manager, which goes to the manager one level up. In general, feedback flows up through managers, who help standardize feedback in in a process known as calibration, which results in an employee rating or score.
Some companies use a controversial method called stack ranking that attempts to rate employees relative to one another. In this process, most notably used by Microsoft and Netflix in the past, all employees are scored by management along a fixed distribution. The result is that some portion of employees must be given lower performance ratings, similar to grading on a curve.
Handling underperformance
Interviewers love questions about underperformers because it's an important but dreaded management responsibility. It doesn't have to be all bad, however. If, as a manager, you approach the situation with honesty and empathy, you empower that employee to take ownership of his or her performance and make positive changes. As it's your responsibility to maintain a psychologically safe environment, this is a huge win. We highly encourage you to try to turn underperformer questions around in this way.
There are many reasons why a good employee may start underperforming. As a manager, you'll first have to address the issue, then take steps to raise his or her performance. If no improvement occurs, you may have to "manage out" or let this employee go.
Here are a few tips for answering questions about your experience with underperformers.
- Talk about your approach to feedback. Frequent touch-points allow you to proactively address underperformance and anticipate issues.
- Acknowledge the reasons for disengagement. It sometimes stems from employees feeling unrecognized. Discuss the root cause. If your employee was doing work that was uninteresting to them, discuss stretch assignments or shifting tasks as possible fixes.
- Emphasize honesty, respect, and privacy. Great managers build trust by treating their employees as individuals. If your team member opened up to you, there's a path forward. This is one of the most positive experiences a manager can have, and interviewers love to hear about it.
Tip: Try using Strategic Developmental Feedback, or SDF. Per SDF, the most useful feedback answers the question "For this individual to be maximally effective, what should they do more of and less of?"
Other tenants of the Strategic Developmental Feedback model are:
- Aligned with and prioritized according to company-specific definitions of excellence.
- Focused on specific behaviors and their resultant impact.
- Addresses both strengths and areas in need of development.
- Focused on patterns rather than single events.
Letting employees go
There are also cases where an employee needs to be let go. Understanding how to set up a team member for success, consider installing a performance improvement plan (PIP), and ultimately, making the firing decision, is a critical part of engineering leadership. Instead of viewing firing as a mean or callous activity, managers understand that the success of the team depends on growing the right kind of talent. Jeff Weiner often speaks to his compassionate leadership philosophy, wherein it can often be kinder to let an employee go who isn't performing effectively, both for the team, the company, and even the employee themselves.
Managing superstars
Superstar employees are tremendous assets to a team, but they can be tricky. Some managers mistakenly believe that superstars don't want to be managed at all. While everyone appreciates a light touch, modern employees tend to see managers as critical to their career growth. Afterall, managers decide who gets the choice assignments.
The best thing you can do for your superstar is to check your own ego and genuinely devote yourself to helping them grow. You are uniquely positioned to help them see the big-picture and plan their future. You can help them identify weak areas — yes, they exist — and ways to address them.