Helping underperforming and junior team members perform their best

This resource first appeared in issue #36 on 07 Aug 2020 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals, Becoming A Manager: Feedback

How to Turn around a Disengaged or Underperforming Employee - Lighthouse
Tactical Challenges In Hiring Junior Engineers - Cindy Sridharan

These two articles benefit from being read together. The topics are quite different but they both speak to the need for managers to invest time in new and/or struggling team members.

In research computing we tend to both not reassign or remove employees who aren’t good matches and not invest enough in employees who are struggling. It’s a bad combination, it hurts team morale, it hurts the struggling team members, and it hurts the research we’re trying to support.

The first article talks about what’s necessary in coaching an underperforming team member. It’s a lot of work, for both you and the team member. I think the blog post lays it out well, and if the topic interests you you should read it. The only things I’d add are:

• You can often - not always, but often - avoid going through this process by providing small frequent feedback earlier, rather than waiting for things to become A Big Problem.
• This process will not always be successful. I really like Roy Rapoport’s article on five conditions that have to be met for improvement to occur.

The second article is very upfront about what’s involved in hiring junior team members:

I strongly believe that if a team isn’t willing to invest at least 1–2 years, they shouldn’t be hiring junior engineers.

This is especially true in research computing, Our junior staff tends to be straight out of undergrad or coming from a couple of years in industry; our senior staff tends to be out of Ph.D. programs/postdocs. Not only is there a gap in experience, but there’s huge cultural gap. The process and mindset of doing research will be completely new to them. It’s good that they’re bringing in new mindsets and approaches! We don’t want to quash that. But the cultural difference will have to be bridged to make sure communication works and and expectations are clear.