Comment by Aurornis
5 days ago
Some good advice. It’s missing one of the most difficult topics: Performance Management.
Most first-time managers have already read a lot of advice about being humble, delegating, celebrating your team’s wins, and the other feel good topics.
If you want to write internet advice that gets upvoted and shared you almost have to avoid the difficult conversation topics and assume that the team is full of perfect people that the manager just needs to serve.
I’m in a semi-private peer group for managers and the number one most common struggle for new managers is their first encounter with employees who aren’t working unless a manager is standing over their shoulder, or who are causing problems within the team. Books like “The Managers Path” can help, but in my experience the best help is to find a more experienced manager you can talk to for advice. A lot of the difficult realities of managing people are messy or even painful and are often intentionally avoided in feel-good internet advice.
This is really nice. I've been doing this for quite a while (and also ping pong ic-em and back). Oh and I've also been "the" poor performer. A couple of observations:
1. Performance management is never easy and I don't think it should be. I don't mean the technique or process of it bit the mental weighing of it. You are affecting a person's livelihood so you don't want to approach it robotically always (despite what the hr training tells you about it not being personal etc)
2. This is a big one. Performance has a huge under rated aspect that is environmental and circumstantial. I've seen really strong performers drop and fail because of personal situations and not being able (or rather not given the space and bandwidth to recover organically). And similarly those with a poor perf in one company go to a supposedly "higher tier" company and really thrive and sky rocket.
Management is really a mixed bag. I loved the coaching, direction setting, strategy, etc but always having to sell opaque higher up decisions as your own and being an inverted $hit umbrella for leadership can be draining. I guess the solution is to just join executive leadership ha.
> I've seen really strong performers drop and fail because of personal situations and not being able (or rather not given the space and bandwidth to recover organically). And similarly those with a poor perf in one company go to a supposedly "higher tier" company and really thrive and sky rocket.
I have, too, but this is the bias I was talking about: We like reading and writing about the situations where managers were able to convert a low performer to a star performer. Similarly, when a high performer becomes a low performer we like reading about how management was at fault.
Yet much less is written about the difficult employees who aren’t responsive to management coaching. Most of what is written is about the stories where good managers turned difficult employees around or bad managers failed to help employees, leaving an impression that the manager is solely responsible for the outcome.
In the peer group I mentioned above a common story is for someone to arrive after trying to coach a problem employee for years without progress. When you’ve been led to believe that a failing employee is really a failure of management it’s hard to let go of them, because letting go is admitting failure. It takes a reality check from someone more experienced to realize that not every employee has good intentions. These situations aren’t written about as much because they’re uncomfortable and many don’t like reading about it.
> Yet much less is written about the difficult employees who aren’t responsive to management coaching. Most of what is written is about the stories where good managers turned difficult employees around or bad managers failed to help employees, leaving an impression that the manager is solely responsible for the outcome.
Maybe off-topic: I think a lot of writing comes from a place of control. The writers want to feel like they're in control and the readers want to feel they're in control too. The internet functions as people's outlet and fantasy environ, so scary writing naturally gets filtered out, i.e. post something uncomfortable and people must retaliate to preserve their comfort, their sense of control.
> Yet much less is written about the difficult employees who aren’t responsive to management coaching.
There are legal, ethical and emotional risks attached to writing about failed relationships with difficult colleagues. These stories are meant to be shared over a hot (or strong) drink.
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Nobody writes books about managing your manager, which seems odd. I practiced it, and it worked well for me.
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Clarifying - If the employee is not coachable why spend years? I know you mentioned the "admitting failure" aspect of letting go (this probably makes me a sociopath to even ask this).
Now coachability could mean different things - Are they absolutely unreceptive to feedback? Were they actually hired in the wrong role? fantastic interviewers but terrible on the job, mislevelled, completely wrong area, passion etc? Record of toxicity?
Arent these (except may be the mislevelled bit) grounds for a PIP to begin with. Ive felt these situations were easier to manage in FAANG?MAANGO etc precisely due to the highly process driven cultures. Also i think the "emotion" of it goes away because hiring is extremely generalized and pipelined (best case you see a candidate's interview feedback if you are the HM and usually you only do that if you are happy with the "numeric rating"). Generalized hiring has its own problems but that's another story. Again this may be different at various companies so just trying to job my memory.
Btw I loved this:
> I have, too, but this is the bias I was talking about: We like reading and writing about the situations where managers were able to convert a low performer to a star performer. Similarly, when a high performer becomes a low performer we like reading about how management was at fault.
Often managers are demonized without recognizing that managers themselves are part of the machine that is the company and the culture (and I feel this actually has become so by design).
> I guess the solution is to just join executive leadership ha.
It's really... not? I guess, it probably depends on the person too. But at some level, you have both a lot of power to influence things accidentally in a bad way if you're not careful, and at the same time absolutely minimal power to actually get stuff done (you always need to rely on others for the "doing" part, oftentimes several levels deep/ with a lot of potential for miscommunication).
Those opaque decisions? You _have to_ take decisions, because not taking decisions is very often worse than taking a bad decision. And you don't have the information, you can't have the information, you need to work at a high level of abstraction because it's impossible to know all the details. Unless the relevant details are being communicated to you just in time (spoiler: they won't be), you won't know them. If you actually care about how well you do your job and what is your impact on others, it's not a walk in the park, at all.
I wasnt suggesting that you shouldnt or you cannot take the decisions. We all understand corporate life etc and i think that kind of compartmentalizing is just part of the game. Frankly there is no decision to take - you are just a messenger so you roll with the punches. While we all learn to put up a straight face and explain (nay relay/readout) why sacrificing X000 people because the path to ASI needs new blood etc - if you are not moved by it internally (with your inner self raising that single eye-brow in .... curiosity) then I applaude you for being made of much more sterner stuff than me :)
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> always having to sell opaque higher up decisions as your own
Is that really part of management etiquette? In my experience nothing ruins my trust in my manager more than when they pretend that they love every decision from the higher ups. My favorite managers have always taken a “well this is dumb but we have to do it because the CEO said so” approach. It creates comraderie and lets me know they are a real person.
My least favorite manager of all time laid off a valued member of the team for financial reasons (sad but understandable). Within 24h he had started to rationalize and defend that our team was actually /better/ now. I assume he was trying to convince himself as much as the rest of us.
Managers are weird because they are implicitly asked to take on elements of the organization into their personality. It’s unavoidable to an extent. But some fully become Sartre’s Waiter. I always wondered if this type of manager went home and was totally cool and normal with their family or if they brought The Board home with them too.
1. That's because people are unique and there are infinite people problems to solve, so it will never be easy.
2. I don't believe those are the types that OP was talking about. There are people that will just never work out to begin with, and there are people who have bad days/weeks. The latter are already trusted and deemed worthy, so it's not the same class of problem.
And remember, being a director is just being an inverted $shit umbrella for veeps, so the grass isn't always greener!
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"
It's a good point but I'll add the problem is also the system/incentives of whatever org you are in.
Some shops its easy enough to manage someone out and bring in a new team member who will contribute more. This is a health environment and generally free of the boom-bust hire/fire cycle.
Other shops have very top down hire/fire cycles where if you fire someone now you have no ability to replace them, and worse yet.. when you HAVE to fire someone, you want the low performer around to hit your metrics..
So a lot of shops carry around a lot of dead weight for different reasons, as long as the person is not a net negative contributor.
Aside from that, yeah, how to deal with poor performers is as much an art as a science. I often find, aside from exceptional cases, most of them actually have some part of the job they prefer & are good at, so modifying the task allocation can go a long way.
> I often find, aside from exceptional cases, most of them actually have some part of the job they prefer & are good at, so modifying the task allocation can go a long way.
While this works in the short/naive scenario, I feel like in most cases these low performers prefer the "gravy" work if you will. The type of work that almost everyone prefers and is good at. So you risk setting a bad precedent for perverse incentives by rewarding poor performance with easier work.
Really depends actually!
In a sufficient sized team you may have boring/rote tasks that your high performers hate & neglect, but sometimes a comparatively lower performer will take on.
In many cases it's the (sometimes perceived but not in practice) higher performers that want the harder exciting high profile tasks, but maybe don't want to do the less fun parts of those tasks. Basic data munging, documentation, testing, monitoring, configuration management, etc... no fun!
A lot of perceived high performing devs I've worked with want to be like surgeons who walk into the OR, put their hands into the gloves, pick up the tools prepared for them on a tray, do the surgery, and leave.
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For anyone struggling with this:
https://www.manager-tools.com/map-universe/hall-fame-highly-...
This podcast has made me a 10x better manager.
Good starters:
- https://www.manager-tools.com/2007/04/effective-hiring-set-t...
- https://www.manager-tools.com/2008/03/the-management-trinity...
- https://www.manager-tools.com/2010/01/how-manage-arrogant-pr...
- https://www.manager-tools.com/2008/02/the-management-trinity...
- https://www.manager-tools.com/2018/06/manager-tools-onboardi...
I found the older manager tools podcasts to be more consistently helpful than the newer ones. I see 3/4 of your links are to old episodes, which tracks with my experience.
I sampled some newer episodes in the past few years and was not impressed. One episode was just the host and guest ranting about how remote work isn’t real work and how everyone needs to get back to the office, which was wholly unhelpful for me as a remote manager.
Agree. Pre-2016 was mostly great. Post-2020 it went downhill.
Edit: I also linked the wrong feedback episode. The correct one was from 2008...
In today's corporate world, it can be difficult or impossible to fire people. It's important to understand that actually removing someone from the organization is a totally separate problem from managing the performance of the team.
People who don't contribute or cause problems need to be sequestered as much as possible. Don't let them bring down the rest of the team. I think "managed out" is the term that's being used now. That is a skill that a manager of any level can use to keep their team performing even when they don't have the authority to remove someone, or the process to remove someone is many months long.
It's just not though. People above you are making decisions to not pay what generally amounts to trivial amounts of money to (in many cases I have seen) completely fuck up their products.
I have worked with enough C levels to understand that most of them just want you to manage all the problems while they collect the money and make "strategic decisions" (follow whatever fad is hot right now.)
It's why I like working with smaller companies, usually not established enough to just make middle management eat shit and ignore customers.
As an IC, one reason I left my old (hated) job was precisely that. The product was barely-functional shit. We once spent 8 months implementing a "feature" that had senior engineers walking off the program in protest, only for them to be validated when said feature caused us to miss our contractual requirements just like said senior engineers said it would, and we spent another 8 months ripping it out.
Naturally I went looking for answers, started asking polite questions of my boss at 1-on-1s, started attending program-level meetings that engineers didn't typically show up to but were large/open enough I could blend into the background, and discovered that the root of the problem was roughly 3 levels into management and they weren't going to give a shit about what some engineers thought they should prioritize, even if we could tie it to financials/hours worked/cost savings (we tried and were politely ignored).
Left for a smaller program at a different company, and it's night and day. I remember suggesting that it would be nice if we could have an additional server for a system we were building and got told "yeah good idea, go ask <PM> if it's in the budget". It was, and we got it. I was in heaven.
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> In today's corporate world, it can be difficult or impossible to fire people
Really? In the US you can fire an employee for any reason at any time (aside from a few illegal reasons: union activity, racism, etc.).
> In the US you can fire an employee for any reason at any time
On paper, yes. In practice, especially in a larger company? It's often a long journey that involves a lot of energy on the part of the manager. And then of course you may not get a backfill rec. So then one needs to ask themselves: is this person truly a net negative when compared to the energy that'd be required to jettison them *and* replace them with nothing?
Often the answer is no.
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the "few illegal reasons" are able to be leveraged by almost any employee to write a letter and/or lawsuit suggesting they were fired for the wrong reasons. if you didn't internally document -- exhaustively -- how bad they were, and also assuming they didn't expertly document -- exhaustively -- how great they were and how unfairly treated they were as an employee -- it winds up being a gigantic pain in the ass and almost always better for the company to simply pay them $200k as a settlement to said lawsuit. And that comes out of the budget of a department who doesn't have $200k to spare.
That's why it's so hard.
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Firing someone "for cause" is an incredibly long and difficult process at many organizations. They eventually get put on a PIP for 3 to 6 months, meanwhile they are looking for another job and continuing to drag down performance of the rest of the team. It would be cheaper to pay them to leave sooner.
Agree 100%.
This is the difficult conversation template I put together and use:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gHyfR0XAc5ehRoqRImV1yAFh...
Great template.
It certainly reflects the process I've gone during some difficult conversations, at least when I did them well. And I've certainly done the other approach where I just dug my trench and they dug theirs; oh lord, is it a terrible approach!
Thanks! I tried to distill down what was in Difficult Conversations:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004CR6ALA?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_a_con...
I think even a bad difficult conversation is better than no difficult conversation so just giving the managers I work with some tool to compel action is valuable.
Performance management is challenging and has been a problem with my previous managers. I point out that person X is not doing their job well, not reviewing PRs (stamping LGTM on everything after about 30 seconds), writing buggy code, writing zero tests, no updating existing tests, not responsive to communication, not receptive to feedback. "I'll talk to him." No change. Two months later, I have the same discussion.
Yep, I did this once and got thrown under the bus when person X left, citing my behaviour - apparently asking person X to follow coding standards, right tests, implement the feature as requested was not a reasonable thing to do.
Yes. You stepped over the line trying to do the manager's job. ;) One manager told me he didn't believe person X's performance was a problem because the work was getting done. The work was getting done by other people. I once had a guy open a PR when 5000 lines of code, tell me "I couldn't get it to work, but here you go", then I and another person had to spend another 2 weeks fixing and rewriting it.
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Agile Coach / Scrum Master chiming in - I switched from an engineering position to this more people-centric role, and completely agree with you.
What I find fascinating about this is how predictable people become once you know the different personalities and their nuances. It helps tremendously to also be interested in getting to know people. And yes, you will encounter people that are disruptive. Usually, and I can only speak for my environment, the team itself is quite good at handling that. I just need to give them room and provide a setting where they can talk about the issues at hand on a constructive base.
That's why I love my job, and it may sound weird - but I'm the guy who can ask all the obvious questions that come to mind and others don't dare to ask. I love that I can build myself a toolbox to use in different (and difficult) situations. And I love to see my team succeed on the one hand, and learn from failure on the other.
> What I find fascinating about this is how predictable people become once you know the different personalities and their nuances.
curious - is there a way to learn this other than from experience?
I haven't discovered it yet. Of course, there are certain studies and models like 16 personalities, DISC, etc. But you cannot pinpoint people to these categories easily. It's a spectrum, I guess.
> how predictable people become once you know the different personalities and their nuances
I will never cease to be amazed at managers who don't do this. I've seen enough managers who pick fights with the wrong subordinates then have to scramble to replace key staff when they leave.
Curious to know why my comment received a downvote / downvotes.
I didn't, but guess: a lot of happy-babbly words without much substance or stark opinion. What's the summary? "I love this job, there are challenges, but I can master it well". Well..ok, thanks?
I didn't downvote, but you started out sharing credentials that aren't management and then recounted standard platitudes about collaboration and some personal experience with zero transferable utility. And you posted that in response to a comment saying how difficult topics necessary to succeeding as a manager don't happen often on the internet. I understand why people would evaluate your contribution as detracting from the conversation at hand and downvote.
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Being an agile coach isn’t management
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Yeah, went down that road too. It's really emotionnally difficult/grinding. And I still don't have a clue: you have to find how each person behaves. Lots of talk, influence, repeating the same thing every day, etc. Unfortunately, I've never taken any pleasure in doing that, it was just difficult and exhausting to me...
> you have to find how each person behaves. Lots of talk, influence, repeating the same thing every day, etc.
It doesn’t help that most of the management advice you find on the internet assumes that inside every employee is a happy, productive worker and their manager can unlock it with the right words.
In the real world the range of employee types is very large. Some of them are just toxic and you’re not going to coach it out of them. Knowing when and how to cut your losses is important for preserving the rest of the team.
> Knowing when and how to cut your losses is important for preserving the rest of the team.
Too right. Hire slow and fire fast was a saying that I saw recently.
Jim Keller did a talk somewhere on YouTube about his experience at AMD on the zen project, and one of the things he highlighted in that process was figuring out what was going on with people that was preventing them from working well on the project. Getting at the deeper causes made it easier to try to find mutually beneficial solutions even if those were the employee moving on from the team. People problems are messy though, and you will definitely feel like the bad guy in some cases, even if you are trying to do what is best for everyone.
Your insight is true enough that almost every recruiter asks a manager "have you PIP'd someone before?" in the first phone screen. It's a hard experience that some junior managers cannot, or will not, do for a variety of reasons.
IMHO, besides the messiness, performance management is unspeakable because people generally hate authority. We've all had bad experiences with authority figures. We're also told many fantasies about the morality of groups of people. If the people are blameless, then the the fault lies with the manager who resembles (or opposes) our teacher, our parents, our government. And so forth.
I use to subconsciously think that until I learned, the hard way, it was irresponsible blame-shifting. A recent HN discussion demonstrated some of those dynamics at play https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42273798
It also can be very awkward when you're chosen for a promotion over someone who has been there longer for you. Suddenly you're managing and giving reviews to someone who was sitting next to you for years. I went through this but was extremely lucky that I had a wonderful mentor. It wasn't a big deal, but the first performance review, while it went well, definitely felt strange.
Isnt this just the definition of check-ins? Simply document how many check-ins have not had progress and be done, no need to stand over anybody's shoulder
just ordered "The Managers Path" because of your post here, looking forward to read it.
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