Managing Your People’s Performance Series - Understanding dynamics
A primer to understand dynamics of people's performance
Being nervous, biased, unprepared, unsure what to expect - Cloud of words that you can form after a series of recent discussions you had with your direct reports.
What time of the year could it be?
3, 2, 1, drum roll, please! - it’s performance review time. Round of applause if you guessed it right. Remember the fear of score cards you had in your school days when you got D grade? - it’s still a thing.
Why is performance review one of the dreaded ceremonies in the industry? - it’s because of lack of preparation and thought going into it. Managing performance in engineering teams is a hard nut to crack. If you’re a first time EM and asked to do a performance review for 7-8 people in your team, it will be overwhelming. Where would you start? Against what criteria will you assess your teammates? How would you convey a bad performance and what follows up after? There will be a flurry of questions you might have. In this series, we’ll deep dive into managing performance in your engineering teams:
People performance dynamics: Understand people’s perspective better and get a 360° view of team dynamics that could impact your people’s performance.
Performance criteria and calibration: How to define performance criteria to review engineers on the same scale compared to other teams in your organization and how to calibrate.
The Writing part: Writing a killer performance review that makes lot of sense, insightful and actionable.
The Conversation and the next steps
Bonus
Managing high/low performers
When and How to discuss the salary component?
How to keep yourself organized in the process?
First things first - In this edition of newsletter, let us understand the dynamics around people, your team and organization and how it could have an impact on your people’s performance.
How would you define performance?
Let’s start with the old school definition of what is a performance.
Performance is how well one performs their role and responsibilities and achieves goals and objectives set for them in a timely manner with an agreed quality. Not achieving them or falling short is considered a lower performance.
I have seen people are being assessed even without letting them know what are the goals and objectives of their role. How would you expect them to perform their role better or even for yourself to assess their performance? - Start off with having a session with your direct report where you discuss expectations for each other and clarify performance criteria at the very beginning.
Factors affecting people’s performance
You just had a performance review conversation with a low performer, John. You were recalling from your memory what you conveyed to him, “Hey John, You didn’t perform well this quarter against performance criteria set for you and there were few concerns on your communication as well, so you’ve got 2.5 out of 5”. John’s expression was clueless and at the same time fearing for what’s coming up. On the other hand, you were clueless as well on what was happening with John and what led to his poor performance as you didn’t care about asking them now and not in your 1-1s as well.
What could be some reasons that led to John's poor performance?:
Performance criteria was never discussed and he hasn’t given importance to them.
He had personal health issues which could have impacted his performance.
His work was always dependent on the team. If someone in the team doesn’t perform well, it’s impacting his work.
He had skill gaps that led him and the team to deliver low par quality and later than expected. Skill gaps can be in technical skills, collaboration or communication skills that affect working with others efficiently.
Too much context switching impacted his performance.
If an individual isn’t performing well, you might be part of the problem too:
Have you discussed the performance criteria with the individual and made them understand well ahead?
Were they overloaded with too many different topics at the same time (high cognitive load) that could impact their performance?
Were those performance issues solely because of the individual’s inability or due to the team dynamics?
Make sure you understand the factors affecting your people’s performance by discussing them regularly in 1-1 and team retrospective. Unproductive environment, frequently changing priorities can affect people's performance and if it is left unaddressed you might be fixing something else which may not be the real problem.
There’s no denying that you have your own share as a manager in your people’s performance whether it is a good or bad performance.
Understand your team dynamics
To assess your people’s performance 360°, you need to understand the team dynamics, role they play and how they fit in and contribute to the larger scheme of things - organization goals and purpose.
Define your team
Start by defining your team. Not letting your people understand the team dynamics could have an impact on their performance as they may not know the purpose of the team and what their success means to the organization. Remember that the motivation of your people has a direct impact on their performance and your primary responsibility is to set them up for success.
Nature of your team: It’s defining who you are as a team and what you do. If you are a cross-functional team, you might be focusing on one specific domain or subdomain in your organization. Define that in the very beginning.
Your team’s core values: Most probably you will inherit core values defined for your organization however you can override or extend according to your team’s nature.
Your team's purpose: Define why your team exists and how you contribute to the organization's purpose and goals. If you’re an infrastructure team, your team’s purpose is to enable other internal teams to work efficiently by building tools.
Roles and Responsibilities: Define roles and responsibilities in your team, their dependencies and ways of working together.
Once the team is well-defined, it’s important to make everyone in your team understand how the performance of one impacts others and eventually impacts the team itself.
Team charter could be a great exercise at this point to define your team and their dynamics, as I’ve personally used it in my teams with greater success. Check it out here: https://miro.com/templates/team-charter/.
Sum of individual performance is not the same as team’s performance
All your individuals are performing well and they have got good ratings in the recently completed performance review. On the other hand, your team’s performance is not up to the mark and you were questioned why that is the case even though individuals are performing well.
Here are some cases:
Your team might be working on wrong priorities: Even though work is getting completed as expected and everyone in your team is performing well, your team hasn't achieved the intended target for business as your team was working with wrong priorities.
Your team often gets blocked by other teams: Because of lack of sync b/w teams, your team’s work is always blocked by other teams and dependencies weren’t factored in at the earliest.
Sum of individual performance doesn’t necessarily equate to team’s performance and most importantly you’re responsible to align them and lead your team to optimal performance, if they are working on wrong priorities or if they often get blocked by other teams.
If the heart is in the right place and performance reviews done thoughtfully, it can be enriching and contributing to your people’s success and growth, ultimately contributing to your team’s success.
What’s your experience when it comes to managing your people’s performance as a manager? What are the challenges you face and what is working for you? - I would love to hear your thoughts.
We’re just getting started and done with part 1 of this performance management series, understanding people’s side of things better when it comes to performance. In the part 2 of this series, we’ll be deep diving into defining performance criteria and calibrate the levels and ratings in a common scale across your engineering teams.
Find the part 2 here: