At Made Tech we believe every team must promote an open, honest feedback culture and collectively work to improve and maintain psychological safety.
Occasionally, a team will need support in helping an individual meet the expectations placed on them, which is something that will fall to you as a line manager to support on.
There's no one-size-fits-all performance management process, it is instead a process tailored to the individual and the support they need.
In a general sense, the process of performance management will involve understanding the ways in which your reportee does not currently meet expectations and supporting them to work out a plan to improve. You will need to set goals and measure outcomes, which means defining how you will measure success with your reportee and their team.
As a last resort, you may need to serve notice of termination of employment.
The trigger to begin a performance management process is usually concerns about an individual's ability to meet expectations is raised by their team lead, to the people team or to their line manager.
When this happens, it's important to confirm performance management is a necessary step.
Begin by speaking to the team lead that has raised concerns, your goal is to understand the ways in which the individual is falling short of expectations, what has been done within the team to support them and what feedback they have already received, and what successfully meeting expectations would entail.
It's important to note that each team should provide support and give useful, constructive feedback. If you aren't satisfied this is the case, you should be clear that you believe these steps need to be taken before performance management, and you should support the team to provide the necessary feedback and review performance periodically.
Meet with your reportee and the Head of People. The purpose of this is to begin with an empathetic approach and understand if there are external factors or issues affecting your reportee that we can provide support with, doing so may avoid direct intervention.
The decision to begin performance management officially will be made between an individual's line manager, their team lead, and the Head of People.
The decision has been made to seek direct intervention, which will be your responsibility as line manager. Your next step should be to work with your reportee to form a set of measurable goals that will show they are able to meet the expectations they need to in order to succeed as part of their delivery team.
Unfortunately, giving detailed guidance for this is difficult as it will depend heavily on the situation at hand, the people team and the line manager community of practice will support you as much as possible. Remember the key points:
- Approach the situation with empathy
- Clearly identify what we need to do, and how
- Clearly identify how we will measure success
- Clearly define the timeframe for meeting expectations
- Be honest and open about the situation - remember that feedback is information
Review progress as often as possible, ideally every week during this process. Remember that this process can be intense and a source of anxiety, again refer to the people team for support we can offer to everyone involved. Reassure your reportee that we want to see them succeed in their role!
Ideally, you reportee will be able to show progress and reach the goals you've set together, and will no longer need close monitoring. Gain endorsement from their team lead that this is the case, and inform the Head of People that you'll cease performance management officially.
It's important from here that support structures you've built together don't immediately disappear, it's recommended to keep iterating on the goals and growth plan, and to review outcomes regularly, gradually reducing the review frequency to a normal cadence.
Reassure your reportee that having extra support and direct intervention will have no long term impact on their career growth.
It's really important to be explicit about what the outcomes we are looking for are and also balance that with eventual consequences of not seeing improvements to a persons performance.
We want to do everything we can to support someone who is not meeting expectations and that is our first aim.
In some cases, and as a last resort, we may need to serve notice of termination of employment. This would be supported by the Head of People and you should engage them in this process as soon as underperformance is identified.