Managing poor performance as a Project Manager

As a Project/ Program Manager, Your world would be great if everyone would perform the best! but in reality, it’s not true and there is plenty of performance issues that we as project managers need to address. I have also noticed that most leaders don’t enjoy sharing feedback on poor performance with their team, but TRUE leaders never back off from such a difficult conversation.

2 Critical questions to think about before embarking on this journey:

1. Is it a pattern or a one-time event?
2. How important is the performance to your project/ program or a said deliverable?
   1. Is it of minor importance?
   2. Or is it the issue of people don’t do things the way you wanted?

Note to self: Resist intervening if it is not affecting productivity or morale!

Solution:

• If you as project manager choose to intervene, respect the employee by talking in private. ( Personally, I have experienced team members being receptive to feedback when you have a 1 X 1 discussion in private rather than providing feedback in public  )
• Be Positive and be clear in what you observed.
• The Goal should be to start a dialogue with the employee to identify the root cause of the problem.

Once you start the dialogue be open to the idea that it’s possible that we are wrong with our observations Or we could be part of the problem ( For example , once I had given a task to team members but after the due date when checked, I was told the instructions that were shared was not clear. In such cases, its not the will to perform the tasks but the employee is unaware of what is expected out of them).

In general, we have to understand the Performance Problem is because of

1. Lack of ability
2. Lack of motivation

One or the other is generally the culprit, but don’t assume without having a good conversation with the employee.

Lack of Ability:

1. Work towards identifying solutions that will increase Ability.
2. Can the employee be provided additional Training ?
3. Can the employee be given more coaching?  and so on..

Lack of Motivation:

1. Review the Interpersonal support that you are providing.
2. Also, check if the skills are right for the role !! Maybe they are in the wrong role. For example I once noticed an enterprise architect IC role, taking up the role of Engineering manager and with a huge amount of team members reporting to him and I could see him struggle for quite some time . When he moved back to a architect role he started performing again.  So it could just be a role mismatch problem.
3. Finally, it could be that the current role is too narrow or too wide for the individual.

Final Step:

• Once you find out the problem and agree on a solution, clarify consequences with the employee if the behavior does not change.
• They need to know continued non-performance is not an option. 

Also, keep eyes open without interfering, monitor their performance in regular intervals..

Performance management can be very challenging but when done right it can be REWARDING… Hope, above tips helped.