The only time I had to put someone under official performance review

I want to tell you about one of the most difficult moments in my career leading teams, leading people, the only time in my career that I have had to use a tool that, until then, I thought was unnecessary.

Leading a team successfully is not easy and it is not only up to you. You have to be a good leader, that is mandatory but not enough.

It is very important that every member of the team pulls with you, that you all pull towards the same direction. As I told you in the servant leader, you have to understand each person in the team and help them to get the best out of themselves to become the best version of themselves.

For the chain to work well, it is necessary to take care of each link, especially if you detect that there is one that is weaker than the rest, then this one must be your priority as a leader.

Walk with me, so that you can understand what happened.

A tech team of 5 people, very high performing, firing on all cylinders where we were delivering features very quickly and with great deal of quality. This led to our client assigning more and more work to us.

So the time came when we had to grow the team, we had to satisfy the client's hunger to keep growing their product and it was a good sign, we were doing things very well.

Growing a team is not trivial, even less so when it is a well-oiled machine (let me know if you would like me to write about how to onboard effectively, if I see interest I will prioritise it for the following posts). Experience has taught me that the first few weeks are key, so that whoever comes in new can learn quickly the way things are done and perform like everyone else.

According to the workload we were getting, we would first make one addition and after a while two more. The first person joined the team, we did the onboarding and the corresponding follow-up helping him to integrate and to become part of the team.

From the beginning I noticed that he was not at the same technical level as the others, but he seemed to have picked up an okay rhythm.

After 3 months, this person was not performing as expected, in fact much worse than his colleagues and even though sometimes this is common in some cases, it is a problem. I detected it in time, the servant leader in me had to come out, I had to help him to overcome the situation.

I had a chat with him and with all honesty I told him about the situation and also: "You don't have to worry, I trust you and so does the team. We are going to work together to solve it".

But something went wrong, I noticed it in his reaction. It’s like when you talk to your partner because something has upset you, there are two possible reactions:

1. They are surprised, they didn't notice, you both take it into account for the future, learn from it and everything is good…. OR
2. They get defensive, they even starts to bring up things that happened a long time ago... there's something else going on.

Well, his reaction was more like the 2nd one, he started to get defensive and didn't recognise his low performance, he said he was at the same level as his teammates.

Although he didn't recognise it, I spent a few months supporting him, many calls trying to help him to improve, a lot of pairing and upskilling as in most cases this tends to work.

Obviously the rest of the team knew it too, they told me: "Jose, we are seeing that he is underperforming but we are going to help him to make a flip to the situation".

Although they were not aware of it, their performance also dropped, as they were spending too much time helping this person, he was weighing the team down, but it was an investment I was willing to make. Both the team and I were helping him for a while, but still there was no way, his performance was still very low.

To solve a problem you have to admit there is a problem first, identify what's wrong, put attitude and work to fix it. If you don't admit it, you don't have the attitude and on top of that you are arrogant about it… the problem grows, experience has shown me this several times.

As he did not admit what was happening and with some arrogance one day he told me "Jose, this feature that has arrived, leave it to me, I think it is important and I can tackle it without any problem". At first I thought about saying no, but I wanted to give him one more chance to prove to me and the team that we were wrong, that he was performing like one of the others, so I trusted him.

My father used to say to me, "Nene, trust has to be earned, you can never give it away", and how right my father was. I trusted him, believing that this would make him deliver this feature but instead he generated a huge incident, the first one we had in more than a year.

Whose fault was it? Well, it was all mine, because as my father used to say, "trust has to be earned" and I gave it away.

The team had been negatively affected for a few months. Because I wanted to give him more opportunities, I set up a lot of calls with him and tried to motivate him, but when there is no attitude and no desire, it does not depend on the leader, at that point you can't do much more.

I talked to the director and we took the decision to officially put him under official performance review, the first (and the only) time in my career that I have had to resort to this "tool".

I had been trying to help him for months, without having to get HR involved, but I was banging my head against a wall. In the first month of the performance review he improved, I was delighted! The second month he quit…

Lots of feelings when I found out, anger for all the effort and time I spent, sadness because I felt it was my fault, some relief because the team was uncomfortable and this would solve it.

I learned 3 huge lessons from this:

1. If you don't admit a problem and don't have the attitude to solve it, it is impossible to do anything about it, even if you try everything as I did in this occasion.
2. Arrogance blinds people, either it is left aside or it is too much of a burden.
3. As a leader you can give all the opportunities, but in the end, the person you put them in front of, they need to make something out of them.

I hope that if you ever find yourself in this situation, my experience can help you, has this ever happened to you or something similar? If you have already encountered it, I would like you to write me a private message or in the comments how you solved it. Let’s learn together!

Lead with heart, lead with purpose.