How I Think About Conversations With Underperformers
The hardest part of a performance conversation isn’t the conversation. It’s the six weeks before it, when you know you need to have it and keep finding reasons not to. Someone in your reporting chain is not performing — not dramatically, not in a way that’s creating a crisis yet, but in a way that you can see and that people around them are starting to notice. Their direct reports, their peer managers, the cross-functional partners they work with. Every week you don’t address it is a week the broader team watches you not address it, which is its own signal about what gets tolerated. ...