Lack of managerial oversight

Capability management

"The role of the leader is to create the environment in which all members of an organization have the opportunity to realize their own potential." ~ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

The success of any organization depends on the managerial oversight. It requires the managers clearly identifying and articulating the standards of performance. And, of course, it requires the managers to monitor the work to ensure the work is being done to the standard.

The real problem, of course, is that managers often struggle with both of those things. The reason might be that the manager has no idea what a standard performance for certain jobs should be. Or the manager has no technical competence but supervises technical roles. Then the manager has no idea how long it takes developers to finish their tasks.

Management oversight is the process of ensuring that the organization's objectives are met by effectively and efficiently using its resources, especially knowledge and cognitive effort.

Once you determine a high yet achievable performance bar, hold your people to that high standard even if you have no idea how they might achieve it. Trust them — that's why they were in the first place. It's not your job to think on their behalf. People can do wonderful things if given the opportunity. But you can also set people up to fail by relying on them to succeed but not giving them the proper tools to succeed. The next training that is needed is how to successfully experiment to improve the results achieved by the organization.

People are the most important asset. Organizations place a great deal of emphasis on recruiting, hiring, and integration in order to build their talent base. Too often the investment in people stops there. The most important question is never asked: How many fully productive employees have they added? The first thing to understand is that just because somebody interviewed well, that does not mean she will perform equally well in your organization. If they measured capability, they might be horrified to find that all those investments in recruiting, hiring, and integration were going to waste. How can we know if our efforts are successful? By using all the reporting functionality KEDEHub provides us with. We can check the results on a daily basis if needed. The best is to check on a weekly basis and report every Monday.

Lazy managers don't want to know who the poor performers are

In today's knowledge based economy, the performance of a single employee matters now more than ever. That's the only competitive advantage most companies really have[7].

From a company's perspective, it is a good practice to try to help a weak developer to get better, and just fire them in case they don't get better some months later after beginning this process. What could happen is managers doing absolutely nothing to help the weak developer, and at the same time they never fire these people.

The most often cited reason for not dealing with underperformers is that the organization just makes it too hard for us to discipline or fire a developer. There can be a number of steps required in dealing with poor attendance, poor performance or poor attitude of a developer. For example, the standard way to address serious individual performance shortfalls in the United States is to use a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP). These are a huge pain to even create (much less monitor) because, to avoid an employee lawsuit, they typically require the involvement of HR and multiple layers of management. When the employee is on a PIP, the manager has to have weekly conversations with the employee about the objective criteria in the PIP. One of them usually is to show up at work at 9am. If the employee repeatedly failed to do so then the manager has to listen to explanations "why" over and over again. The manager then has to document this, etc. A huge, huge pain.

Another reason could be the tendency for managers to blame low performance and turnover on developers, rather than on oneself or on the organization. Psychologists have long recognized that people often overestimate the role of personality and underestimate the power of the situation in shaping human behavior. Managers tend to believe that people act the way they do because of who they are. By blaming developers for performance problems or retention issues, managers free themselves from doing the hard work of considering how their own management style affects developers satisfaction, performance, and turnover[6].

Yet another reason cited, especially underperforming managers, is that they leave poor performers in place because they want the company to be seen as humane. Managers could remove all the difficult parts of an underachiever's job and delegate them; in a vain attempt to help the poor performer cope. Why don't companies act? Some fear it would lower morale, which is nonsense. Debra Dunn, a senior executive at Hewlett-Packard, puts it like this[8]: "I feel there is no greater disrespect you can do to a person than to let them hang out in a job where they are not respected by their peers, not viewed as successful, and probably losing their self-esteem. To do that under the guise of respect for people is, to me, ridiculous."

The real reason is that some managers are lazy. Lazy managers do not want to know who their poor performers are because that requires taking action and the action requires a lot of unwanted, unpleasant work on their part.