How to Motivate an Underperforming Direct Report in 1 Conversation | Leadership Training

Are you struggling to figure out how to get a younger direct report to step it up and take accountability for improving their performance?

I'm gonna show you how to get through to them with one simple conversation. 

Stay tuned.

Hey everyone. I'm Doug Howard and welcome back to my channel. If you're an engineering manager looking to enhance your leadership skills and become more effective as a leader, then you're in the right place because in today's episode, I'm gonna show you the most efficient way to get a struggling direct report to turn their performance around.

Why You Need to Handle Underperforming Employees Right Away

It's frustrating when you see a younger direct report or any direct report for that matter, continue making the same mistakes over and over again. You don't wanna hurt their feelings, but you also know that you can't let their sloppiness continue any longer because it's creating a negative impact throughout your team and the projects they touch. 

But you want to be careful for how you go about giving them this constructive feedback, because if you do it the wrong way, you're gonna create an environment where they're expecting you to tell them what to do, versus taking accountability for improving their own performance.

This is why most engineering managers fall into a never ending cycle where you're stuck micromanaging people even though you don't want to. But you can change the entire dynamic of this relationship through one simple conversation. To show you how I'm gonna share a story from back when I was an engineering manager, and afterwards, I'll break down the steps that you can apply this to your specific situation.

The Impact of Underperforming Employees

Here's the situation I was in. I had a new hire that wasn't working out six months into the job. Here's what he was doing wrong. It was a mix of sloppy mistakes. He was missing details. He was making the same mistakes over and over again even after he was told and he was causing project delays. He wasn't following instructions and he was missing critical steps, which is a big problem for a structural engineer to miss critical steps. He also wasn't asking for support or help either, which was making me think he didn't care about his sloppy work.

Does this sound like anyone on your team? 

Now, the real problem was the impact he was having. He was causing a lot of rework and project delays and everyone else in the department ended up having to pick up his slack.

Because nobody was saying anything about it for a while, it wasn't on my radar as a manager until eventually it started boiling over where I had a bunch of different people coming to me all of a sudden, in my perspective, out of nowhere telling me about the problems this other person was creating. Basically asking what are you gonna do about it, Doug? This was just a very negative black cloud over the department and people were very unhappy, so I had to do something about it. 

Now, I saw a lot of potential in this person during his interview six months prior, so I didn't wanna give up on him just yet. But I didn't wanna get HR involved either, because in my personal experience, HR tends to complicate the situation and make it, too bureaucratic. You end up documenting more than you end up solving the problem, and that paints an even bigger black cloud around the whole situation. I wanted to try to figure it out on my own first without going that route.

Now, before I tell you what I did, I want you to think about how would you have handled this situation if you were in my shoes? 

How to Coach an Underperforming Employee

Here's how I handled it. I scheduled a casual six month touch base meeting with him, and it was very casual. It was all focused on him, and it was all positive and forward looking.

So I started with just questions like, how's it going? How you feel like you're doing in the job? Do you feel like you're getting to know people here? Do you feel comfortable? So it was just general questions like that. And then I started asking him how did he feel about his performance? Do you feel like you're doing a good job? Do you feel like you're struggling with anything? 

To my surprise, he felt like he was doing a really good job. He felt like he wasn't struggling. He felt confident in his work. So clearly there was a disconnect between how I felt he was doing and how he felt he was doing.

But instead of calling attention to that, I kept the conversation positive, forward looking and focused on him. Then I started asking him about his career goals and I asked him questions like, where do you want to be in a year from now? What type of projects do you wanna be working on? What type of role do you want to be in?

We really hadn't discussed anything like that yet. And again, to my surprise, he told me he wanted to be a project leader. So in the back of my mind, I'm sitting here thinking, dude you do not, you're not on path for this. You're not presenting the skills that, you're needing to be a project leader.

But I didn't go there. I didn't say that out loud, obviously, cuz I wanted to keep an open dialogue and I wanted him to feel comfortable with telling me this stuff. Instead of saying something like that, I took it a different way. I asked him, what skills do you think you need to be qualified to be a project leader?

I said it in a very positive way, and I could tell just by looking at his face that he had never thought about this before. So he didn't really have an answer. And I told him how are you gonna get into a project leadership role if you don't know what skills you need to develop to be qualified for that?

Create an Opportunity for the Struggling Direct Report

He looked at me like I see what you're saying, Doug. I understand your point. Now I came at this with a collaborative tone. This is an opportunity for him and I to work together on something. 

So I presented him with an opportunity. I said, tell you what, how about I pair you with a senior lead engineer for the next few weeks? And you can be in their hip pocket, you can shadow them and see everything they do. That way you can see everything that goes into a project leader role. Then also you can see what skills you need to develop so that you're ready for that role. 

He was super excited about the opportunity and I think he was surprised. I don't think he was expecting me to give him that type of attention when he was only six months into his role, but I told him some very specific instructions for the shadowing.

I said, when you're doing this, I want you to pay close attention to what skills you need for this role. But I don't want you to get caught up in the technical skills because the person I'm pairing you with has a lot of experience. They've been doing this job for a long time, and yes, you can build these skills, but I don't want you to feel like this is impossible. The technical skills will come with time, but what I really want you to pay attention to is the skills that you can start fixing now. The skills that don't require 10 to 20 years of experience. More like professionalism, skills and soft skills. I told 'em to pay close attention to all the non-technical skills that this senior engineer did. I told 'em to focus on things like time management, communication and organization, and attention to detail. 

He was excited about this. I think he was really excited about this opportunity. He was excited that he was getting this type of attention from his manager. We left this meeting with a very positive tone and a good energy about it, and here's how he responded.

Creating an Action Plan for Non Performing Employees

Two weeks later, I had a check-in meeting with him and I asked him, how did it go? What did you learn? And here's the first thing he said. He said, “Doug, if I wanna be a project leader, I need to work on my focus because I've been making too many sloppy mistakes.”

I asked him why did he feel that way, and he told me that when he was working on a project with the senior engineer, there was another engineer before them in the project that made a lot of sloppy mistakes and it had a very negative impact on the senior engineer. It caused a lot of delays. He had to work overtime to fix it. He saw how frustrated the senior engineer got, and I think he recognized that he had been making those types of sloppy mistakes on previous projects.

Help Them See How Their Performance Impacts the Team

I think he was connecting the dots that, his sloppiness was creating stress for other people on the team, which, brings me into a little bit of a side point, a tangent. You know when you don't see the impact of your actions or when you when you just look at it from a top level view of like numbers, then it's hard for you to empathize with the other people who are impacted by it.

But when you see the actual impact of your poor performance and how it's impacting other people, then it creates that inner motivation to fix it and to not let this trickle down because I do believe most people don't want to create extra work for other people. They don't knowingly want to be difficult. They don't knowingly want to create more problems for people. And when you help them see that they're causing more work and more stress for other people, that ignites something within them to self-motivate to wanna fix this and not let this continue. I'll come back to that later, but in the conversation I had with him, I asked him what else he learned.

Underperforming Direct Report Created His Own Performance Improvement Plan

I was blown away by this. He pulled out a notebook and he had a list of 30 skills that he felt like he needed to improve on. He basically came to me with his own performance improvement plan, and we went through the list and he explained each one, and it was all non-technical skills. It was all things like paying attention to detail and being more organized and being a better note taker and listening better in meetings and things like this. All things that you know, anyone can work on. You don't need an engineering degree. Or 20 years of engineering experience to be good at these things. So he came into these skills. I asked him, what are you gonna do with this knowledge? This is great, but what are you gonna do with this? And he wasn't sure.

I took advantage of this by saying, why don't we work together on this? Why don't we create an action plan? I think this is a great list. So why don't we make this more bearable and less overwhelming? Let's prioritize three areas at a time. Three skills. We'll prioritize them in order and then we'll, as soon as you get good at one, we'll cross that off the list and then we'll pull the next one up.

He was on board with this, from that point on, we did a once a month meeting check-in to see how he was doing with his list of 30 skills. Basically each month we were crossing one or two off the list and pulling one or two more up. It was a continuous progress. So it was really good because it was a tangible way for him to see how these skills were paying off and, to see the tangible progress he was making versus it feeling like some type of imaginary feat where you don't really notice how you're moving forward from the day to day.

Here's what happened from that day on though. We worked together closely, but the thing that is really hard to quantify is he was a different employee from that day on. He was contributing at an even higher level and he was taking accountability for improving his own performance instead of waiting for me or someone to point out the mistakes he was making and point out where he needed to improve.

This kind of changed his whole mindset and just how he was viewing his responsibility for his own performance. One year later from that meeting we had. He was in a lead project engineer role, and I would've never thought this was possible the way things were going one year prior. All of this changed from just one conversation we had.

Underperforming Employee Voluntarily Admitted Why He Was Underperforming!

Now, I forgot to tell you one more part of this conversation we had on the backend when we were talking about his focus and the skills he needed before we left that meeting. He told me this. He said, Doug, I want you to know one of the reasons why I was struggling to focus. I was watching Netflix all day while I was working. I had it up on my phone right next to my computer screen, and I didn't realize how much that was distracting me. Now, I didn't know he was doing this, and he just randomly admitted it to me. And when I asked him, I said I appreciate you telling me this, but why are you admitting this to me, especially if you're not gonna do it again?

He told me, well I just wanted you to know so that if you see me doing it, I want you to tell me to not do it. I want you to hold me accountable to not doing that again. Just think about that. He's voluntarily telling me he's guilty of doing something. I didn't even ask him. He was doing that because he wanted me to hold him accountable to, correcting his behavior if I saw him act like that again. 

I never had to do it, but that just shows you the commitment. He was bought in and he was a changed person. He was looking at this differently. I never had to check in on him again. He was coming to me when he wanted help or when he had a question, or when he was looking to grow in a certain area, and that made my job as a manager so much easier. 

Establish Trust with Underperforming Employee, Instead of Assigning Blame

I wanna take a step back to show you all the things I did here, cause there was a lot of intentionality to what I was doing in this conversation with him. 

The first thing I did was I established trust. Instead of coming into the meeting saying, all right, we need to talk about your performance. You need to improve in A, B, and C. I focused on building the relationship. He was six months into the job and I didn't have a lot of hands-on involvement with training him, so I didn't really get to know him that well yet, and, I felt before I have a tough conversation with him, I need to get to know him better and make him feel comfortable with having a difficult conversation with me.

So I started the whole conversation just by asking about him and asking about how he's doing and asking about things he's interested in. I made it just real comfortable for him to open up to me and tell me what was really going on. Cause if I didn't establish that trust, I wouldn't get an honest answer for him. I would just get the answer you give to your boss, which is very guarded and reserved. But I needed him to open up and I needed him to open up to receiving constructive feedback. 

Give Underperforming Employee and Opportunity to Learn from Senior Staff

The second thing I did was I figured out what he wanted, which was to be a project leader. Then I created a clear connection between what he wanted and what I wanted. 

I wanted him to fix these sloppy mistakes. I wanted him to live up to his potential that I saw in the interview, and I wanted him to take ownership of doing what it took to get there. Once I recognized that what he wanted and the way he saw it was to be a project leader, I created a connection for him by having him shadow one of our senior engineers that he figured out I need to fix these things in order to get to where I wanted to be.

Show Underperforming Direct Report What's Possible

The third thing I did was I showed 'em what was possible. When you think about human psychology, when a task seems insurmountable and there doesn't seem to be a tangible way for you to get from point A to point Z or whatever the end goal is, then you never take any action towards getting there.

But when you do have a clear action plan and you do know steps B, C, D, all the way through Z, then it feels realistic. Then it feels like you can do this, and that makes all the difference for someone else taking action towards, getting where they want to be. 

So by showing them what was possible and showing them what it actually took, to be in this type of role, now it went from imaginary to a quantifiable thing that he could take action on, and we got it all on paper. Now he was dedicated to continuously working towards those goals and I was able to reward him with it at the end too. I put him in a lead project engineer role, so it paid off. 

So guess what? From that point on, even after he was in the role, he understood that if he does this, he will get rewarded with that. That just changed the whole dynamic of his relationship with me, his relationship with the team, and his relationship with the company and the product and everything he did. He was a transformed employee honestly.

Giving Effective Constructive Feedback Without Using Authority

The main takeaway I want you to have from all of this is that when you use authority to give constructive feedback and to get someone to change their performance, you're gonna get that person to only do the bare minimum. What I mean by that is they're gonna do exactly what you say, no more, no less. And that's not really the intention that you want. Had I told this person to improve their focus, that's all he would've done. And I don't even think he would've really improved his performance. 

What he actually would've done is just done a better job at hiding his mistakes. Or he would've been working in fear, and been afraid to make a mistake so he wouldn't have been working as fast, but he wouldn't have gotten the results that I wanted, and that's where influence comes in. 

When you use influence and you build that relationship and create that open dialogue, you can figure out what the person really wants, and you can find that connection between what you want and what they want.

That's the difference between them doing the bare minimum versus taking accountability for it on their own and taking ownership of improving their own performance and creating a mutual understanding of what both of you want and what both of you need from each other. This is the key to getting more impact from your effort and your time as a leader.

When you just tell someone literally to do something, they're just gonna do what you say, nothing more, nothing less. But if you use influence, they're gonna do more than what you asked for. 

The key is how you present the message to them. Instead of telling them what you want or why you want it, you have to lead with speaking in terms of what they want.

Then you gotta connect the dots to show them how the thing you want is the solution to getting what they want. This way they view the situation like they're working for something that they want, which is the difference between following your orders versus going above and beyond without you even asking them to.

When you master this skill, you can literally influence, motivate, and inspire all types of people in any situation, which makes every area of your life so much easier. If you wanna learn how to do this, check out my episode called How to Influence Without Authority at Work. 

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