Make the goals small and incremental, so there’s an opportunity for lots of small successes. Meet with the team member every week to check on progress, and be sure you set really explicit expectations around each upcoming milestone, so it’s easy to measure success or failure. If the low performer can’t keep up, it will become quite obvious to both of you early in the process. At this point, the person will often acknowledge that things aren’t going well and decide to quit; in other cases, determination will kick in and he’ll “up his game” to meet expectations.
