Engineering Management for the Rest of Us

by Sarah Drasner

This process also gives you a framework for working with people if something doesn’t go well. If you have set clear expectations, both tactically and strategically, you can revisit these expectations down the line if things aren’t going well. Again it’s best if the employee owns this, so as you talk through line items of what’s expected and where they are, ask them about this delta, and see what they say. Typically I have found that when I build trust with a person, and they are able to own their responsibilities, they are pretty honest about what they are doing well and what they can be doing better, as well as their challenges. If you see a large enough delta between what you both committed to and what work is being done, it can be tempting to attribute this delta to laziness. A lot of things are misattributed to laziness that have some other root cause, and yet they appear externally as laziness. If someone isn’t getting their work done, please do your best to explore further with them before writing them off. If you say someone is “lazy,” that is an immovable character assessment and absolves you as a manager from figuring out their motivations, potential misalignments, or challenging external factors that might be impacting their work.