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I am a team leader for a SW Team which got freshly merged with another team. One of the new team members (call him Member X) is showing really bad performance and most of his tasks only get finished because he is asking his colleagues (Member A,B) the whole time and let them do 70% of his work.

Also Member A and Member B are complaining about him that he costs them a lot of time and slows them down. I would like to say that Member X is kinda fresh in his job but he is doing this for almost 4 years and his performance was never noticed/communicated/cared about (and also ignored by the upper management) because he is working on a different office and the responsible management person was about to leave and didn't care anymore.

I tend to advise Member A and Member B now to reduce their time in helping Member X so that he has to come up with own solutions and learn from this. But honestly I do not know if this is a good idea.

Do you have any good ideas how I can improve the performance of this colleague? In first steps I would not like to involve higher management and solve this on a team level.

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    "Do you have any good ideas how I can improve the performance of this colleague?" I would simply replace MemberX with somone that is more capable - no need to drag a dead horse to the trough..
    – iLuvLogix
    Commented Apr 12, 2022 at 9:05
  • It's always a good idea to try to find solutions to problems yourself. Then only bother colleagues when it's clear you can't solve it by yourself.
    – Simon B
    Commented Apr 12, 2022 at 10:17
  • @JoeStrazzere No I am not responsible for training him and also do not do performance reviews. Getting rid of him should be my last step in the management toolkit. My authority over him is kinda similar like the authority of a scrum master - none. But of course I could reach out to upper management.
    – Zaragesh
    Commented Apr 12, 2022 at 10:33
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    You shouldn't make Member A and Member B do your dirty work. If Member X is taking too much of their time, it's your job as a team leader to step in and tell them to be more independent.
    – Gregory Currie
    Commented Apr 12, 2022 at 11:45
  • This person’s manager was leaving for 4 years? What about performance reviews before the manager decided to leave?
    – Donald
    Commented Apr 12, 2022 at 13:08

3 Answers 3

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Time for a one-to-one where you explain to X that his performance is far below standard, that A and B will not be helping him in the future (which is only fair because otherwise they will achieve officially less than other team members), and ask him if he has any ideas how to get his performance up to scratch.

In the end, some people are just not good at some stuff. As Billy Joel said, "I know some excellent business men who can't sing". After four years in the job, training isn't going to help, and your company is not a charity. Of course it is possible that he was just lazy and used A and B as crutches, so maybe there will be a change.

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  • yes I think that I have to reach out the one-to-one meeting with him because I also have the feeling that he isn't aware of his underperforming
    – Zaragesh
    Commented Apr 12, 2022 at 10:34
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In first steps I would not like to involve higher management and solve this on a team level.

This is only your problem if you allow it to be. You don't at the end of the day have any recourse but to escalate. In your situation I would do that sooner rather than mess around. A four year situation isn't going to change just because you talked to the employee. It will just create tensions within the team.

Member A and Member B are complaining about him that he costs them a lot of time and slows them down.

Be careful with this, it seems one-sided. Why are they doing 70% of his work? That makes little sense to me. A manager talking to all three of them from a position of authority has a better chance of digging into this. And if someone has only been doing 30% of their tasks for 4 years that is a big concern.

A complaint from 2 colleagues against another merits escalation. It shows that you're taking it seriously.

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    And who in their right mind would have agreed to this arrangement from member A / B side? Why would I do 35% of work (70% split between 2 people) and get exactly 0% compensation, for FOUR YEARS? I would've told them no after a week. I would've told X to talk to manager to get training, not do their work.
    – Nelson
    Commented Apr 13, 2022 at 1:55
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I was in "colleague A/B"'s position not too long ago.

When my "Member X" was finally let go from my team, I took a huge sigh of relief. Everything he delivered was done very poorly, and required a lot of extra work from me to actually put it into a somewhat working state. He kept making the same mistakes over and over, and seemed to fail to understand some of the most basic concepts of OOP. And this from a person with a supposed 3 year experience as a software developer.

You can try to address the situation directly with him, but 4 years of bad habits are probably not going to change after one meeting. Be very wary of colleague A and B's complaints: if you don't address their concerns, you might lose one (or two) good developers due to frustration, and be stuck with the bad one. I sure was considering finding another job before my "Member X" was let go.

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