So Dan has challenged me, following Friday's post, to explain what to do about underperformers. [I had to edit Dan's comment because it got a little close to a real HR issue from a few years ago. I purposefully didn't reply to it directly either.]

I think there are two types of under performers - those who simply can't do the job, and those who won't do the job. I'd like to deal with the first type in this post.

"There are a lot of gardeners in IT"

Jeff De Luca uses this expression a lot. It dates from his years with IBM and a time during the grim dark years under John Akers, whilst the World economy was reeling from the 1987 stock market bust and the later property bubble, and IBM was laying off people left, right and center. Jeff in discussions with his boss at the time, had been reassured that "there was always work for good people" and that "there are a lot of gardeners in IT" and that they might soon be "mowing lawns around Melbourne" once again.

Dan will recall the time we interviewed a tree doctor for an $80 per hour contingent staffing position. His previous IT experience amounted to less than 3 years at a large wireless company as a contractor doing Java development, and several years in the Cascade mountains heeling sick trees. Following the interview, where he couldn't describe the difference between the == operator and the .equals() method, I advised his agent to advise him to go back to his true profession. In general, I try to avoid the gardener problem by not hiring them in the first place.

The employee who can't do the job is the responsibility of the manager. It is the manager's failing. The employee is still trying to do her best - even when it isn't nearly good enough.

As Dan rightly points out, a gardener on the team, can destroy morale. When you inherit a gardener from a previous manager, it creates a problem. You identify gardeners primarily from a "managing by walking about" strategy. For me this includes the sub-classes of "managing by having lunch", "managing by drinking coffee" and "managing by playing ping-pong or foosball". Many of my former staff will recognize these techniques. Step 2 in dealing with a gardener is to stop estimating based on their productivity. If the team has effectively benched the gardener then as a manager you can't count them as part of the productive team when estimating projects. By eliminating them from the estimate, you stop the team from carrying the burden through extra heroic effort. That just leaves the morale problem. The gardener has to be managed out. As anyone working in the USA's Fortune 500 knows, this is a tricky problem and it takes time - sometimes up to 18 months.

I've mentioned before that I like to measure individuals on secondary contributions. For example, "become the language lawyer on unit testing and test-driven development and transfer your new knowledge to the other team members. Build their respect as the authority on TDD and make yourself the go to point for advice on TDD and unit tests." Now that is something I can measure. A gardener will never be able to accomplish this task. Managing the gardener out is the responsibility of the manager. Coaching the team quietly and privately to be patient and to understand the difficulty of achieving this is how to deal with the morale problem.

In summary, the "can't do the job" employee is not responsible for their performance. The manager is responsible. The manager should never have hired them in the first place.