I’ve come to think about managing an IT department a little like maintaining a garden.
You have to seed it with the right people. You have to feed the people you have so they continue to grow. And, occasionally, you have to weed.
None of those is a one-time activity.
I’m always thinking about where we have gaps and what kind of person we need to hire next. At the same time, I’m looking for opportunities to develop the people already on my team. And when someone isn’t meeting expectations, I have to decide whether that person needs more coaching, a different opportunity, clearer expectations, or something more serious.
There is another part of the analogy that I’ve come to appreciate:
Before you blame the plant, check the soil.
When someone is struggling, the employee isn’t automatically the problem. Sometimes we haven’t given them the training, direction, tools, feedback, or environment they need to be successful.
Figuring out which one you’re dealing with is part of the job.
Seed: Hire for the IT Organization You Need
When someone leaves an IT department, the easiest thing to do is pull out the old job description and start looking for a replacement.
I don’t necessarily want to replace the person who left.
I want to think about what I need next.
If I lost a systems administrator, maybe I need another systems administrator. Or maybe our environment has changed enough that I need stronger cloud skills. Maybe cybersecurity has become a bigger concern. Maybe automation has eliminated some of the work that the position used to perform.
A vacancy gives you an opportunity to look at your organization and ask what capabilities you’re missing.
That is the first part of seeding.
The other part is making sure you’re planting the right kind of person in your environment.
Technical ability matters, obviously. But I’ve worked around IT long enough to know that technical ability by itself doesn’t necessarily make someone a good IT employee.
Customer service is a good example.
In my current organization, IT isn’t the product. We support the organization’s broader mission. That’s the only reason our department exists.
That means I need people who understand that supporting users isn’t an interruption that keeps them from their “real” technical work.
Supporting the organization is the real work.
Unfortunately, customer service doesn’t always come naturally in IT.
There are technical people who would be perfectly happy to sit at a computer, complete whatever task they’re assigned, and go home. They may be very good technically, but they have little interest in understanding the person on the other side of the technology.
That isn’t enough for me.
So I look for it during hiring.
I use behavioral questions. Tell me about a time you had an unhappy customer. What happened? What did you do? Tell me about a time when you didn’t meet a customer’s expectations. How did you recognize it, and what did you change?
I’m much less interested in someone telling me they “believe strongly in customer service.”
Of course they do. They’re interviewing for a job.
I want to hear what they actually did.
Give People Guide Rails Early
Hiring the right person is only the beginning. Once they’re here, they need to understand what matters.
I’ve used a fairly simple set of guide rails with my teams:
Customer First. Mobile First. Cloud First.
Those three principles don’t tell an employee exactly what to do in every situation. They’re not supposed to.
They help people make decisions when there isn’t a procedure telling them exactly what to do.
I’ve overheard employees using those same principles when talking with vendors or stakeholders. They’ll explain why we’re approaching something a certain way because it better supports the customer or moves us toward where we’re trying to go technologically.
That’s what I want.
If a leadership philosophy only works when the leader is in the room, it isn’t doing much good.
People need to understand the expectations well enough to carry them forward themselves.
Feed: IT Employees Can’t Stop Growing
Once you have good people, you need to keep investing in them.
That’s especially true in IT.
The technology that someone built a career around can change dramatically in a relatively short time. I’ve written previously about the responsibility technical leaders have to continuously develop their people. You can’t assume the skill set that made someone successful yesterday will automatically keep them successful tomorrow.
But employee development doesn’t have to mean sending someone to a week-long training class or paying for another certification.
Sometimes it means giving them work they haven’t done before.
We recently completed a long implementation of a new enterprise application. The system included report-building capabilities, and initially, we expected to send much of that work back to the vendor because no one on my staff had experience with it.
One of my senior technical employees figured it out pretty quickly.
Once that happened, I had two relatively junior employees start working with him.
I wasn’t expecting them to suddenly become full-time report developers. I wanted them to be exposed to something they didn’t know.
They were learning a new enterprise system, working alongside a more experienced employee, and developing another technical skill we could keep inside the organization instead of always paying a vendor to provide it.
That’s the kind of feeding I look for.
Training is important. So are certifications. But sometimes the best professional development is simply giving someone a chance to do something they haven’t done before.
Good Employees Still Need Feedback
I recently hired an employee who is extremely good at what he does.
He’s self-motivated. He sees work that needs to be done and gets after it. He proactively tells me what he’s working on rather than waiting for me to ask.
He’s the kind of employee you don’t want to get in the way of.
I still meet with him at least once a week.
He doesn’t need me to give him a task list. What he does occasionally need is context.
He might have an idea that’s 95 percent of the way there, and I can tell him about some organizational history he couldn’t possibly know because he’s new. Maybe that changes the priority slightly or sends the solution in a somewhat different direction.
That’s valuable management, too.
Autonomy doesn’t mean absence.
One of the mistakes leaders can make with great employees is assuming they don’t need anything from us because they’re already performing well.
Maybe they don’t need much direction. They still need access to you.
Correct Little Things While They’re Little
Giving performance feedback early and often is something I’ve had to learn over the course of my career.
It’s very easy not to do it.
An employee does something you don’t particularly like. It’s minor. You don’t want to nitpick, so you let it go.
Then it happens again.
Now there’s an awkward thought in the back of your mind: I didn’t say anything last time.
So you let it go again.
Do that enough times, and you’ve created a new problem. Eventually, you’re irritated because the employee keeps doing this thing you don’t like.
Except from the employee’s perspective, you’ve watched them do it for six months.
Why would they suddenly think it’s wrong?
I’d rather have a quick conversation the first time.
It doesn’t need to be confrontational. Most of these conversations aren’t.
My new employee once asked whether people were allowed to decorate their cubicles. Sure. Keep it professional and appropriate for the work environment.
Done.
It’s a tiny example, but those little conversations matter. They get both sides comfortable with the idea that expectations can be discussed.
This is particularly important for new managers.
If you’ve just been promoted and you’re suddenly supervising people who used to be your peers, giving feedback can feel uncomfortable. Start having the small conversations. You need to get comfortable giving feedback, and your employees need to get comfortable receiving it.
Then, when something more serious happens, feedback isn’t some strange event that only occurs when somebody is in trouble.
This lines up with SHRM’s guidance on performance management, which treats performance management as an ongoing process rather than an annual event. Regular feedback and coaching allow problems to be addressed while there is still time to correct them.
My version is simpler:
Correct little things while they’re little.
Inspect What You Expect
There’s another side to feedback that I think leaders sometimes miss.
You actually have to know what your people are doing.
There’s a Japanese term used in Lean management that I’ve always liked: gemba, meaning the actual place where the work happens. A related Toyota practice, genchi genbutsu, is essentially the idea of going to the source and seeing the situation for yourself rather than relying entirely on secondhand information.
I believe in that.
If my desktop support team is helping relocate an office, I’ll stop by when I can. I’ll see how things are going. I’ll talk to the supervisor of that area.
If I can’t be there, I’ll follow up afterward.
How did the move go?
Did my people take care of you?
Anything we could have done better?
That isn’t exactly a formal gemba walk, but the principle is useful: get close enough to the work to understand what is actually happening.
One of the first things I implemented when I came into my current role was a survey when an IT ticket closes. It’s simple: rate the experience and give us comments if you want to.
I see those responses.
If somebody gives us three stars or less, I want to know why. I’ll often contact the person directly.
Sometimes the answer has nothing to do with employee performance. They’re frustrated because we couldn’t give them the answer they wanted or because the problem was outside our control.
Fine. That’s useful information too.
Other times, we did something wrong.
I want to know that.
If you’re only asking your employees how they’re doing, you’re going to get an incomplete picture. Most people aren’t deliberately misleading you. They genuinely believe they’re doing good work.
Your customers may have a different perspective.
You need both.
Before You Blame the Plant, Check the Soil
Eventually, every leader deals with someone who isn’t performing the way they should.
This is where I think we have an obligation to look at ourselves before immediately blaming the employee.
Were my expectations clear?
Did this person understand what I wanted?
Did we train them?
Did they have the tools and access they needed?
Did they have enough time?
Did they know who to ask when they got stuck?
Have I actually told them their performance isn’t where it needs to be?
Those questions matter.
Sometimes the leader is the bad soil.
It’s easy to complain that someone isn’t developing when you’ve never given them an opportunity to develop. It’s easy to complain about performance when you’ve never clearly defined what good performance looks like.
It’s especially easy to tell ourselves somebody “should have known.”
Maybe they should have.
But if it’s important enough to hold someone accountable for, it’s probably important enough to make sure you’ve communicated it.
That doesn’t mean every performance problem belongs to management.
Quite the opposite.
Once I’ve provided clear expectations, reasonable resources, feedback, support, and an opportunity to improve, responsibility starts shifting very clearly toward the employee.
Good soil doesn’t eliminate the plant’s responsibility to grow.
The leader owns the environment.
The employee still owns effort, communication, behavior, honesty, learning, and ultimately performance.
That’s where Feed can start becoming Weed.
Feed or Weed? Look at What Happens When Someone Struggles
The report-building project eventually gave me a real example of that transition.
One of the junior employees wasn’t getting the reports done.
If he had simply struggled to understand the technology, that would have been one thing.
But that wasn’t all that was happening.
He wasn’t making the progress we needed. He wasn’t communicating well with the other people involved. Part of the process was getting reports into draft form and sharing them so others could check the work. That wasn’t happening either.
And these weren’t practice exercises anymore.
We needed the reports.
Eventually, I removed him from that part of the project and gave the work to someone else.
He was upset.
A couple of weeks later, he came back to me and apologized. He’d had some time to think about what happened and acknowledged that he hadn’t gotten the job done.
I respected that.
But I also wasn’t going to put the project right back into the same position.
So I had the project manager give him a couple of lower-priority reports.
Now he has another opportunity.
If he figures them out, great. He’s learned something, expanded his skills, and demonstrated that he really does want the opportunity.
If he doesn’t, we haven’t put an important deliverable at risk.
There’s a practical lesson in that experience that I think applies well beyond this particular employee:
Give people room to fail without requiring the organization to absorb unlimited consequences from their failure.
A second chance doesn’t require pretending the first failure didn’t happen.
Weed: Accountability Is Part of the Job
This is the part of leadership nobody particularly enjoys.
I don’t want to fire people.
I never want to fire somebody who didn’t know it was coming.
If an employee has been performing poorly for a long time and is completely shocked when their manager finally takes action, I think there’s a good chance the manager failed somewhere along the way.
People need an opportunity to correct their performance.
I usually start with a conversation.
For something relatively minor, it may be nothing more than, “Hey, next time, I need you to handle this a little differently.”
If it happens again, the conversation gets more explicit.
At some point, I may follow up with an email.
I just wanted to follow up on our conversation today. Here’s what we discussed. Here’s what we agreed needs to happen going forward.
I don’t necessarily consider that a formal discipline.
But now there’s no ambiguity about whether the conversation happened or what was expected.
That basic philosophy is also consistent with modern performance-management guidance: employees should receive feedback and coaching throughout the year so that problems can be addressed as they arise, rather than being discovered for the first time during a formal review.
If the behavior or performance continues, you’ll eventually move into whatever formal corrective process exists within your organization. In my current environment, that process is influenced by policies and collective bargaining agreements. Another organization may handle it very differently.
The HR mechanics aren’t my point.
The progression is.
The employee should know the standard. They should know when they aren’t meeting it. They should know what needs to change. And they should have a reasonable opportunity to make that change.
If you eventually reach termination, it shouldn’t come out of nowhere.
Figure Out What Kind of Problem You Actually Have
Not every performance problem deserves the same response.
If someone doesn’t have the skill, maybe I need to train them.
If they don’t have the knowledge, maybe I didn’t communicate enough.
If they lack experience, maybe they need mentoring and some room to make mistakes.
If they’re struggling with communication, that’s coachable, too.
Then there are problems involving effort, behavior, or integrity.
Those are different.
I’ve dealt with employees who have made mistakes in programming. Technical people make mistakes. I make mistakes.
I’ve also dealt with someone saying they tested something when it was clear that they hadn’t.
That’s no longer simply a programming mistake.
In my current environment, particularly because we support a law-enforcement organization, honesty is a hard line.
That resulted in a much more serious response.
But here’s the important part of that particular story: the employee ultimately came up to the standard.
The accountability worked.
That’s why I don’t think weeding should be synonymous with firing.
Sometimes accountability is exactly what gets somebody growing again.
Your Good Employees Are Watching Too
When leaders tolerate poor performance, the effects don’t stop with the person who is struggling.
Someone else usually picks up the work.
Your good employees notice.
They notice the person who repeatedly misses deadlines. They notice who doesn’t follow through. They notice when somebody gets away with behavior that everyone else is expected to avoid.
Eventually, they start wondering why they’re working so hard to meet a standard that apparently isn’t really a standard.
That’s one reason consistency matters so much.
I’ve written about the other side of this in Managing Difficult High Performers: How to Lead Brilliant Jerks. Being technically brilliant doesn’t mean someone gets a pass for destructive behavior.
The same principle works in reverse.
Someone being nice, popular, or having been around forever doesn’t mean performance no longer matters.
People don’t necessarily expect every employee to be treated identically.
They do expect the standards to be real.
Seed. Feed. Weed. Then Keep Doing It.
I don’t see Seed, Feed, Weed as three stages in someone’s employment.
They’re things I’m doing all the time.
I’m looking at my organization and asking what capabilities we’re missing and what I need to seed next.
I’m looking at the people already here and thinking about how I can feed them. Maybe that’s training. Maybe it’s a certification. Maybe it’s putting a junior employee alongside a senior one on a project they’ve never seen before.
I’m watching performance and listening to our customers.
When someone struggles, I’m checking the soil before assuming I’ve got a bad plant.
Did we do our part?
If we did, and someone still repeatedly fails to meet reasonable expectations, then I have to be willing to weed them out, too.
That’s part of taking care of everyone else in the garden.
Managing technical people has its own challenges. Skills change quickly. Good technical employees often have considerable autonomy. Sometimes the people we’re leading know far more about a particular technology than we do.
That doesn’t reduce the need for leadership.
It makes good leadership more important.
Hire deliberately. Keep developing people. Talk about performance while the problems are still small. Pay attention to what your customers are telling you. Set standards people can understand and then consistently hold people to them.
And when somebody isn’t growing, check the soil.
Just remember that eventually, the plant has some responsibility for growing, too.
