Six Months Too Long

I kept someone on my team six months longer than I should have.

He was a hire I'd advocated for. Strong on paper, strong in the interview. The kind of person you don't worry about at thirty days and start to wonder about at ninety.

By month three, I knew. The output wasn't there. He was working hard, the effort was real, but the level was wrong for the bar we'd hired him at.

I gave him another quarter because I'd vouched for him. By the next quarter the project he was on was almost wrapped, and firing mid-launch felt wrong. By the third extension we'd hit the holidays, and I told myself January was the right starting point.

By the time we let him go, the cost wasn't the firing. It was the months in between. He'd been in a role where his output was below the bar without anyone telling him what the bar was. That's a hard place to do good work.

That's the version of bad management I think about most.

Not the manager who fires too fast. The manager who can't bring himself to be clear, and so doesn't fire when he should, and so the person on the other side reads the unclarity as ambiguity instead of as a verdict.

If you're senior and currently somewhere where your manager's feedback is vague, vague feedback is information. The most common reason a manager won't give you a straight read is that they've already made one and don't know how to say it.

You can ask directly. A version of "I want to make sure I'm reading the trajectory right. If you were going to name one thing for me to focus on over the next ninety days, what would it be?" usually does it. A concrete answer means you have something to work with. A vague answer means you've already gotten your read, even if your manager hasn't admitted it to himself.