EM: People Management

What is your approach to managing poor performers on your team?

By Interview Clozo · Published 27 October 2026 · Last verified 26 October 2026 · 12 min read

Your approach to managing poor performers on your team is a sequence: diagnose the cause, name the gap, agree a supported plan with checkpoints, then decide. The step weak answers skip is the diagnosis: training cannot fix an unclear priority, so the cause decides whether the plan is coaching or an exit.

In this article

Before you start
Why interviewers ask this
Managing poor performers from first principles
The Staff-level answer
The rubric
Three variants of this question
Common mistakes
Follow-up questions
Sources

Before you start

This page sits inside the engineering manager interview questions guide. It answers one question in the people-management part of that loop. For the general version of the question, see how to manage underperforming employees; this page adds the interview answer, the rubric and the written evidence trail.

Why interviewers ask this

The question separates managers who avoid conflict, managers who punish, and managers who run a fair process. A poor performer costs the team delivery, and a badly handled exit costs trust with everyone who watches it, so the answer shows how you behave when the stakes are personal.

A weak answer says "I give feedback and, if nothing changes, I put them on a plan." It has no diagnosis, no evidence and no support. A strong answer names the order of steps, says what you write down, and says what you offer. A Staff-level answer adds the failure modes: the cause was never the engineer's skill, the standard was never stated, or the plan was a formality. It also says how you protect the rest of the team and keep the process fair. The wider people management round tests the same judgment from other angles.

Managing poor performers from first principles

Support period: A support period is a fixed stretch of time in which a manager gives an engineer the help named in a written plan, such as pairing, training or clearer priorities, and reviews evidence at set checkpoints before deciding what happens next.

Diagnosis comes before the conversation, and the review ends in a decision backed by evidence.CC BY 4.0 — source: What is your approach to managing poor performers on your team?

Step-by-step description

Find the cause before you label the person.
Describe it privately, with specific examples.
Write goals, support and checkpoint dates.
Review the evidence and make a documented decision.

Diagnosis means finding out why the gap exists before deciding what to do about it.
A written plan turns the conversation into measurable goals, support and dates.
The review ends in one of three decisions: back on track, extend with changed support, or move to a formal process.

In plain words

Think of a coach with an athlete who is slower than last season. A good coach does not announce "you are a bad runner." The coach checks for an injury, a changed technique or a missing training plan. Then the coach shows the athlete the times and agrees a schedule. The athlete is re-timed on set dates. The analogy breaks at one point. A sports coach can pick another athlete, but a manager owes an employee a fair process before any exit.

In one precise sentence, the approach is to find the cause of a performance gap, state it with evidence, agree a supported plan with dated checkpoints, and make a documented decision at the review.

Step 1: Diagnose the cause before you label the person

Diagnosis means finding out why the gap exists before deciding what to do about it. Four common causes are: the expectation was never clear, the engineer lacks a skill, the engineer lacks motivation or fit, or something outside work is affecting them. Each cause needs a different response. Training does not fix an unclear priority, and a stern talk does not fix a missing skill.

Input: your evidence and a conversation. Output: a stated hypothesis about the cause. Check your own part first. Ask whether the standard was ever written down, whether the engineer got feedback in one-on-ones, and whether the work was set up for success. The guide to growing engineers covers the skill-gap case in depth. You now know what you are treating, which decides the tone of the next step.

Step 2: Name the gap in a private, specific conversation

Naming the gap means telling the engineer, in private and early, what you have seen, with examples. Acas, the British advisory service on workplace relations, says employers should first see whether a problem can be resolved informally. Its informal route is privately talking with the employee, listening to their point of view and agreeing improvements, and for a performance issue a training or development plan. Specific beats general: "three reviews waited more than a week for your response" is a fact the engineer can check, while "you are slow" is a verdict they can only argue with.

Input: the diagnosis and two or three concrete examples. Output: a shared description of the gap and what good looks like. Say what you expect, ask what is getting in the way, and listen before you conclude. Write a short note of the conversation afterwards. The note is for you and for a later review, and it records what was said and agreed. The one-on-ones and hard feedback page covers how to phrase this conversation.

Step 3: Agree a written plan with support and checkpoints

A written plan turns the conversation into measurable goals, support and dates. A plan of this kind is called a performance improvement plan (PIP). A good one names two or three goals, the help you will give, and the dates of the reviews.

Below is an illustrative 90-day plan for one engineer who is slow to respond to the code reviews assigned to them. Time to first response on assigned code reviews, the days from a review request to the engineer's first comment or approval, starts at 6.0 days in the illustrative plan. The target is 3.5 days by day 90, with checkpoint targets spaced evenly.¹ The engineer controls this number, unlike the time a pull request takes to merge, which also depends on other reviewers.

In this illustrative plan each 30-day checkpoint expects time to first response to fall by about 0.83 days and bugs found after release by one per month.
Checkpoint	Time to first response on assigned reviews (illustrative)	Bugs found after release per month (illustrative)
Baseline	6.00 days	4
Day 30	5.17 days	3
Day 60	4.33 days	2
Day 90	3.50 days	1

The support side matters as much as the targets: pairing sessions, protected time in the calendar for reviews, training, and a lighter load while the engineer catches up. A metric is one input to the review, alongside examples and the engineer's own view, never the whole judgment.

A plan sets a checkpoint target for each review, so progress is measured against evidence and not impressions.CC BY 4.0 — source: What is your approach to managing poor performers on your team?

Text description of the diagram

Time to first response on assigned code reviews starts at 6.0 days in the illustrative plan.
The target is 3.5 days by day 90, with checkpoint targets spaced evenly.

Step 4: Review the evidence and make a documented decision

The review compares the evidence with the plan and ends in one of three decisions: back on track, extend with changed support, or move to a formal process. The decision rests on what you recorded, not on how you feel about the engineer. The Acas capability guidance says that if an employee is unlikely to reach the standard, or does not improve even with more support and training, employers should try changing duties or finding a different role, and agree any change with the employee.

If those options do not work, a formal route, often called a capability process, is a written procedure for dealing with significant performance problems. Bring in your human resources (HR) team before you start it, because the rules differ by country and company. The same guidance says an employer needs evidence of the poor performance and of the steps taken to support improvement. Your notes from Steps 2 and 3 are that evidence.

Knowing it is half the job. Saying it is the other half.

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The Staff-level answer

A mid-level answer to this question sounds like a policy: "I give feedback, set a plan and, if it fails, escalate." The Staff-level answer names the diagnosis, the evidence and the support, and it can be said in about a minute.