5 Ways To Manage Under Performers

A CTOs guide to improving their teams

James Williams
7 min readOct 22, 2020
Photo by Marcus Aurelius from Pexels

Right off the bat, I would like to give my first piece of advice. Never saddle high performers with underperformers. Almost always, it makes your star performers worse.

It’s not easy to build a team that can take a company to the next level. The best leaders engineer their teams with precision. They consider personalities and skillsets equally. The trick is to put super-smart people together that have built-in chemistry. When I build teams, I imagine who will go to lunch together, naturally.

If it just happens, you don’t need team-building exercises. In my opinion, team-building exercises are just admitting that the team isn’t built the right way in the first place.

It’s like planning fun where you tell people when to smile and laugh.

But.

You don’t always have the option to build a team from the ground up. Sometimes you inherit crappy, inefficient teams.

There are a lot of great techniques, books, and coaches. And, most of it works. This article gives you insight into things I have tried that worked.

Here are my top 5 tips to turn under performers into stars.

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James Williams

Founder of COFEBE, Inc. We build tools that make engineer’s jobs easier. https://www.cofebe.com