How do you approach a report that is not performing as expected? What steps are taken?

Our first step is to make sure we're defining "as expected."

Often times -- especially at early-stage companies, Founders don't create job descriptions for roles, and then get frustrated that their employees aren't performing.

We have job descriptions for each role -- even for the Founders. And then we use a concept of "check-in tables" and a red / yellow / green" system for the manager + direct report to align around how well each of us is performing in the role.

And this goes for me as the CEO as well! In fact, here's my check-in table as CEO -- I recently ran this process with my co-Founders, even though we're only a few months old as a company. We wanted to set a baseline to track our growth in each of our respective roles.

Here's what each color means:

The first column has my job description, and the second column has my self-score colors. You can see I think that I have a lot of work to do! The other columns have the scores from my co-founders, which I've blurred out to protect their privacy.

This check-in process is an excellent way for us to all align around how we're each doing in our roles.

FounderCulture members can get more detail on how to create Current + Next-Level Check-In tables in this FC Knowledgebase post.