Well this guy - my direct report was based in South Africa though. In his first month I assigned him an internal project which he seems to be very keen about it and was very active in all the discussion calls.
I then asked him to start building some modules or components which are supposed to be joint together at one point to form the complete solution. By the way this is a solution which is able to detect unsecured db events from database run history. Upon unsecured event detection the program would send an alert to the Risk and Compliance department for further action.
I have setup a chat in Teams with all the members involved into this little project for discussion and clarification. On and off I would reach out to this guy for any issues/challenges that are blocking him from progressing further and what I have got is always "all good" or "no problem" you know all sorts of positive answer, you know how I feel? I feel so relieved that wow I have got a good staff!
(In fact now I am very regretful for not interviewing this guy myself , instead I let the other manager interviewed him which I think the other manager does not have the right skill to identify the right talent, and I am very very very good in identifying good candidate for every company out there! There are secret techniques actually which you might need to learn from me. Engage me at +60127138309 if you really want to learn about these methods which you must apply during an interview with the candidate! )
Here comes the issue, one day before the demo date with the user, this guy reported that he's sicked, then the following day he said he gotta continue his medical leave as he's still recovering! Then i negotiated with the user and postponsed the demo date to the following Tuesday.
Guess what happened on the following Tuesday? This guy said he had to attend to his mother's seizure issue, then for the whole week I did not know at all when he's going to come back to work! In between I asked him to spend a few minutes to upload his works to our internal code repository which he didn't!
Ok no problem then I decided to drop him from the project and got another guy to start fresh. Luckily the user was very understanding he allowed more time for us. Of course I did not share my decision of passing the project to another guy with the South African guy, I wanted him to know we are still expecting him to delivery the demo.
Then I don't remember exactly when but I think it must have been the following week, it was again on the demo day itself, this guy wrote in again saying now his father in law has passed away , then few hours later in the noon he secretly sent his dad-in-law death notice to me. I was like wtf I never asked you to send me what.
Anyway I was getting much pressure from the user for his behaviour and after discussing with the South Africa HR , I decided to extend his probation. When he's back I assigned him lighter task however he was not showing much proactiveness to be honest in his new assignment, he's supposed to monitor the pending ticket board to assign himself some tickets where I had established the Support tools for him such as Team Chat on Teams, some 'buddy' team member etc. Unfortunately he always needed someone to remind him oh the ticket is coming to its due date soon then only he would start taking action.
The lesson learnt from me is very simple, I should have interviewed this guy from the beginning because I believe I will be able to sniff his attitude and behaviour issue during the interview, which my peer manager failed to do so.
I have been managing a team of senior automation engineers, technical support engineers, SREs and DBAs who are based in different countries different timezone from Malaysia, India to Bulgaria and South Africa and so far for many years never had any problem losing those good talents. In fact their productivity keep going higher and higher each year! Again because I know the secret of managing highly intellectual people like them. If you are having challenges in managing good talent please reach out to me I can provide you the consultation on a reasoable fee of course!
