The reality is that you need to micromanage the shitty ones. They need to be kept on track so that they were productive.
I'm a lead as well and one of our developers is a smart but scatterbrained programmer. She is a mess in terms of running a project and communicating with the rest of the company but if I give her a specific task, she does well.
So what I did was insert myself in any meeting she was a part of, and talked with her several times a day to check in. When I see her going off course in a meeting, I will correct it, and if she says anything incomprehensible in a meeting, I will translate for the others.
The good thing about this programmer is that she really wants to improve, so I give her very frank feedback. The feedbsck I orovide is along the lines of "you need to increase people's confidence in you, because right now it is low, we don't know if you can run a project on your own". She has gotten much better and a lot more productive, which I honestly believe is due to me. I don't take any credit for the work she does, and I constantly praise her in front of others, but I do know that without my micromanagement, she would not be nearly as productive as she is right now.
If her productivity didn't imorove with my micromanagement, I would have fired her because the last thing we need is a drag on the team due to an unproductive member.
I'm a lead as well and one of our developers is a smart but scatterbrained programmer. She is a mess in terms of running a project and communicating with the rest of the company but if I give her a specific task, she does well.
So what I did was insert myself in any meeting she was a part of, and talked with her several times a day to check in. When I see her going off course in a meeting, I will correct it, and if she says anything incomprehensible in a meeting, I will translate for the others.
The good thing about this programmer is that she really wants to improve, so I give her very frank feedback. The feedbsck I orovide is along the lines of "you need to increase people's confidence in you, because right now it is low, we don't know if you can run a project on your own". She has gotten much better and a lot more productive, which I honestly believe is due to me. I don't take any credit for the work she does, and I constantly praise her in front of others, but I do know that without my micromanagement, she would not be nearly as productive as she is right now.
If her productivity didn't imorove with my micromanagement, I would have fired her because the last thing we need is a drag on the team due to an unproductive member.