Advice related to managing colleague's work

[Anonymous]

My team has 4 developers including me. One of the developer has not been performing work well and the 2 other developers think it is unfair to them and started documenting about this developer's work. These 2 developers approached me for my opinion and I told them that I would not be right person to bring this to.
All the developers have a Dev lead (that is in a different team). These 2 developers had the option to complain to Dev lead or to scrum master or both. They chose to complain to scrum master.

Scrum master escalated this to the leadership and leadership brought this to Dev lead's attention. The Dev lead is not liking the fact that scrum master did not reach him directly but instead reached out to the leadership.

Note: In the past, some other developers including me complained about this developer to the Dev lead and each time Dev lead brushed it off saying that the developer has 3 or 4 years of experience and will improve with time. Also scrum master reached out to Dev lead directly in the past regarding this developer. Not sure what the outcome of that discussion was as it was never made transparent to the team.

Long story short, Dev lead is now asking me why I was not doing a daily followup with the developer about his tasks or work. Our teams are following agile methodology and each team member is responsible for his or her own work. Also in the past, I used help this developer a lot but he always dumps his work on me and never thanked me for any help.

The Dev lead has assigned me to coach the developer and literally asked me to micro-manage this developer's work. I am in a company with a lot of policies and rules. I am not sure how I can manage or micro-manage other person who does not directly report to me.
Also I worked with this developer for close to 2 years and most times ended up completing his work for him. Helping him is not matter of an hour or two per week. It is pretty much either I complete his work or he screen-shares and I make him do his work which can take up many hours in a given week.
This developer is not some one who is interested in taking feedback and improving.

I need some advice on how to handle this situation. I don't want to end up doing this developer's work and at the same time making sure he completes his work so that I can provide the same status to the Dev lead.
Since I did not get this task of monitoring developer's work in writing (scrum master does not know that Dev lead assigned this work to me), there is no way I can provide a status that I helped this developer.

[Anonymous]

If you have the political capital to push back right now (you’re a top performer with high output and your manager has demonstrated willingness to let you work how you need to) you could go back Monday and say you thought about this over the weekend and it doesn’t seem realistic - you have your own workload and when you’ve tried to coach this person in the past, they aren’t receptive to feedback. You aren’t willing to own both your results and theirs (because that’s called being a manager.., and this person kind of has two already)

If you don’t feel like you have the political power to push back immediately, Try it for a month and document how this person is (not) responding as well as the amount of time it’s taking you and the impact to your own work. Then go back to your manager having given it a good faith effort and explain with data why this is not going to work.

[Anonymous]

Adding… your dev leader sounds like a terrible leader to me. They have a problem employee and instead of doing their job and managing this person to better results, or out, they are dropping that problem on you. Maybe they won’t have a backfill if they fire this person? That’s fairly common.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you have the political capital to push back right now (you’re a top performer with high output and your manager has demonstrated willingness to let you work how you need to) you could go back Monday and say you thought about this over the weekend and it doesn’t seem realistic - you have your own workload and when you’ve tried to coach this person in the past, they aren’t receptive to feedback. You aren’t willing to own both your results and theirs (because that’s called being a manager.., and this person kind of has two already)

If you don’t feel like you have the political power to push back immediately, Try it for a month and document how this person is (not) responding as well as the amount of time it’s taking you and the impact to your own work. Then go back to your manager having given it a good faith effort and explain with data why this is not going to work.

I am fairly new to this company (2+ years) and due to remote work and also due to being introvert, do not have a lot of acquaintances or friends at work. Dev lead has been with this company more than 17 years. On the client side, its Dev lead role but on the company side, he is a Senior associate. I am worried to do or say anything that he may not approve. Dev Lead always says ("brags") that no one can go against him as he has been here before a lot of these people and knows a lot of important people in the company.

[Anonymous]

As part of the sprint planning can you put mentoring/reviewing, etc as tasks? Forcing a decision of whether you should review or do dev tasks? And if you spend to much time doing unaccounted work, you raise it in the retrospective.

[Anonymous]

Look at the bigger picture first. Does the weakest link even know he's underperforming? Does he truly know his contributions fall short of expectations? Is there too much ambiguity so this guy is just doing his own thing? Is there too much "my way or the highway" mentality with your team that your 2 colleagues feel they have to tattle to Dev lead?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Look at the bigger picture first. Does the weakest link even know he's underperforming? Does he truly know his contributions fall short of expectations? Is there too much ambiguity so this guy is just doing his own thing? Is there too much "my way or the highway" mentality with your team that your 2 colleagues feel they have to tattle to Dev lead?

OP here.

I don't think that developer knows who reported his performance or if people are discussing his work behind him.

Just today, had to spend almost 2 hours helping him with his work. And after all that help, he never even mentioned a thank you and never even acknowledged before team that I helped him.

The two developers belonged to a different team initially and most of their team members were let go. And two developers from my team moved to different roles (no longer working as developers). So these two developers joined our team which has stable work. Sometimes it feels like they want to push away the original team members so they can settle down here with job security.