You haven't made a case that they're incapable, just that they're not comfortable coming to you for direction. "Protect, direct and eject." You need to protect

You haven't made a case that they're incapable, just that they're not comfortable coming to you for direction. "Protect, direct and eject." You need to protect your top performers from the political conflicts that high performance attracts. You need to direct the people in the middle or those who haven't found a way to shine yet. We won't talk about ejecting, because you haven't made a case for that yet. Middle management presents a weird conflict of interest. You're still judged on deliverables rather than intangibles (like an actual executive) but you're going to have to take interest in your reports' careers if you want to have credibility with them. You have to be a product manager (to get X done for some "X" that is larger than you can do yourself) and a people manager, and to manage up. There's no silver bullet, but I think you need to humanize yourself and the relationship. You don't want your developers to see you as "The Boss", and you have to take interest in their careers and help them get where they're trying to go (which may be off your team, for the two who don't seem engaged). The difficulty of this depends both on your interpersonal skills and your credibility within the organization. Ultimately, if your managers (up the chain into the executive suite) don't care about your reports' careers and advancement, it's going to be a struggle to get for your reports the support and resources that they'll need to be motivated again. If your managers are bad, it's just a losing battle for you. Ultimately, you're going to have to figure out what your reports (all 4 of them; don't just focus on the 2 who seem to be lagging) want and make sure they get it, and that they know they will have your support as long as they don't betray your trust. Then you need to come up with a strategy that meets your project-management targets but also engages them. That's not an easy thing to do and it's impossible to come up with a general-purpose solution.