A few months ago, Ethan Evans wrote a note about the true nature of performance improvement plans (PIPs) that hit hard:
Performance improvement plans (PIPs, Pivots) almost always end in you being fired or quitting.
The reason is that any real attempt to correct a performance issue has already been made, informally, without a structured process. Only when it becomes clear that the situation won’t improve, the manager and HR shift into PIP mode, which is essentially the process of managing someone out.
The manager's mental state shifts to "managing a problem" where that problem is you. Once they decide they are "documenting your poor performance," they tend to see, notice, and write down more things than they would have before.
Here’s another inconvenient truth: the primary function of HR is to protect the company, not its human resources. The number one goal of HR is to prevent the company from being sued. A PIP serves as a tool to collect evidence #1, #2, #3 … to guard against potential litigation.
As a lead, I’ve had to manage low performers on a few occasions, and I wish they had known the true nature of PIPs. Managing someone out is the worst part of being a manager, and unless you’re a sociopath, the instinct to minimize the damage inflicted is natural.
Unfortunately, in my experience, every employee I put on a PIP tried to tackle the challenge, and almost always the result was termination.
I’ve only seen one exception, where I was able to relocate the employee to a better-fitting role. At the beginning of the PIP, I was still hopeful. I tried to truly understand the reasons for the low performance, and through several discussions, I realized that the work assigned to this person was simply not a good fit for their skills and interests. He was a recent hire, brought in during a high-growth period when the company was aggressively scaling headcount. We had a streamlined hiring pipeline optimized for speed, but this came at the cost of nuance in filling specific roles.
As a result, he was placed on the Data team in an analytics engineering role, but his strengths and interests were better suited to data platform work. He didn’t enjoy working with stakeholders or business use cases, he preferred to work on the infra side.
Once I understood this, I reached out to the Data Platform team to see if a swap was possible, in case someone there was interested in moving into analytics engineering. Fortunately, we found a match, and the swap was a success. The employee who had been on a PIP ended up thriving in his new role and was even promoted two years later.
But this was definitely an outlier.
One thing I’ve noticed is that when employees are placed on a PIP, they often enter a mental state that is a mix of denial and delusion. They are shaken by what they hear, and when faced with the fight-or-flight response, they tend to choose a deluded version of fight.
Once the plan starts, the best course of action is to start looking for your next job fast, while you still have a paycheck.
This is great advice from Ethan Evans, but as a manager, you can’t say that to your employee.
I remember another case where, after nine months of low performance and multiple attempts, I wanted to tell the employee that the best course of action was to spend the last quarter looking for another opportunity, either internally or externally. My intention was to give her three months of grace, allowing her to leave on her terms rather than through termination.
HR wouldn’t allow it. Even with the best intentions, telling someone to start job searching is considered equivalent to termination. And terminating someone without going through a formal PIP exposes the company to legal risk.
I don’t think there’s an easy way to nudge people toward choosing the flight option, with a head start and grace. I can only hope they read Ethan Evans at some point.
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