There is nothing to hate here. I have given numerous PIP's as a manager and only actually fired once. The purpose of a PIP is to improve, not to fire a person.
Tech still, to this day, has a problem retaining women and URMs. Conceptions of individual performance are often shaped by unintentional (or intentional) sexism and racism. Speaking personally, at my last role at FB there was a quite marked change in how I was treated after I transitioned to ~female.
The PIP process does not interrogate all this nearly as much as it should. I'm quite convinced it's absolutely the wrong way to go about things — too much falls on the IC and not enough on management.
Sometimes, you can tell someone "listen, nothing else worked, and we tried for a while, so this is the last resort". Do you think it's better to fire people outright than to give them one last chance?
(There are certainly some individuals that end up being a negative to the team, disrupting more than contributing, and a small minority of PIPs are justified in that sense. But most PIPs I've seen are handed out to hardworking individuals who are very clearly doing their best and are enhancing the team, just because they maybe aren't as good as playing politics, or are game theoretic doves in an environment full of hawks.)
edit: while I was not put on a PIP, at FB I got a "meets most" rating in the cycle where I first built cargo-nextest. In the end nextest had a far greater impact on the world than anything else management was doing, and the same people who gave me that rating now have it as a critical dependency. It's still wild to me how little focus there was on seriously thinking about long-term project health.
Are we building something for the next 6-12 months, or are we aiming to build a monument that will outlast our careers? Sometimes the answer really is the former, but it has very serious costs that are often unaccounted for.
Some environments just can’t be fixed. The employer’s needs and the employee’s have diverged (or potentially were never aligned to begin with).
As a manager, I think I see this most often when a relatively average performer reaches a particular stage in their career and feels like it’s time for them to “take the next step”, but there’s no room for them at the next echelon because the few spots there are going to better qualified or better performing employees.
These folks start to disengage, performance dips, focus is lost. You can’t nurture your way out of this situation. Most employees quit at this stage, but some stick around long enough to be a problem. Most of these people also have a view of themselves which reflects what they were able to achieve at their peak, and blame their current performance on being “demotivated”.
In my experience, very, very few PIPs are handed out to folks who are actually, currently working hard, and in those cases, it’s because that person was never a good fit and should not have been hired in the first place.
PIPs will almost always end in termination because good managers will have already tried a multitude of tactics to improve performance, and bad managers are unlikely to be able to provide the kind of feedback needed to be successful in a PIP if they were not able to before the PIP. In those situations where a good manager is successful with a PIP, there is likely still an issue, because it took threatening the employee’s job to get them to fix their performance, when presumably they did not respond to less formal methods.
I'm an upper-caste south Asian and it's fair to say that I have it much better than, say, Black people in tech on account of race. (Interestingly, I did have a fairly racist interaction once where this guy treated me like I had no idea what I was talking about, even though I'd spent several years working on $subject. From talking to Black folks my understanding is that it's the sort of thing they face all the time.)
Gender adds another layer to all this -- as someone who has been on both sides of that divide the difference has been quite noticeable. And the interaction of gender and race is all the more complicated -- Indian women face a level of scrutiny that neither Indian men nor white women do. And Indian trans women even more than Indian cis women. "Intersectionality" is a really nice term that captures this general idea.
It's a complicated set of interactions, but it's nonetheless real and worth carefully considering. Life's complicated and ambiguous.
Performance feedback should not come in the form of cues. If it does, it is poor management.
There are a million examples of why they are bad, and I can’t really think of any in which they are useful on their own. Which becomes the issue when decision makers advance in ranks and “I don’t dare make decisions without covering my ass” managers slip in. Or when HR gets too much political power and push their tools as the law. Often organisations simply grow into poor cultures because the systemic value of measurements is shit compared to individual management. This is of course helped along by bad managers, who when given too much freedom create an organisational culture which is far worse than the meritocracy of data driven management.
I think it’s a little rough to judge someone who may have grown up in these cultures as a bad manager from a couple of lines of text.
I think the GP is overly optimistic about a PIP. In general I'll say when I've put someone on a PIP, it's been with the expectation of firing at the end. "We have discussed this problem and I've made it clear you need to improve, this is your last chance, I need to see x, y, and z (where X Y and Z are as concrete and measurable as possible) or mm/dd will be your last day". It's making clear that whatever issues are involved have come to a head, and this is the final chance to fix them. My general assumption is that if spelling out the issues and providing coaching hasn't resolved the issue the PIP probably won't either, but I do see value in a clear process vs the cut just being whenever I decide to do it, with no warning that day is coming.
I have also actually seen this work in practice. I've had people who multiple conversations and coaching seemed to make no inroads, but putting that clear "if this isn't resolved by X day, we're done" expectation out there seemed to make it "real" and they've completely turned things around. I have promoted people I've previously put on a PIP.
That said my advice remains, if your put on a PIP it's time to start looking. I think many (most?) managers d use them cynically where a PIP is more paper trail than final warning, and the employee may be getting fired regardless. Even if that's not the case you've just been told very clearly it's not working. Something isn't working and it's better to hedge your bets and look for another job that fits better while trying to improve.
You can tell someone they need to improve their performance. You can help them make a plan. And you can help evaluate the result.
Making a plan can certainly help.
You don't need to involve HR inorder to make a plan.
(Not saying that pip isn't a good concept, just that a formal pip is a last resort kind of tool)
I agree the ideal manager who is a good communicator with a genuinely incompetent employee ought to make a soft touch. If they're really bad, ideally let them know they can look for a job if they wish, offer a neutral recommendation, etc. Let them know a PIP might be coming etc since legal basis must be covered.
Problem with a poor manager, even with a soft touch, is maybe their expectations actually are bad (especially a pointy haired boss who doesn't have a conception of the labor needed). Maybe they have OCD and see all work as bad, in the same way someone might consider Scarlett Johansen extremely ugly because of that one single freckle ruining the whole thing. I've seen this too. That's all to say if a manager comes in with the sweetest gentlest informal approach and complains to Scarlett Johansen about how awful the freckle is, well, even the soft touch won't help much there.
I would imagine in most real world cases we can see both, and we can see mixes, where it's a so-so employee who might be great under a strong manager, but is weaker under a OCD manager who puts the magnifying glass on the weaknesses. And of course sometimes managers will put the magnifying glass on the weaknesses because they want to eliminate this employee for various external reasons.
To some, it is, and to others, it isn't.
I wonder: Is your question a byproduct of some type of educational system which had a lot of grade inflation and people get passed on to the next year no matter how poor their progress?
In my school/high school, if you got an F in one subject, you'd be held back for the whole year. In my university, they didn't grade on a curve, and had clearly delineated thresholds for A, B, C, etc. The engineering department worked hard to ensure only competent people could get an A or B (you didn't need to be brilliant - merely competent).
By the time you get a job, you should be able to handle feedback along the lines of "You're performance is not good enough for this job". With good management, this isn't a shock, and you should have gotten messaging about performance for quite a while prior to being handed a PIP. Not all management is good, though.
It should not be an identity crisis. No one is good enough for any job, and for any team. You should not go on in life thinking you'll not fail. You won't grow much that way.
I've seen management at times give the employee a ton of leeway. A friend of mine was in a SW team, and he decided he didn't like coding. The manager worked with him to give him an alternate role that was mostly related to customer support. When they'd come with a bug report or query, he'd study the (large) code base and help them if they were doing something wrong, or file a proper bug report with the team.
He still sucked (and knew it). He started working reduced hours (with the manager's approval) to handle the stress.
I kept telling him to go find another job if this one doesn't suit him. He had other skills - he'd done HW work professionally at the same company prior to switching to SW.
This went on for two years before they finally put him on a PIP and fired him. He had a grace period of two years to find another job, but didn't.
The real problem is the unfair PIP - where they want to fire you for reasons other than your performance. It begins with escalating demands that you cannot fulfill, and they use that as a pretext to put you on a PIP.
Anti-disclaimer: I've been on a (very unfair) PIP and was practically fired. Everyone I know at the company who's been on a PIP was fired. So when I say all of the above, trust me, I know the dark side of PIPs. I think they are primarily a tool to get rid of person and the manager is usually not honestly trying to redeem the person.
But even in those cases, it shouldn't be even close to "soul destroying". It's simply the equivalent of getting dumped by a boy/girl friend. Sucks, but it's expected. You move on.
I will also mention talk of managers getting PIPped, she reports that indeed her manager got PIPed by the director above.
Maybe you should consider giving people feedback in non-PIP form!
For most companies the purpose of a PIP is to fire a person.
So people's experience will fall into a few categories: * People who are not doing well * People where the expectations of the job are (honestly) different between employee and employer. * Trying to create cause to fire an employee / avoid layoff news.
As an analogy, we don't need a study to figure out that Apple has more of a profit motivation to remove charging bricks from its iPhone packaging rather than their stated motivation to help the environment. We know intuitively as intelligent humans that obviously the cost savings is the most compelling motivation. There is no financial reason for Apple to care about the impact of excess charging bricks on the environment unless it was so catastrophic that it would impact their future business. And I think we all know that it isn't - a charging brick is a tiny collection of common materials that pales in comparison to the amount of gasoline the average person burns in a single day.
In the same way, we can figure out quite easily with our own brains and observation skills that a corporation doesn't have any real motivation for an enployee to successfully exit a PIP. Here's why:
- Firing the employee will directly save on cost and cut risk. Because they are already under-performing there is very little upside to keeping them around, the implication is that they are already costing more than they are bringing in, i.e., they aren't helping very much to ease the capacity burden on other employees or "keep the lights on." e.g., if you have an employee on an on-call rotation who misses their pages or can't resolve any issues without asking for help, you might as well not have them on the rotation at all.
- The employee is already proven to be a below-median performer if not a bottom 25% performer, so intuitively we know that a random hire is more likely to perform better than the current one. If you already have a bad apple you're going to be willing to reach into the bag of apples to find a better one even if you're blindfolded.
- There is no direct cost to firing an employee in the USA. Hiring and firing is at-will and job mobility is high. There is no requirement to pay severance of provide extended notice.
- It will take a minimal amount of time to hire someone thanks to the at-will nature of US labor laws, and because the existing employee is a low performer, a new employee will be very likely to be onboarded to a higher level of performance of the current employee relatively quickly. We already know from data [1] that it only takes a month to hire on average. That's only two paychecks of paying a poorly performing employee. The company could even start the interview process in parallel with the PIP.
- The probability of management being able to turn around the situation permanently should be assumed to be low because fundamentally the role and responsibilities will not change. We intuitively and through real studies know that it’s difficult to change habits and abilities in the sort of time range that a PIP demands. E.g., Is it better to hope that Bronny James one day becomes as good his father at basketball or would it be better to draft someone who is already better than Bronny James? It’s not impossible that Bronny develops to that level but it’s also extremely unlikely and his ceiling is probably only a somewhat small percentage higher than his current level of performance. If you’re giving someone a PIP because they can need help figuring out how to set an environment variable how can you expect them to perform the role adequately even if they put an honest effort into improving?
- There is a clear and direct benefit to the company for having a PIP as documentation of both poor performance and formal notification to avoid wrongful termination lawsuits and to avoid the negative impacts of having more unemployment insurance claims. Paying a few months of salary to document poor performance is clearly worth the cost compared to just a small handful of hours worth of legal fees or a settlement.
I think that all these factors means that effective PIPs are really only going to occur in situations where there is a temporary or sudden decline in performance and that remedies in the PIP will actually help the employee get out of that rut. But intuitively we know that is going to be rather uncommon, because most PIPs are accompanied with additional burden on the employee, so only the people who respond positively to additional responsibilities, pressure, and scrutiny will survive it. And that already is proven to be unlikely because of how the employee ended up getting a PIP in the first place.
[1] https://resources.workable.com/stories-and-insights/time-to-...