Pips are disingenuous. If you get put on one, find a new job as fast as possible(businessinsider.com) |
Pips are disingenuous. If you get put on one, find a new job as fast as possible(businessinsider.com) |
When serious professionals try to work together and it doesn't work out, someone is asked to leave, and they do. They get to play it off as a reason other than performance. Egos and careers remain undamaged, and everyone can move on.
Adult Day Care centers have very low bars to clear, and most roles could be performed by basically anyone. Firing someone requires a lot of pomp and circumstance in order to seem fair. After all, everyone else is barely doing anything, and they will get to keep their jobs.
If you get put on a PIP, you know what game you're playing, and you absolutely should not quit. Make them fire you, and collect unemployment. Then move on to the next host.
What game is that? It's common for employers to use PIPs to create a paper trail prior to terminating somebody who doesn't get the memo that they are not making the grade. That's because performance reviews tend to under-document problems, which leaves the employer open to problems if the matter ends up in court. (Which is not particularly surprising--most people including managers are uncomfortable giving unvarnished feedback.)
Both failed… I would have much preferred keeping them to finding and training someone new.
That’s not to say that they should be given infinite leeway, but nobody here has made that argument, so…
Sometimes a PIP is just a PIP. I’m sick to death of the increasingly clickbaity articles that cause employees to preemptively put their shields up as a result of painting every workplace as being a very particular sort of…terrible corporate America.
Once I had a really bad family issue. Won't go into it, but I took a bunch of time off. Coming back to work, I wasn't fully engaged, because there was a lot of chaos. So I got put on a pip.
My manager did this in good faith. He gave me a bunch of things to do, a bunch of milestones to meet, deadlines.
Honestly, it was a lifeline I needed. And better, I didn't have to guess on schedule, make promises on tight deadlines. So I worked specifically to the milestones. Helped people after things were done. Didn't take on extra, but added it to my notes. And I got through it.
Now I was worried. Was this just gathering evidence for something inevitable. Was it pre-decided? I just took it on good faith, did the work, and when I accomplished the goals, I was off the pip.
I was good after that. I think I'm better for it.
(that said, I've been told a second pip might be impossible to pull off)
1) got a talking too about performance - it wasn't called a pip (my mom was dying and I was taking too much time out for medical appointments for her. Note the discussion was shortly after she had passed)
2) As a fairly new manager (at the time) I had to put my first hire as a manager onto a pip. It was painfully obvious to everyone they were not capable and struggled with the most basic things.
While I didn't hold out much hope they would turn it around, I gave them every opportunity to prove to me they could do the job (or learn at least to) they were hired to do, instead they cheated their way through the pip, passing others peoples work off as their own.
I just got PIP'd, and then fired. The objectives of the PIP were impossible to complete, dependent on externalities that I couldn't control. A box checking process indeed. Although, I dont think my boss entered it in bad faith, I'm pretty sure his boss made the decision.
WHat sucks is that I've been fighting some medical issues for the past 1.5 years thats made it difficult to focus and think. Things are starting to resolve, but I've had to completely change care teams. And, I was shitcanned despite letting management/HR know about the issues, having letters from two different docs.
I did my best to complete the objectives, even knowing I wouldn't. I did use the time to look for work, but unfortunately, didnt get anything nailed down before the termination.
- unassigned from a team
- report to no one
- no real work to do
- got frustrated and quit
I didn’t stick around till appraisals. I shudder to think what might have happened if I did. No one was looking at my performance.
I had been working on two related projects and was really struggling because the company wanted "something different" than the industry norm. I could please one stakeholder but not another, and it went on like that for awhile. To this day I can't fathom why the various managers involved couldn't meet with _one another_ to sort out their creative differences, but they didn't. I was stuck trying to implement for competing aims that seemed more and more incompatible.
I couldn't see the forest for the trees because all of that was additional to my core work.
So, I didn't see a PIP coming. Got called into an unscheduled meeting one Friday. My boss says "hey didn't we have a meeting this afternoon? Let's hop on Zoom." It was like 4:30 PM and we absolutely didn't have a meeting scheduled. I got told I was being put on a PIP because my project wasn't delivering.
Created a game plan and was told we'd do check-ins in writing (via email) and a Zoom each week until "things were back on track." I busted my ass afresh and I sent a start-of-week email with my agenda for the week, an end-of-week check-in to compare my agenda to work completed, and to schedule a call.
What I absolutely should have seen coming was that I was going to be terminated. I should have seen that coming because I got not a single reply to the check-in emails I sent. I thought the Zoom calls sufficed. Each week I was told "hey, yeah, I saw that, great work! No notes!" But any time I tried to record the call I was admonished; it was clear I could either record the call or we could have the status meeting.
And then they laid a bunch of my team off, and reposted what I'd been doing as a new role. I didn't see it coming at all. Maybe I should have. My boss even said "some people see this coming," and told me it wasn't about performance. I was left hurt and confused. I had just gotten acknowledged for delivering very well on my core KPIs at an all-hands meeting the month prior.
Never meet your heroes, they say.
Many (possibly most) companies use PIPs as a pretense for a firing decision that has already been made. In those companies it is a fool's errand to try and improve your performance (because performance may have nothing to do with it). You cannot win. You should feel lucky that you only seem to have encountered legitimate pips where both sides are hoping for improved performance.
After the team lead has endlessly explained, reassigned, and simplified a person's tasks, and just generally tried their best to make the person a productive member of the team _and failed_, then they've given up and put them on a PIP so they can be let go.
AFAICT PIPs are must CYA's.
PIP is such a bullshit term. Their “official” description sounds like a great thing that all employees could benefit from. If a company waits until the last moment to give their struggling employees the kinds of tools they should be freely offering in good faith to everyone, then they suck.
If you're the sort of person that cannot decode what a "Performance Improvement Plan" means then you're going to be eaten by the industry alive. It's insane to me that we even need qualified people to reassure anyone about that.
If you are in the United States, FMLA[1] provides job-protected leave for these sort of situations and ensures you have a job to come back to when it's over. Most smaller companies I've been at really hate to do the paperwork for it, but they're federally mandated to provide the benefit.
I feel like this is the problem with PIPs. From the managerial side, there is this good-faith expectation that a poorly-performing employee will snap back into shape once put on-notice. For people that are chronically incapable of certain tasks, this is a deliberately bad-faith expectation. And while it's not particularly common, it also stands to reason that a well-performing employee could be judged by unfair metrics or assigned an impossible task. So now everyone feels wronged. It's like a minimally-viable abstraction for making a firing appear natural and documented.
They were my first hire and made a number of mistakes:
- I was too nice/eager (one of interviewers said 'no, they can't code' and I should have listened to them).
- They passed (with the one caveat) our not very rigorous screening process, this is on me as well.
- I did not do a formal review at the end of their probation period (it was becoming obvious they were not skilled, but I dismissed it as coming up to speed with our systems).
Before the pip, I would have probably kept them but with a pay cut, but prevailing wisdom was that it would not work in practice.
Also of course a well-performing employee could be harmed by this, but the method is irrelevant - that is a bad company and the employee is well to find another job anyway.
I think the problem with your statement is you are trying to overgeneralize. PIPs run the gamet depending on how good the company is. I've never see a PIP be used in the ways you described, and I have never used them in such a way (and never will).
Like what?
On the one hand, yes, this is true. On the other hand, it shouldn't take decoding doublespeak to know that a "performance improvement plan" has nothing to do with improving performance, and is just a box-checking CYA exercise to make a paper trail for firing someone.
And the way in which people learn this obnoxious bit of doublespeak is by having plenty of readily findable sources telling them "this is a box-checking exercise for firing you, do not believe any HR information claiming otherwise".
There are real pips, but you have to know when to hold them and when to fold them.
Business and employment works with good faith. A lot of people work with good faith. If your manager suddenly pulls a PIP, the good faith is broken but the managers continue to lie that PIPs can be surpassed. It is the lies that detract people - especially the ones that are clinging to the job for valid reasons like family, mortgage, visas etc.
American companies have abandoned good faith. Gen Z is learning it from millennials and abandoning corporate America. Articles such as this one are just highlighting to people how to recognize bad faith.
Of the other group, some were close. Some were not. All were having consistent performance issues for significant periods of time, and were not responding to any of the normal feedback mechanisms. One of them, decided to dig in and make it miserable for everyone.
The difference between the two groups? The first group took ownership of their actual performance, understood what the concerns were, and addressed them.
The second group, either refused to take any ownership of what was going on, was unable to for whatever reason, or like in the last really troublesome case, decided to blame and attempt to manipulate everyone else rather than face their actual issues.
The second group all eventually got fired.
I can tell which group you’d be in just from this post. But then, I doubt you’re surprised by that either.
But at the same time, decoding what 'business language' means in real-world terms is an essential skill in today's market. People who can't figure this out are going to be chewed up and spit out by the machine one way or another. The entire reason why the concept of a PIP exists at all is so management can have a reliable and abstracted "Remove Employee" button whenever they choose.
I guess the ultimate irony is them presenting this like a Playboy tell-all interview with... someone from management. If this is Business Insider, I'm Forbes magazine.
I’m glad you know what a PIP is – how about a little less judgement for today’s 10000? https://xkcd.com/1053/
Meanwhile, serious professionals primarily use word of mouth and their networks to recruit for important roles. For less important rank-and-file roles, references are one way to de-risk new hires. Anyone applying for a senior position should be able to write down a few phone numbers that lead to glowing reviews. Never having impressed anyone is a red flag for a senior role.
I interpreted this from OP: >Both failed… I would have much preferred keeping them to finding and training someone new
as giving infinite leeway, like "i'd rather not go through the hiring process and just 'deal with it'".
If someone successfully completed a PIP and gets fired, the company has effectively put in writing that the employee was fired for other reasons. I wonder if that would look worse in a lawsuit than not having a PIP at all.
That is precisely what I meant.
The second group, either refused to take any ownership of what was going on, was unable to for whatever reason, or like in the last really troublesome case, decided to blame and attempt to manipulate everyone else rather than face their actual issues.
My suggestion to anyone reading above post - listen to them. Take ownership of your performance. But by switching jobs - not by dancing to arbitrary deadlines/characteristics imposed by managers who don't understand externalities - like this poster.
Tell of a manager that doesn't understand engineering, collaboration, and tradeoffs.
I'm one of the ones that got caught with a PIP. My supervisor, team leads, co-workers, and other colleagues all had great performance reviews for me. And then suddenly the PIP. I found out later that it was probably related to some medical issues I have, which explains why it came out of nowhere.
> But at the same time, decoding what 'business language' means in real-world terms is an essential skill in today's market.
Yep, still struggling with that. I'm the child of hippies that wasted all their time filling my head with religion, rather than survival skills, and so being prepared for "business language" is still challenging. Heck, I'm a Millennial, and I haven't had any career office talk to me about how key LinkedIn is in finding work and networking. I had to go find the research myself, and take action to get myself up to speed.
I can't really guess at all the factors keeping me and my cohort out of professional life, but it does happen, quite a lot. Maybe it's not visible to everyone because we're so absent in professional settings. For example, at my last job at a big company all of my colleagues were either 15 years older than me or 15 years younger than me, with only a single exception. That is a pretty clear pattern, and does explain why my experiences and those like me might be absent from the discourse surrounding professional work.
--
Edit: Actually, that got me thinking. What if we're looking at some sort of evolutionary process? For example, consider a population of people, and assign the trait of "understanding business language" to some of them at random. Then at each time step prune out of some of them that lack that trait. Then, after n-time steps you're left with a population that is almost entirely made-up of people with that trait. And as the people left in the population all have the survival trait, the equilibrium state is a professional class of people that were lucky enough have the trait in the first place. And so, from the perspective of someone in that population with that trait, over time, they would see only others that had the "common knowledge" of that trait, and perhaps assume that the trait must be present in most people given the "False consensus effect" [1]:
> is a pervasive cognitive bias that causes people to "see their own behavioral choices and judgments as relatively common and appropriate to existing circumstances".
Fascinating if true.
I've seen managers struggle to emotionally justify firing incompetent dolts. They didn't go "heh, what's the smartest way to scape goat this guy out of here"? Honestly, I would've had a much easier time, but I would've done it in a straightforward way.
If anything, I predict the "common knowledge trait" to shake out of society is "being a good person", and it shook out millennia ago and is pretty common (too common, if anything). If you're not, nobody'll wanna work with you.
I’m completely unable to grok “business language”. Perhaps like the hippie poster I should look to my country bumpkin parents, but I’m old enough that I should look inward. It’s probably my cynicism that makes me unable to hold the optimism behind business jargon (synergy, thought leadership, and co-opting the word ‘strategy’ for any and every decision).
I’ve pursued very hands on work that is pretty far from the business end and just hope to hang on long enough to earn my nest egg and provide for my family to maybe have enough good cheer to thrive in corporate America unlike their grumpy old man.
I'm sure that I'm misunderstanding what you mean here. Do you really mean that fundamentally everyone is trying to get ahead by gaming the system?
So if you're not part of management setting up the game, and if you're not one of the players conscious of the House Edge, how long can you play at the table? I really do empathize with people who have benign expectations of business politics and want to go attend those silly bar-crawl/"after hours" events. But those people, nice as many of them are, are tools. The only way to put yourself ahead of the management is to stop being a sycophant, and to strategically deny your employer free office hours.
I could not disagree with this more. My professional and business experience indicates this is not accurate.
> The entire article here is about how you will be manipulated if you don't question the literal wording of what HR tells you.
True! I'm not saying that the world isn't full of manipulative assholes, and people need to know what sort of assholery they will encounter.
I'm just saying that you don't need to be a manipulative asshole in order to succeed in business. If you're arguing that you do (which is what I'm hearing), I think that's incorrect.
> The only way to put yourself ahead of the management is to stop being a sycophant, and to strategically deny your employer free office hours.
We're entirely on the same page here, though.
Definitely agree here. If you're a manager or executive, you always have the option of showing up to work casually, treating everyone with good faith to get work done and get paid.
If you're an employee, though? Ground crew, not management, no reports? It's gloves-off all the time, a manager who's nice to you one day can turn sour another. It's the nature of the power imbalance that makes it impossible for good employees to take their employer in good faith. Without that skepticism, you're bound to be manipulated and undervalued as a human.
While there are plenty of incompetent (or just plain dickish) managers, no one who ever reported to me got a PIP for anything but being consistently ineffective or so abrasive they were causing more trouble than they were worth.
Ineffective could mean anything from couldn’t code effectively (compared to peers) to couldn’t design/figure out what to do to a decent enough quality, or wasn’t independent enough for the level they were working at, or unable to get peers to help them due to being a problem, etc.
Abrasive being picking fights with co-workers over things that didn’t matter, pointlessly antagonizing or scaring people, bullying co-workers, etc.
In all cases it needed to be a pattern of behavior (not a one off), they already had significant feedback/chance to improve and had not, and I have concrete guidance on what to do instead, why it mattered, and I would check in regularly and independently to see if there was improvement and give regular feedback.
And I made sure that the managers who reported to me (later) did the same. Which is why we had such good turn around rates. But ultimately, it wasn’t up to us - the most we could do is show a path. They had to walk it.
Anyone who didn’t think it was fair (but couldn’t articulate why in a way we could reconcile), or refused to understand and take ownership of the situation didn’t do well. Which was unfortunate. And did happen.
If they left without completing it, I would have understood and hey - better for everyone. No point trying to fit a square peg into a round hole forever.
But in all the time I was managing (over a decade, 200+ different folks, peak of a little over 60 at one time) no one ever did. Even though in some cases we offered them significant money to do so.
The case that tried to hit every button and blame/manipulate everyone else was particularly terrible, because I had to go into CYA/document everything mode while he tried to sabotage the team and anyone else he could get ahold of. Including false accusations against me, the HR rep, and several nearby managers who had nothing to do with it.
All because he got hired in to code, but near as I could tell literally couldn’t. He kept trying to make all his co-workers do it for him, which got old very fast. 3 months in, all his co-workers hated him, and that was quite a feat on that team.
He turned down a six figure ‘please stop already’ offer just to try to complete the PIP - which he didn’t, and everyone who wasn’t completely delusional knew he wouldn’t. And got fired.
So what are you talking about, specifically?
This leads to a weird situation - one wherein as soon as a manager, reporting to you,faces pressure, they use the PIP to find an escape hatch. They start creating narratives about how some failure is because of an engineer individual - and not because of poor structures, poor communication by the manager, or generally management losing track of what makes a project succeed. An example of this is merely managers who PIP people for something sliding by 2 days but reality is that those 2 days don't matter to the business - it is a mediocre system that is penalizing an individual for those 2 days - just because.
The fact that you've had to PIP over 20 people - say at a rate of 1 person per year - it is a massive signal that your structures are dysfunctional. Either you are hiring absolute dumbasses or there is something wrong about your system that causes Pippable behaviors.
Look inwards. You'll go further in life.
For example - where did you get that I PIP'd over 20 people? Because I not only never said that, it never happened.
Of the dozen I did PIP, over half were handed to me in re-orgs, and had been persistent performance issues that the prior manager never addressed. Such is corporate life.
And all of those dozen I handled directly. There were a few in time that subordinates handled as they came up later, but I forgot to count those in the total. All I would do in those cases is ensure they were doing the right things - I wouldn't ever make the call, as it wasn't mine to make. They don't meaningfully impact the overall numbers though.
And there were a lot of non-PIP performance discussions too of course. For instance, I had a manager I took over that was burnt out and performing badly due to a really legally dangerous performance issue from someone MY boss had insisted be given a chance. I didn't PIP the manager, we talked about it and I helped him find a new team where he could get some new scenery, and my boss took over the performance problem.
Regardless, only 4 of the 12 ended up being fired. Which is what, 2% of the total number of folks? Even doubling that, over 10 years that is amazing. The rest improved performance wise. Several of them even thanked me. Bizarrely, the really difficult case I talked about was one of them.
Near as I can tell, no one had ever held him accountable for his actual performance, because he had previously kept succeeding at getting people to blow up at him.
Show me a place where that is a bad stat, and I'll show you a place that is lying through their teeth or delusional.
And hey, I got PIP'd once too. Personal issues that bled over into professional life. It sucks!
My manager was right on with what the issues were though, even if he didn't do most of the actual best practices. I ended up making some major life changes personal wise to deal with my issues as well as transferring to a different team as my managers style was not a good fit for me either, and had another 3+ years of productive time in my career there (and got promoted). We still chat from time to time.
Ciao!