Are PIPs designed to fail?
Why performance improvement plans (PIPs, Pivots) almost always fail
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Performance improvement plans (PIPs, Pivots) almost always end in you being fired or quitting.
There are psychological reasons this is inevitable.
Here is why, and how to avoid them as an employee and to be a better manager.
First, I know a few managers will argue with me in the comments and claim that they "do everything they can" to help employees improve. I welcome your stories and claims - please share them!
Despite these honest claims, the psychology of the situation sets you up for being fired:
If the manager knew how to help you, they would have done so *before* writing an official plan.
If you knew how to succeed at your work place, you would have done so already. Other than a few "quiet quitters," no one sits around saying "I want to do a bad job, so bad I get fired."
By the time your manager decides you need to be put on a formal performance plan, they have burned up all their optimism for you. Managers avoid this HR process and paperwork as long as they can. By the time they reach the point where they feel they must act, they have crossed a mental line of thinking "I may have made a hiring mistake" and / or "this person may need to be fired."
The HR process is set up at least in part to avoid employee lawsuits. As such, it is a machine designed to make sure that the right documentation and paperwork is created. This machine will force the manager to write down all the things that may indicate that you are a poor employee who can be fired for "non-performance."
The reason I say that most performance plans inevitably lead to termination is thus:
(A) 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.
(B) The HR machinery grinds away. This is particularly true at companies like Amazon that have a goal of "unregretted attrition" where they want to actively move poor performers out. Read my post explaining why HR is not there to help you.
To avoid getting fired...
You really must avoid ever getting on one of these plans to begin with!
Once the plan starts, the best course of action is to start looking for your next job fast, while you still have a paycheck.
Now for all the managers who claim that they really want their employees to succeed and they write the plans to try to help them:
I believe your intent and your good heart.
All the subconscious bias I describe above still impacts you. Even if you want to help your employee, you are usually out of ideas (or you would have used them) and frustrated, plus now HR is involved and you have to think about the paperwork if it doesn't work out.
So, if you really want to help your employees, you have to do it *before* the performance plan comes out. By all means, be as fair and supportive as you can during the plan, but understand that at this point your best help to them may be giving them time to find a new job.
Comments?
Audience Insights
Additional advice and stories shared from readers:
From David Anderson (author of the Scarlet Ink newsletter; watch our talk about Amazon Leadership Principles (LPs) here) — “I'd add a point C to your reasons that it tends to end in termination.
c) Frequently employees who improve their performance temporarily to pass a pip, end up underperforming again later. Either because their motivation only temporarily improved while trying to pass the PIP, or there's an underlying issue which was never addressed. If a manager goes through the literal dozen+ hours necessary to document someone's underperformance, they will be very hesitant to allow the person to "escape" the PIP process. Because otherwise the manager might need to start again 6 months later.
Fair or not, as Ethan says, the time to improve performance is before the pip starts. I'd also add that my guess is 50% of underperformance is because of a disconnect between the manager and the employee, not an actual employee under performance. Yet another big reason why having the right manager for you is critical.”
Ethan’s response — I agree on both points. I have rarely to never seen someone survive a pip and become a top performer after that. Far more often a second pip follows the first.
From David Markley, my co-teacher for our course Avoid Disaster: Leading Large Tech Projects & Teams — “When there is a quota for the percentage of people who must be “unregretted attrition,” you are also fighting against managers meeting their quota. I don’t agree with this company behavior at all, but I would generally advise that people maximize their payout under these circumstances and move on to the next role. The culture that created such a quota is not interested in saving people. They have fresh meat standing in line outside.”
Ethan’s response — While I believe the "quota" system has some positives (because actual observed behavior when it was paused for a year at Amazon shows that many managers simply avoid performance management if not forced to undertake it), I think it is an overly simple blunt hammer in place of training and supporting managers to actually manage performance well. Regardless, you are right that the system makes every level of management worry about the quota, and managers above me were more likely to ask me when I was going to "wrap up" performance management and "hit my number" than how it was going rehabilitating an employee (a question I was simply never asked).
From Alex Sourov — “All good observations. I've done a fair number of PIPs in my life as a manager... In my experience the rate of passing PIPs was about 50% but the tricky thing is the majority of people who pass still don't last too long after they pass it. I saw PIPs as a one-time demonstration that an employee can do their job over a short time period when provided with more help than they should generally be expected to get. There have been a few people who just really wanted to be told that they should go elsewhere but like you mention it's rare. My message to employees going through PIPs was: "Look I'm confident you can beat PIP but I'm not confident you can sustain this performance without this much help from above and this is one time your manager can provide you with this much help. Let's beat this process because it's better for everyone to do so -- but also let's be honest about whether you will be able to sustain the required performance without this much support otherwise". This worked quite well for PIPs and I think in general -- and if employees left afterwards, it was still better if they left on their own accord because they realized that they cannot independently maintain the required standards.”
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Agree with what you wrote, but there is one reason a formal PIP sometimes succeed where pre-PIP efforts failed. For some employees it is difficult to understand how bad the situation is until it is put formally in front of them. It does not matter how clearly it is expresed beforehand, they would still interpret the messages optimistically.
A formal process may help (and helps), but it is very challenging, as you wrote. The critical ingredient is very high level of trust between the employee and the manager.
good general insight, but does not vibe with my experience at Amazon because I successfully managed my first report out of PIP. The situation differed because I was not the one to put him there: his previous manager did. I agreed to take him on, and then was told the next day I needed to put him in PIP :-) Why did it work? His 'attitude issues' had nothing to do with the intrinsic quality of his work or fit with the company (he still works at Amazon after years) but with how he came across to many colleagues, hindering collaboration. Together we worked on Earn Trust and Leaders are Right, A Lot - and achieved these goals.