Comment by deskr
8 months ago
How on earth can you be a good manager and not realize that saying "your performance is shit, we're going to fire you unless you take this course and we deem you've passed" is totally and utterly soul destroying to a person?
What’s the alternative? Give them a rainbow sticker? It’s business among adults, performance matters. If you can’t meet expectations then it’s not a good fit. That’s part of life.
The alternative is to very seriously ask if the primary reason for underperformance lies with management rather than the individual. We are a social species and a large part of our behavior is are determined by our social environment. The PIP process does not incorporate this very basic fact about us.
Any serious organization will take that into account for the managers own performance. Their job is people management, and so losing an employee is potentially a strike against them and they need to be able to justify the firing was not their own failure but the employees inability to perform, which is part of the process. You can also get some signal about this on how other employees are performing, if every employee’s under performing then obviously it’s a cultural management organization issue, but no organization can be all things to all people often there will just be bad fits and people need to be able to move on.
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I have seen both sides of this, but most often its legitimately performance related. As in, IC pushes no code, calls in all the time, is generally unreliable, etc etc. But the manager side is almost worse, because the bad manager multiplier effect extends to each of their reports. And if reports aren't sure about expectations, or communication is subpar, its easy to feel lost.
An informal pip.
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)
The ugly part of this is there are bad managers and bad employees so we don't know what each situation is. Or sometimes both parties are decent people but their personalities each have one too many spikes that sometimes mesh super well with people, sometimes mesh poorly.
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.
I’ve always assumed that’s a prerequisite for a pip. Obviously managers need to give reports good feedback regularly.
More soul destroying than "your performance is shit, so shit I see no hope your worthwhile, get out?"
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.
As someone who has been in that situation, it's better than "your performance is shit, you're fired". In my case a large part of the problem was that I was not picking up on what should have been obvious cues. This provided a needed wake up call, and prompted me to improve.
So poor management. A manager's job is to provide their reports the tools they need to do their job, and key to that is not 'obvious cues' but explicitly stated expectations. Basically the manager didn't manage and substituted a PIP for what they should have been doing all along.
I get what you're saying. But as the person directly involved, and as someone who has managed people over the years since, believe me when I say that the fault was my own.
You're really absolving the employee from any possible blame here. Sometimes people ignore blinking warning lights until they get a wake-up call.
> that I was not picking up on what should have been obvious cues.
Performance feedback should not come in the form of cues. If it does, it is poor management.
"To stay off the P-I-P you must answer me these riddles three."
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A PIP should be the last chance to improve. You should have had many chances before that, with lots of clear feedback. Of course it's soul-destroying, but laying them off is worse.
People have things going on in their lives! What if it's not the employee's performance but the manager's that's concerning — it's the manager who should get the PIP? What if it's the CEO's fault for creating an environment where many employees are demotivated — what if the CEO should be the one getting the PIP?
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.
I feel like this conversation is "bad PIPs are bad!" "but good PIPs are good" "no, bad!".
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?
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URM? I can’t find what that is
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> is totally and utterly soul destroying to a person?
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 think it’s just corporate culture in some places. I’ve done a stint in management and I’ve had the “fun” of dealing with all these performance measurements. I personally think they are rather useless in any sort of office work where your employees have a high degree of independence and complex tasks. I also think they come with a huge risk of creating a working culture where employees game the system. If you clock time on the hour then you can be sure nobody is going to help each other, because how do you clock that half hour? If you sell software by ridiculously short estimates and reward your employees for meeting them, then how happy are your clients with all the post-release support they’ll have to pay for? If you have one employee who’s build internal tools that empower everyone else, but haven’t delivered on X, Y, Z and you’re personally getting judged on those metrics then how do you keep up over all productivity when you’re forced to let them go.
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.
Covering yourself shows leadership you may have what it takes to cover the company if you got more power. The greater the position the more covering you will do.
I mean, assuming the person's performance didn't meet standards, the truth hurts. It's too easy to float as an engineer, and salaries are expensive.
Maybe they like the power, and this makes them feel powerful. Signs of a good manager, of course. /s
Putting people in PIP or firing them, are not good experiences, period. Only socio/psychopaths would feel powerful and good about having peoples future in their hands, and not all managers are socio/psycopaths.