Comment by sunshowers
8 months ago
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?
I think most of the time, so-called underperformance is caused by the environment, not the individual. If a company cares about bringing the best out of individuals it would fix the environment.
(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.)
While I agree to an extent, every company would theoretically want to “fix the environment” if it made commercial sense to do so.
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.
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I have had periods in my career when I performed poorly, and in virtually all cases the cause had nothing whatsoever to do with the job environment or management. (The real causes included depression and poor coping mechanisms for it, a toxic relationship, and the birth of a child.)
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What if everyone else is performing well in that environment?
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URM? I can’t find what that is
Underrepresented (racial and ethnic) minorities -- in the US context, it tends to mean people of color that aren't east or upper-caste south Asian.
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.