The PIP that was just paperwork
Sixty days of weekly check-ins, three signed documents, and an outcome everyone knew from day one. The PIP wasn't a path to improvement — it was a legal pretext.
A manager I coached had put an underperforming engineer on a sixty-day improvement plan. The plan listed five specific milestones. The engineer signed it. The HR partner countersigned it. There was a weekly check-in on the calendar. The plan was, in shape, indistinguishable from a real coaching exercise.
The manager told me, in private, on day three, that he was already drafting the termination email he expected to send on day sixty-one.
The PIP was not a coaching tool. It was a legal pretext. Both the manager and the engineer knew it from the first meeting. The HR partner knew it from before the meeting was scheduled. The team, watching the engineer pulled into more one-on-ones, knew it within the first week. The performance of the PIP — the rituals, the documents, the milestones — was theater that everyone was contractually agreeing to pretend was real.
The cost of the theater is paid in sixty days of suspended productivity, escalated anxiety, and quietly degraded trust on the team. The engineer cannot do their best work; they are spending mental cycles managing the PIP. The team cannot relax; they are watching a slow-motion termination they correctly identified on day one. The manager cannot make any other personnel move involving these reports during the window. Everyone is frozen for two months for a paperwork exercise that everyone has predicted accurately.
The honest version is shorter and less expensive. The conversation is direct. This is not working out. Here is severance. Here is the support we will provide. The relationship ends in two weeks. No PIP. No theater. No sixty-day fiction. The employee gets a clean exit and the truth. The team gets to see the company make a hard call quickly and humanely. The manager gets two months of their life back.
The reason this version is rare is not legal. It is psychological. The manager is reluctant to take ownership of the termination decision and prefers the PIP because it lets them tell themselves a story in which the employee chose the outcome by failing to improve. That story protects the manager's self-image at the cost of two months of organizational energy. It also rarely fools anyone.
The real coaching tool — the one that prevents the need for a PIP — is the conversation that happened, or didn't happen, six months earlier. Specific, direct, repeated feedback in the moment makes the PIP unnecessary in either of two ways. Either the employee improved and the role is fine, or the manager and employee both have enough early evidence that the role is wrong, and the exit can be amicable and timely. The PIP is what fills in when both conversations were avoided.
If a PIP is genuinely a coaching exercise, run it as one — with belief, with specific milestones the manager would actually bet on. If it is paperwork, be honest with everyone, especially the employee, and end the relationship cleanly. The middle version, where everyone pretends, is the worst available choice. It costs the same money, takes longer, and leaves more damage behind.