The PIP Nobody Believed
Sixty days of check-ins and three signed documents produced an outcome the team called on day one. The plan wasn't improvement — it was a record for the file.
Day three of a 60-day plan. The manager had already written the termination email he meant to send on day sixty-one. He showed me the draft. The plan on file listed five milestones, a signed acknowledgment, an HR countersignature, and a weekly check-in. On paper it read as a coaching exercise. In the room it was a countdown.
The plan was not a coaching tool. It was a legal record. The manager knew. The engineer knew from the first meeting. HR knew before the meeting got scheduled. The team, watching one colleague pulled into extra one-on-ones, worked it out inside a week. Everyone had agreed to treat a foregone conclusion as an open question.
That pretense is not free. It costs sixty days of stalled work, rising anxiety, and trust that erodes a little every standup. The engineer can't do good work; the cycles go to managing the plan. The team can't settle; they are watching a slow-motion firing they called on day one. The manager can't make any other move on these reports until the window closes. Two months, frozen, for a document nobody doubted.
The shorter path costs less. The conversation is plain. This is not working. Here is severance. Here is the help we will give. It ends in two weeks. No plan, no rituals, no sixty-day fiction. The person gets a clean exit and the truth. The team watches the company make a hard call fast and humanely. The manager gets two months back.
Why is the plain path rare? Not law. Psychology. The manager doesn't want to own the decision, and the plan lets him tell himself a story in which the employee chose this by failing to improve. That story guards his self-image at the price of two months of the org's energy. It also fools almost no one.
The real coaching tool is the conversation that did or didn't happen six months earlier. Specific, direct feedback in the moment makes the plan unnecessary either way. Either the person improves and the role holds, or both sides see early that the fit is wrong and part on good terms. A PIP is what fills the vacuum when both of those conversations got skipped. We traced the adjacent failures in the manager who couldn't fire and in how to give good feedback.
If a plan is a genuine coaching bet, run it as one, with milestones the manager would wager on. If it's a record for the file, be straight with everyone, the employee first, and end it cleanly. The middle option, where everyone performs a belief nobody holds, is the worst of the three. It costs the same money, takes longer, and leaves more wreckage.