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Dear Bob …

Have you ever written about PIPs (Performance Improvement Plans – official HR hand slapping)?

I am faced with one now for the first time in my almost 35 years of IT. It basically sets me up to fail — strict requirements to be completed in 30 days over vacation and holidays.

What I’m curious to know is whether there are any statistics out there showing what percentage of those put on these types of plans ever really succeed, and how many result in employees leaving on their own steam. The view from here is that these are mainly used as a management tool to remove a team member without actually firing them. Or am I just being paranoid?

Thanks,

– PIPped off

 

Dear Ticked off …

I don’t think I’ve ever written about this subject, although there was a time in my career when I was responsible for instituting the process (I headed up HR for a client for a year).

Answers to the questions you asked first: I don’t know what kinds of statistics exist for this sort of thing. I’m pretty sure, though, that any statistics that are available won’t mean very much. The reason: The only useful statistics would come from comparing the performance of pairs of similar employees, led by similar managers, with one in each pair given a PIP and the other left unaware of his/her performance deficiencies.

I know enough about business “research” to be confident no studies like this have been conducted. Among the reasons for my confidence: The unlikelihood that a researcher could ever persuade a company to engage in research like this, especially as the use of performance improvement plans for non-performing employees is widely considered “best practice” among HR professionals.

So from the perspective of whether or not these things are useful, I doubt there’s any reliable evidence either way.

But really, that doesn’t matter. Here’s what does: You’ve been handed one. Your decision is what to do about it.

The best advice I have is to take it seriously, whether or not it deserves to be taken seriously.

Take it seriously because your employer is taking it seriously. Do what it asks you to do, do it by the numbers, and document that you’ve done it. Even if your plan is to leave because of it, this is a key step in leaving under your own steam.

And while you’re doing so, figure out which of the concerns expressed in the plan would be worth your time and attention to address, whether or not you deserve to have been put on the plan.

Here’s what I expect your biggest challenge will be: In a very real sense you’re dealing with the proverbial stages of grief right now. In your case, your sense of loss is your 35-year unbroken string of positive performance, which is now being called into question.

30 days is just about enough time for you to progress from denial to anger — a singularly unhelpful phase in your current situation. To succeed you’ll have to put all of that in a box and find something in all of this that really is an opportunity to improve.

And you’ll have to find a way to do it that doesn’t impinge on either your self-respect or your intellectual integrity, because from your description of the situation it appears you don’t agree with your manager’s assessment that resulted in this situation.

It isn’t merely hard to say, “You’re right — my performance in this area really has been awful,” when you think you’ve been doing well at it. It feels cowardly, like failing to stand up to a schoolyard bully.

And yet, as you’ve already discovered, arguing about it isn’t going to get you anywhere. Your manager has made up his/her mind, HR agrees, and that’s a fact you have to deal with, not a problem you can solve.

A professional marriage counselor once told me the advice she gave clients that most found both helpful and most difficult to follow was to hear the message while ignoring the tone of voice with which it’s delivered: Just because someone is screaming doesn’t mean their message is wrong.

There are parallels to your situation. So with that, a suggestion: Whether or not you think your performance in an area is deficient, you can still find ways to improve at it. Focus on that, not on the assessment that led to it.

Good luck. It’s a rotten thing to have to go through. But finding another job while unemployed because you failed at it is a whole lot worse.

– Bob

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I launched InfoWorld’s IS Survival Guide — KJR’s direct forebear — in 1996. Back then I had four goals:

1. Every column had to have something original to say, or at least an original perspective.

2. It couldn’t be dull. After all, if I put readers to sleep they wouldn’t get anything out of it. Also, friends shouldn’t bore friends to tears.

3. Speaking of getting something out of it, every column should contain useful and practical ideas readers could use as soon as they finished reading.

4. I had to last at least one year without running out of material.

Nineteen years later it’s safe to say I at least achieved goal #4. How well the IS Survival Guide/KJR achieved the other three is for you to judge. Meanwhile, goal #4 is now to make it through an even 20 without violating the first three goals too badly. After that? Let’s get through year 20 first.

Which leads to asking a favor.

Writing a weekly column like this, where the primary distribution is email, is a lot like giving a webinar. There’s no immediate feedback that lets me know how I’m doing. Except for your posted comments and emails, it’s like talking to an empty room.

That’s the favor. I’m going to write at least one more year of these weekly mumblings. I’d appreciate your taking a bit of time to let me know if you continue to find it useful. Thanks.

* * *

There’s something of a pundit-class tradition, namely, to use the beginning of a new year as an opportunity to predict what will happen during the next twelve months.

I tried this a couple of times before deciding to leave prognostication to others. Not that their forecasts were more accurate than mine. But forecasting turned out to have three unfortunate consequences:

  • It violates goal #3, because it’s a rare prediction that provides any useful guidance, even when it turns out to have been correct.
  • It expands. Every year, tracking the progress of old predictions, and adding new ones took more and more space. I could see a time when making new forecasts and tracking old ones would expand to occupy the entire calendar … sort of like the holiday shopping season.
  • It entrenches. When a forecast doesn’t play out, ego drives a pundit to solemnly declare that whatever was supposed to happen is just taking a bit longer than expected. The possibility that your friendly pundit might have simply been wrong? Unimaginable.

So no predictions for 2015.

Okay I lied. Here are three, issued with the standard KJR Warranty — if they don’t work out, gee, that is too bad.

Prediction #1: Every prediction that takes the form “In x years there will be two types of company — those that did y and those that are out of business,” will prove to be wrong.

In business, there are no panaceas and no pandemics. Good consultants are consistently annoying when it comes to their (our?) answering every question, “It depends.” It might be annoying, but it’s almost always the best answer.

Prediction #2: Every prediction that “x technology will completely replace y technology in z years” will also prove to be wrong. For heaven’s sake, some companies have mission-critical systems that rely on IMS. No matter how obsolete a technology is, the last holdout will take a devil of a long time to dump it.

Prediction #3: In 2015, somewhere in the industry press, you’ll read an article that says, “CIOs should be business people, not technology people.”

I predict this with the same confidence with which I forecast that sometime next year, unless you live in, for example, Death Valley, it will rain.

Forecasting the reappearance of the CIOs-must-be-business-people article is entirely parallel. I say “the article” because I’m pretty sure there’s just one. It appears, lasts just long enough to remind everyone of its existence, and vanishes again, only to be resurrected again when some IT pundit has a space to fill and nothing original to say.

And every time it reappears it’s just as profoundly stupid as it was in every previous incarnation.

I mean … I mean … I mean if an article appeared suggesting CFOs should be business people, not finance people; CMOs should be business people, not marketing people; or COOs should be business people, not operations people; would anyone take such utterly nonsensical false dichotomies seriously?

You won’t read that here.

Welcome to year 20 of Keep the Joint Running. Let me know whether what you do read here is useful.

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