Performance improvement plans, or PIPs, tend to be seen as a death knell for the employees who get them. Rather than a sincere approach to helping team members succeed, they can often signal a slow farewell from the company—a three-month countdown to getting let go. As Owen Manley, a former sales account executive put on a PIP more than a decade ago, puts it, “PIPs go one of two ways. Three months into them, I’d guess [employees] either leave by their own choice, or they’re let go.”
Manley, now 54 and a recruiter at a tech advisory company in Toronto, had been with his company for more than four years when he was put on a PIP in the wake of his father’s death. For Manley, the plan felt like a betrayal. He’d been a hard worker, slacking briefly due to a family tragedy, but loyal to his company. He felt his company should have returned the favor. When it didn’t, he found himself with “a bubbling cauldron of emotions,” he says, from anger to despair to defiance.
“It’s funny how vivid this experience remains,” he says. “I can still visualize the sitting down, the conversations.” The only time in his 25-year career that Manley’s been on a PIP, it left an indelible mark. However, with pressing responsibilities like a mortgage and family to support, he figured out how to “beat” his PIP, if not how to forgive the higher-ups who put him on it. Manley shared with Fast Company how he did this and his feelings on PIPs today.
His story has been edited for length and clarity.
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