PIPs Don’t Fail Because of Bad Employees — They Fail Because of Bad Systems
Dan Goodman said it plainly in a recent LinkedIn post: “PIPs suck for everyone.” The employee wrongly being managed out through fabricated documentation. The manager forced to manufacture performance claims to justify a decision already made. The HR professional doing leadership’s dirty work. He’s right about all of it.
But here’s where I’ll push back: PIPs don’t suck because they’re a bad idea. They suck because we’ve built systems that guarantee they fail — and then we blame the tool.
I know this from experience. Early in my career, I had an employee whose performance was visibly declining. I noticed it in week three. I told myself it would resolve on its own. I dropped hints. I made vague comments in team meetings. I did everything except have the actual conversation. Three months went by. By the time I finally sat down with him directly, his reaction gutted me: “Why didn’t you tell me sooner? I had no idea it was this serious.”
He wasn’t wrong. I had failed him — not by eventually addressing the problem, but by waiting so long that the gap between his performance and what was needed had become enormous. The formal conversation that followed felt punitive to him, even though I meant it as support. The damage was done. That moment changed how I lead.
What I did in those three months wasn’t unusual. It’s what most managers do, and there’s substantial research explaining exactly why — and what it costs.
We’re Not Talking About the Same Thing
The core problem with the PIP debate is that we’re using one term to describe two fundamentally different processes that share nothing except a name.
The first is what most people mean when they say “PIP” — a legal documentation exercise initiated after the termination decision is already made. The purpose isn’t improvement; it’s paper trail. The relationship is adversarial from day one because everyone in the room knows what’s actually happening. SHRM research confirms what most practitioners already suspect: the overwhelming majority of formal PIPs end in termination, not sustained performance improvement. When you design a system to document failure rather than develop capability, failure is what you get.
The second is something genuinely different — a structured development plan initiated at the first sign of a performance gap, with the explicit goal of helping someone succeed. This version treats the employee as a capable person who needs specific support, not a liability to be managed out. It’s collaborative. It starts early. And it actually works.
The tragedy is that the first version has so thoroughly poisoned the concept that when managers try to use the second version honestly, employees don’t believe them. The word “PIP” has become a threat. That’s a systems failure — we’ve allowed a useful tool to be weaponized so consistently that it can no longer serve its legitimate purpose.
Deming Had a Point — But Not the One Most People Think
W. Edwards Deming famously placed performance appraisals on his list of “deadly diseases” of management. His argument wasn’t that performance doesn’t vary — it obviously does. His argument was that most performance variation is systemic, not individual. When you rate and rank people for problems that are primarily caused by the system they work in, you’re doing something unjust. You’re holding individuals accountable for outcomes they don’t actually control. (See also: What If the System Is the Problem?.)
This is where most PIP conversations go wrong before they even start. A manager walks in convinced the problem is the employee. The employee walks in convinced the problem is the workload, the unclear expectations, the inadequate tools, or the lack of support. Both of them are often partially right — but because the system frames the conversation as an individual accountability exercise, the systemic contributors never get examined. (See also: The Accountability Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight.)
Deming would look at a room full of PIPs and ask: what does it tell us about our hiring, onboarding, training, feedback, and role design systems that we keep producing this outcome? That’s the right question. It’s also the question that almost never gets asked.
The Leadership Failures That Make PIPs Necessary
Before any organization hands a manager a PIP template, it should ask four questions:
Did the employee know what was expected? Not generally — specifically. Research from Gallup consistently shows that fewer than half of employees strongly agree they know what’s expected of them at work. You cannot hold someone accountable for a standard they were never clearly given.
Did the employee receive timely, useful feedback? Gallup data shows that only 26% of employees strongly agree that the feedback they receive helps them do better work. Managers who give weekly feedback have teams that are 3.2 times more likely to be engaged. When feedback is infrequent, vague, or disconnected from specific behaviors, people can’t use it — and they’re often blindsided when formal consequences arrive.
Did the employee have the training and tools to meet the standard? Deming’s question again. If ten people in similar roles are struggling with the same thing, the system is the problem. If one person is struggling, that’s worth examining individually — but even then, the question is whether the organization provided what that person needed to succeed.
Did leadership avoid the conversation until it was too late? This is the one that stings most, because the answer is usually yes. I lived it for three months. Most managers do. Kim Scott’s Radical Candor framework names this pattern precisely: “ruinous empathy.” We care about the person, so we soften the feedback. We avoid the discomfort of directness. We tell ourselves we’re being kind. What we’re actually doing is depriving someone of information they need — and then calling it a performance problem when the predictable consequences arrive.
When these four conditions aren’t met, the PIP that follows isn’t an accountability tool. It’s documentation of an organizational failure being charged to an individual account.
Why Psychological Safety Isn’t Optional Here
Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety has a direct application to performance conversations that doesn’t get enough attention. Psychological safety — the belief that you can speak up, ask questions, and admit mistakes without punishment — is the precondition for any developmental conversation to work.
When an employee doesn’t feel psychologically safe, a performance conversation lands as a threat, not an opportunity. Their brain processes it accordingly. They become defensive, shut down, or perform compliance while privately disengaging. (See also: Burnout Is a System Output.) The manager interprets this as resistance. The relationship deteriorates. The PIP proceeds toward its predictable conclusion.
When psychological safety exists, the same conversation can be genuinely developmental. The employee can say, “I’m struggling with this because I don’t understand the system” or “I didn’t know that was a priority” or “I need more support on X.” The manager can hear that without treating it as an excuse. Solutions become possible.
You cannot bolt psychological safety onto a PIP conversation. It has to be built into the culture long before any performance gap appears. Organizations that treat PIPs as their primary performance management tool have, by definition, failed to build that culture.
What a Real Development Process Looks Like
If the goal is actual improvement — not documentation — the process looks substantially different from the standard PIP playbook.
Phase One: Early Informal Support
The moment a manager notices a performance gap is the moment to address it — not three months later, not after a pattern has entrenched itself. This initial conversation should be private, direct, and focused on the specific behavior or outcome, not the person’s character or potential. It should include a genuine inquiry into what the employee needs: more clarity on expectations, different support, additional training, a different approach to the work.
This phase should also surface any systemic contributors. Is this a role design problem? A training gap the organization created? An expectation that was never clearly communicated? If so, those need to be addressed alongside the individual conversation.
Most performance gaps, caught this early and addressed this directly, resolve without any formal process. This is the goal.
Phase Two: Formal Development Plan
If informal support hasn’t produced improvement, a structured development plan is appropriate. But the design matters enormously. A plan built around specific, measurable skill development — with concrete support resources, regular check-ins, and clear milestones — is a fundamentally different document than a list of failures with a compliance deadline attached.
The plan should be collaborative. The employee should have meaningful input into both the goals and the support structure. That’s not softening accountability — it’s recognizing that plans people help design are plans people are more likely to follow through on.
Regular check-ins during this phase aren’t optional. Weekly conversations — brief, focused, developmental — give both parties real-time information about what’s working. They also create the feedback frequency that Gallup’s data shows is correlated with engagement and improvement.
Phase Three: Honest Assessment
At the end of a real development process, there are only a few possible conclusions: the person has demonstrated the required performance and the plan closes successfully; the person has made meaningful progress and needs more time; or the evidence suggests this role isn’t the right fit, and an honest conversation about that is the most respectful path forward.
That last conclusion, when it comes after a genuine development effort, is different in kind from a PIP-as-termination-documentation. The employee knows real support was offered. The manager knows the process was honest. The conversation about next steps — whether that’s a different role internally, or a transition out of the organization — can happen with dignity intact on both sides.
Dignity isn’t a soft consideration. It has direct consequences for team morale, for how departing employees represent the organization externally, and for whether remaining employees trust that they’ll be treated fairly if they ever face a performance challenge.
The Conversation You’re Avoiding Is the One That Matters Most
I avoided a conversation for three months. My employee paid for that. I’d like to tell you I learned this lesson cleanly and never made a similar mistake again, but that wouldn’t be true. The pull toward avoidance is strong — it feels like kindness, and the short-term discomfort of directness is real.
But the research is unambiguous. Scott’s Radical Candor framework identifies ruinous empathy as one of the most common and damaging failure modes in management — not because managers don’t care, but because they care in ways that ultimately harm the people they’re trying to protect. Gallup’s data on feedback frequency shows the cost in engagement and performance. Edmondson’s research on psychological safety shows what’s actually required for developmental conversations to work.
The PIP doesn’t suck. The system that produces it — the one built on avoided conversations, vague expectations, inadequate feedback, and documentation-as-performance-management — that system sucks. And like most system problems, you can’t fix it by blaming the individuals caught inside it.
You fix it by designing something better. Start earlier. Be more direct. Build the kind of culture where a manager can say “this isn’t working” in week three instead of month four. Give people real support and real feedback, not compliance paperwork with a deadline.
When you do that, PIPs stop being a threat and start being what they were always supposed to be: a structured way to help someone succeed. (See also: Burnout Is Not a Character Flaw — It’s a System Output.)
