Keith Lucas

And it's a way of really driving through clarity and honesty and decency.

And it's all about assessment, not really indictment.

Yeah, so I'm really against performance improvement plans.

And I'll give you my two main concerns.

So one is that the way I've seen them done in my career is that they tend to remove ownership from the person having the performance issue and shift it to the manager.

I believe strongly that the person with the performance issue must drive their own turnaround.

Ownership is often at the heart of performance issue.

Either they're not owning something explicitly or they're not owning their performance intentionally.

And so ownership is usually at the heart of performance issues.

So it has to be the heart.

at the heart of the turnaround.

So if you make it a series of checklists that someone has to do, then you are really removing that ownership.

The other reason I'm not a fan is that I think ultimately they are red herring and they map people into corners.

And what I mean by that is consider three cases.

One, what happens when someone meets all of the PIP criteria and then you fire them anyway?

I've seen this.

They're fired because they really are not aligned with the team's operating system and not performing at the level the team needs.

So they did their PIP, but now you're firing them anyway.

That's hard for that person to understand.

What about the person who rises from the occasion, meets all their PIP things, and then like a month later, they fall back to what they were doing.