PIP In The Bud

I was going to hold fire on this topic to get some more perspective, but I didn’t want to be PIPped to the post. In truth, I hadn’t heard about PIP until last week when a concerned Senior Consultant put me on to it. For me, PIP was either a pigtailed ginger girl or how one would be described if you were entirely too much fun in the 1920’s. My good wife is in HR so she shot me down in a way usually only reserved for meme sharing. I was excited to show this new thing I uncovered, to be met with a semi-eye roll followed by an apathetic “yeah I know” I’ve not been in the types of organizations where PIPs are rolled out in quite some time, which is why I was a little slow on the uptake. I thought there was just good old performance management but it turns out this is a little more like PM Lite acting as a precursor to old standard.

Source: Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment

A Performance Improvement Plan is summed up by our good friends at the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment quite succinctly above. This might’ve been a bit close to home for some at MBIE as it was reported 341 jobs were going or had gone already. To sneak a peek at some of the other areas in the public sector where cuts were fresh or imminent, click here. Back to our industry! We’ve been no stranger to performance plans, but it does seem to be a little more prevalent nowadays. The redundancies started around November of last year and haven’t really stopped although they have slowed. The stream has gone down to a trickle and the ones that survived the winter seem to be on thin ice. I should say that a PIP is not necessarily a bad thing, It’s how it’s taken on board and importantly how it’s delivered.

The more disillusioned reader may acknowledge that it’s bloody hard to sack people these days. That a PIP is just in a sense, the building of a case. It’s the corporate equivalent of when Amber Heard recorded JD steaming or sleeping under a blanket of ice cream. You may feel as if it is the first step towards the door. Some managers may even be banking on that interpretation as it’s a lot easier and cleaner if someone resigns than a drawn-out process which can become quite an undertaking for all involved. Not all managers want this though. I reckon that most managers will want to see an element of grabbing the bull by the horns, having the awareness that things can’t continue how they have been and that they themselves are looking for a way out of the dark.

There’s a lot of ego in recruitment. It’s a competitive industry and if you’re not hitting your stripes there’s no place to hide. We’re comfortable with the idea of ‘faking it until you make it’ but once you’ve made it, the insinuation that you’re not the finished article can be quite confronting. It’s about how it is delivered. If it’s positioned as a tool to build confidence and competency or an opportunity to enhance skill sets, then it’s an easier pill to swallow. If you have a competent manager with a modicum of empathy this whole process will run a lot smoothly. It’s their job to sit down with you and set reasonable objectives and a realistic timeline. You will both work together to define what is acceptable performance. These metrics don’t have to be purely financial; they could be client meetings or candidate registrations. They should however be realistic; I spoke with a consultant who got in touch in the wake of the last blog. They were on PIP and had been given a target of 100 calls a week (actual calls not just leaving messages)

The dance of expectations is inevitable, between what your manager wants you to do and what you think is reasonable. To give yourself a stronger leg to dance on, your numbers need to be backed up by facts; what the market is doing, and where the jobs have previously come from. You’ll agree on a timeline to work towards and take it from there. So is PIP a good or a bad thing? It depends on how you take it and I believe part of that depends on how it's delivered. It’s either going to be the story of your rising out of the ashes like a phoenix or the tale of how you crashed and burned. Rest assured though, there does seems to be a lot of people in the HMS PIP at the moment so don’t take it personally and stick at it.