Somebody on your team is struggling. The work is late. The quality has slipped. They've gone quiet in meetings.
You have a template for this. It has a name, a start date, three measurable goals and a 60 day review. HR helped you write it.
Before you send it, answer one question. What's going on in their life right now?
If you don't know, you're not ready to write the plan.
Fixed or understood?
Debra and I talked to Zach Mercurio on Corey-osity Unleashed. Zach studies mattering... the feeling of being noticed, valued and needed by the people around you. Near the end of the episode he said something I haven't stopped chewing on:
"Most people don't need to be fixed, right? They need to be understood."
Then he named the mistake directly:
"We throw people on performance improvement plans before we've done the rigorous work of understanding them."
Read the word "rigorous" again. Zach isn't asking you to be nice. He's asking you to do the work. Understanding a person takes time, attention and follow-up. A PIP takes a template.
Your brain blames the person first
There's a reason the PIP feels like the obvious move. Your brain hands you a story before you've checked the facts.
Back in 1979, Stephen Green and Terence Mitchell published a model of how leaders respond to poor performance. The leader sees a problem, decides what caused it, and picks a response to match the cause. Simple enough.
The trouble sits in the middle step. A 1985 follow-up by Heerwagen, Beach and Mitchell described two traps. First, supervisors lean toward blaming something inside the person... effort, ability, attitude. Second, even when they spot an outside cause, they shy away from fixes with a visible cost to them. The good news? The same study showed people make more outside attributions when someone prompts them to look.
So you're wired to assume "they don't care" or "they're not good enough." Then you're wired to pick the cheap fix. A PIP costs you a template and a meeting. Fixing an overloaded workload, a broken process or a bad handover costs you a fight with your own boss.
Zach put a sharper edge on this. He told us complaining, blaming and gossiping are often "the language of the unheard and unseen." He said he gets called in to work with "difficult" groups, and nine times out of ten, by his own reckoning, they turn out to be the people who feel most unseen. I wrote about this in Stop Calling Everyone Toxic. The label saves you from the harder work.
The back row
Debra told a story on the same episode. I love it because it shows the whole idea in about ninety seconds.
She was presenting a new benefits programme at a manufacturing site. A good programme, too. During the first session, the whole back row stood up, shook their chairs at her and told her to go home.
The managing director's explanation afterwards? They didn't trust anybody in the company.
Debra had four more sessions to run. So before the next one started, she walked to the back row first. She asked those workers about themselves. She told them who she was. They talked about their kids. She talked about hers.
Nobody shook a chair at her again.
Same programme. Same slides. Same factory. The only change was five minutes spent treating people as people before asking anything of them. As Debra put it, the anger came from people who felt they were being treated like a number.
Now picture the version where the managing director labels the back row "troublemakers" and starts a disciplinary process. Plenty of companies would do exactly this. Paperwork would follow. Trust would not.
The conversation nobody had
Here's the number which bothers me most. Gallup found 52% of people who quit voluntarily said their manager or organisation might have done something to keep them. And 51% said nobody... not their manager, not any leader... talked with them about their job satisfaction or their future in the three months before they left.
Half of them walked out the door without one real conversation.
Gallup puts the cost of replacing someone at between half and twice their annual salary, and calls even this a conservative estimate. Weigh it against an hour spent asking a struggling person what's going on.
I'm not sure about this part: Gallup's figures cover people who quit voluntarily, not people who went through a PIP. I haven't found solid public data on how PIPs end. I'm drawing a line between the two because the missing conversation looks the same to me, but treat it as my reading, not their finding.
Understand first, then decide
None of this means you never write a performance plan. Some problems need structure, dates and documentation. I wrote about the difference between a one-off slip and a pattern in A Mistake Is an Event. Underperformance Is a Pattern. Patterns need addressing.
But the plan comes second. Here's the order I'd follow.
Notice the change before you judge it
Zach's first pillar of mattering is noticing. When someone's work drops off, ask what changed and when. A new baby, a sick parent, a reorganisation, a new tool nobody trained them on. You won't spot any of these from a dashboard.
Try a quick test. Name three things going on in this person's life outside their task list. If you stall at zero, you've found your starting point. Zach told us time and attention are the currency of care. You've been spending neither on this person.
Ask, then shut up
Zach suggested questions like "What's been on your mind today?" and "What's getting in the way of you doing your best work?" Then ask what help they'd want from you. Ask, and let the silence sit. The first answer is rarely the real one.
Pick the setting with care, too. A meeting room with a closed door and a laptop between you feels like a hearing. A walk or a coffee feels like a conversation. Debra didn't summon the back row to the front. She went to them.
Check yourself for the cheap fix
When you settle on a cause, ask whether you picked it because it's true or because it's convenient. If the real fix lands on your desk... more people, a clearer brief, a smaller scope... own it.
Look at your own record
Zach gave us two warning signs. Are your one-to-ones the first thing you cancel? If your direct report saw your name pop up on their phone right now, would they feel dread? If the answer to either is yes, your relationship with this person is mostly transactional. A PIP from you will read as the final transaction.
Write the plan together, if you still need one
Once you understand the person, a plan stops being a verdict. It becomes a shared agreement about what good looks like and what support you'll give. Nobody should hear something new in it. If they do, you already failed.
The question to ask before you hit send
My own research found 99.5% of people have had at least one type of bad boss. I'd bet a decent share of those bad bosses filled out a PIP on someone they never took the time to know.
Don't be one of them.
Before you send the plan, sit down with the person. Ask them what's going on. Listen like your decision depends on it, because it does.
Who on your team have you judged without understanding?