> A good manager doesn't need PIPs because they're always communicating clearly and consistently to their reports about how they're doing.

I'm not sure this is true. I'm definitely open to the idea that I was a bad manager or there were things I wasn't doing well, but not communicating my expectations clearly is not something I've ever been accused of. Or at least not once I had some experience. Management comes with a learning curve.

I have had an employee where I and their direct manager were very much communicating they weren't meeting expectations, including coaching and providing warning that their job was now at risk, that only did a 180 when put on a PIP. I think for some people there is power in putting a concrete date on things vs something that needs fixed "soon".

The employee in question continued to improve post-PIP and got promoted. I don't know what happened after I left the company, but I have no reason to doubt they continued to do well.

>A good manager doesn't need PIPs because they're always communicating clearly and consistently to their reports about how they're doing.

More generally, a good manager is someone who shields their people from surprises. A PIP should never come as a surprise to someone. Unfortunately, there are bad managers out there who fail at that. It's not the manager's fault if someone gets put on a PIP, but it's absolutely 100% their failing if it comes out of the blue.

Worked as a PM at a well known tech company, great relationship with my director. He leaves, new director comes in and within three months I'm on a PIP. I'm given a list of work products to create for a new offering that has been discussed, which on the face of it are entirely reasonable, and the standard 30 days.

100% ghosted by my Director. Weekly 1:1s? He no-shows 2 of them. Near zero input. In "fairness", I knew what was happening, but had some tiny semblance of good faith. Hah.

Final meeting, he shows up with HR. "So we've been talking about (when?) and I have just completed my final review of the documents you created (bear in mind these have had significant input from multiple stakeholders who, not for nothing, generally approved), and I am still left believing that your output is not up to the quality or depth that we expect from our PMs, so..."

I pulled up the receipts, because why not? I think he may not even have known that GDocs provides good metrics on documents, including who has viewed, and when, and how many times. I did this with the HR person sitting awkwardly there. "You reviewed this document? GDocs says you've never accessed it. And this one? Never accessed. What about this deck? Never accessed."

At that point he turned his cam off and clumsily handed it over to the HR person. They asked if I'd like to follow up, but that the company would support the Director's decision. Fine, didn't expect any different. They did acknowledge that they could see too that he hadn't done anything to even present a token perspective that the PIP was anything other than firing with 30 days notice.

Lives and learns, we do.

PIP and similar things also get "misused" with other anti-management techniques like stack ranking.

Someone I know got put on a PIP solely because the dictates from Upper Management said that annual review scores must have a certain distribution and average per team - and that naturally means someone it at the bottom. And the dictated numbers means that people with lower scores must be put on a PIP. It happened to be the newest, least experienced member of our team, and the PIP "plan" itself (as written by the team lead) was effectively "Continue what you're doing", but they were still forced by HR to do it.

They left themselves a year later, and I don't blame them. They just re-introduced all the worst parts of "stack ranking" and firing the "worst" person in the team with more bureaucracy.

How do you know its the workers fault and not the nature of this role in the company?

They need to leave after the second PIP, having passed 2 PIPs the manager bears a lot of scrutiny "are you sure they won't regress again? It has been a year and you can't make a decision"

That said I've seen in sales a person only deliver above average when on PIP, passed the PIP and immediately mentally check out then PIP again and deliver. It was pretty maddening for his boss, the person was obviously skilled/capable but just needed PIP to be motivated to actually work