During my 17 years in this business of coaching professionals to improve their careers I often come across new clients who approach me to understand how to deal with a sudden and unexpected surprise they receive from their manager. This surprise is often in the form of a Performance Improvement Plan (PiP), despite their above-average (many times superb) performance and diligent, hard work and dedication.

How and why does this happen?

In most cases this happens because these PiP’d clients fail to manage their boss and did not understand how they were being set up to fail and being scapegoated by incompetent, dysfunctional, and political bosses.

Let me explain:

As I have written in many of my previous blogs nearly 80% of the managers are dysfunctional, incompetent, or into playing their own political games; very few offer true and inspiring leadership to their flock. Hard-working and diligent employees that report to them often assume that their boss should know what needs to be done to benefit the group, the business, or the company and they faithfully follow their commands without questioning why, how, or what needs to be done in the right order.

In one of such recent cases a very dedicated and hard-working employee—a great troubleshooter—with a stellar record of successes and product releases was transferred to another group because of some brewing troubles in their development plans within that group. The new manager that was now heading the group was brought in because the VP was his friend. This new manager did not fully understand the business nor did he care to learn about how to manage the new group and how to provide even modicum of managerial leadership (let alone technical leadership) to get this initiative going and to keep it on track.

So, when my client was transferred to this group under this new manager he soon came to know about the scope and the import of the new product to be developed and what it would take to resource it properly and what timeline would be required to meet the product release date. When my client asked his manager about the details of how to resource the task the manager, not knowing anything about what it takes to properly resource the project, ignored my client’s many requests, merely giving him some vague commands on how to go about getting things done, often blaming him for not showing enough initiative.

My client being a diligent and accommodating kind kept on marching ahead despite changing and vague requirements, lack of resources, and incomplete understanding of the outcome that needed to be delivered.

As things progressed this situation kept getting increasingly worse. Higher-ups in the company started monitoring the status of this project and the progress that the manager reported to his bosses did not comport with the reality on the ground. This was further compounded by a regulatory audit deadline that was looming on that project, where this incompetent manager had already made some statements to the regulators which were not true and the timelines he had given the regulators, without informing my client or anyone else on the project were rapidly approaching.

When the higher-ups came to realize what they were up against all hell broke lose and everyone started looking for a scapegoat. My client was the perfect patsy because he quietly did his work without complaining and did what he was told regardless of how onerous or how much outside his regular duties the task was, merely by dint of his will to deliver what was expected of him, as he had done before at that company.

When things started going off track and it was evident that this project was a train wreck, with no chance of getting released on time with additional jeopardy to the impending regulatory audit they decided that my client was fully responsible for this fiasco. A few days later he was blindsided with a PiP and given a few weeks to straighten out the mess if he intended to continue his employment there, despite his 10-year record of stellar accomplishments.

When the client approached me after the PiP it was clear what the end game was. Reading through that write-up it was clear that to meet the requirements of this PiP my client would have to go through completing the tasks and milestones that were impossible to meet, even if he were now given the resources he had asked for from the get-go.

So, my advice to this client was to forget the PiP and to start looking for an exit and another job. I also told him that some responsibility for this outcome was his due to his acts of omission, if not of commission, which surprised him. After some discussion about why that was my view, he agreed to this harsh appraisal and to arm himself to deal with such situations in the future differently, taking to heart these harsh lessons.

Here are those lessons:

1. When your boss gives you a task do not just accept that task without fully understanding the requirements, timelines, resource allocations, assumptions, and the overall impact of what you are assigned.
2. Listen to what the boss says and then develop a plan of action. Provide a complete list of what is missing in the way to problem was presented to you and document the requirements etc. as listed in #1 above.
3. If the boss is evasive and does not respond to your requests for these details stop the work and elevate your concerns to higher ups and others in the ecosystem around you to check how this same manager is dealing with them to prosecute this project. In the case of my client many other groups had serious concerns about how this manager was dealing with the various aspects of this projects vis-à-vis these other groups.
4. Understanding how the other teams are dealing with completing the project gives you some insights about your own plight and you must leverage that insight to escalate your concerns to management early in the process.
5. Document every thing that you exchange with your boss. In addition to keeping all the emails and written exchanges any conversations and phone calls with the boss and others related to the project must be documented in a contemporaneous way to protect your job and your career.

In the case of my client he had some emails requesting such details throughout the many months of dealing with his boss, but he failed to escalate the issue and to seek support from other players within the ecosystem that were also affected by how this project was running. Early escalation could have helped my client expose the fraud this manager was perpetrating on the company and perhaps there would have been a different outcome.

C’st la vie!