I’m a longtime poster but have name changed to disconnect this from my usual posting, and this is going to be a long one, sorry, so I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to read, and in a way it’s as much about clarifying my own thoughts.
Earlier this week my line manager, who joined the company about four months ago, called me into a meeting, at which our top manager was also present, and advised that he wanted to put me on into the first “informal” stages of a performance improvement plan. The examples he gave during the meeting of my recent underperformance were, I feel, fairly weak: one was a mixup I made with booking a meeting room which resulted in an internal meeting having to be rescheduled; the other a single missed deadline on one of my monthly service level agreements. For reference, I’m in a fairly senior position, and I agreed with him in the meeting that these failings were unacceptable, but also pointed out that they were completely isolated examples during my time with the company. He also said that he finds it difficult to talk to me in our one-ones as I don’t give much back. This one I feel is more an issue with his management style: I’m genuinely not an adversarial type, I’m not defensive or challenging, I’m not precious about negative feedback (indeed, a large chunk of my role is managing complex stakeholder relationships where I have to negotiate challenging feedback) and I do know that my colleagues have and would agree with that view. I acknowledged that I’m not somebody who talks for the sake of talking (either in work or my personal life), and that I respond more effectively to direct questions with specific requests for information rather than his vague “so how are things going?” style, which could come across as me appearing evasive to those who aren’t familiar with me.
I’m more than willing to acknowledge that there are absolutely areas of my work which are weaker and probably do need some support or development: I joined the organisation in my role almost four years ago, and both the business and how my role serves and interacts with the business have become significantly different since then. There are new technical areas that I’m not sufficiently skilled in, and a lot of additional pressures and processes from new global jurisdictions I’ve had to pick up and learn. I’ve identified this previously in regular appraisals, and identified some training I could access, though my previous manager was fairly blasé about it. But ultimately, this is something I would have expected my new manager to address first through normal line management and appraisal processes, discussing with me an approach to develop my skills and capability, rather than straight into a PIP which is essentially treating it as something to be disciplined.
I have my formal meeting with HR next week and am mulling over my approach. If the business genuinely believes I’m sub par for its needs and wants me to become more competent and this PIP is about being supportive of that. As I say, I’m not adversarial or precious about criticism and I would like to be more confident in my role’s new responsibilities. But I’m also aware that companies do often use PIPs as a route of managing out people who just don’t fit in the business strategy anymore - and if this is their end game and I and they are just going to be going through the right process for them to be able to make that happen, I’d rather save them the admin and me the stress and anxiety and negotiate my way out now with a settlement and a neutral reference.
Would it be overstepping to be transparent about that in next week’s meeting? Or would it come across as defiant or unwilling on my part? I’ve never been in this situation before with any job, have always been considered a good and valuable employee, so have no experience of having my performance managed like this and how to respond.
Thank-you so much for reading if you’ve gotten this far, any advice from those who’ve been in, or led on applying, a PIP would be very much appreciated.