Hot Take: You Need To Put Everyone on a Performance Improvement Plan

Read Time: 4 minutes.

Yesterday, I showed 17 healthcare leaders the value of putting every employee on a performance improvement plan. I didn’t call it that, but that’s exactly what we did.

We'd spent the morning writing expectations. Clear goals with below, at, and above criteria, each level with a clear metric. Everyone agreed the assignment was clear.

Then I created a very real grading scenario for them.

One question: Give me this person’s overall rating?

Same person. Same data. Same expectations.
Three VERY different assessments.

Seventeen experienced leaders, looking at written expectations they had just built themselves, could not agree on whether this person had a good year.

Now imagine that person is sitting across from you in December, and you're the one who has to defend whichever answer you picked.

We had made the goals explicit.
We had left everything that guides them implied.

Here's what was missing.

The boundary camp. Quality wasn't a dial to them. It was a floor. This is patient safety. More surgeries with more complications is not a trade you make at any exchange rate.

Verdict: Below expectations.

The weighting camp. Volume was the number this leader was held to all year. They delivered enormous growth, and a small quality dip is what growth costs.

Verdict: Above expectations.

The averaging camp. Three metrics. One above, one below, one at.

Verdict: Meets expectations.

Every one of those is defensible. That's the problem.

We told this person what to achieve. We never told them which one to protect when they had to make tradeoffs. So they used their best judgment. Then we used ours.

And those might not always lead to the same conclusion.

Name the boundaries. Which metrics are floors, not dials? Write it in plain language. "Complication rate is a constraint, not a target. A miss here cannot be offset." Most teams have one or two non-negotiables. Almost nobody writes them down.

If you don't have expectations drafted at all yet, start here first. It takes 15 minutes if you let AI help you with the first draft.

Set the weights. Volume 50, quality 30, cost 20. The exact split matters less than the fact that one exists. The moment you try to assign it, you find out whether you were on the same page or not.

Reconcile it quarterly. Sit with each person and ask two things.

Written expectations. Specific measures. A defined bar for success. A scheduled review cadence. A record of what changed and when.

Read that list to anyone in HR and they will thank you.

You just put every person on that team on a performance improvement plan. In January. Before anyone was failing. And no one even realized it.

Because a PIP done proactively upfront with the goal of helping people win is a genuinely good practice. Unfortunately, we only ever use its worst version.

You know that version. Someone is already on their way out. Legal needs a file. HR hands you a template. And it lands on the manager who has been putting up with this underperformance for months. The conversations that go nowhere. The coaching that doesn’t breakthrough. The team wondering why they haven’t take action.

And now they’re told to start over formally with a 90-day plan that everyone in the building already knows the ending of.

Nobody improves. Some estimates put the number as low as 10%.

Even after we cleaned up the expectations, I got a question:

“Isn’t the final assessment still subjective?”

Every leader in that room wanted the same thing. 100% objective. Measurable. Take my judgment out and let math win.

You can get most of the way there. But never all the way. Business is too dynamic. Some aspects of performance are subjective (see also: toxic high performers). At some point you decide whether a person is delivering sufficient value for your organization.

That call is yours. And often that call is hard.

But look at what you're arguing about when you get there.

Aligned on the goals, the measures, the floors and the weights, and the judgment left over is an inch wide. You can defend an inch.

Leave it all implied and you get my room yesterday. One set of results, seventeen well-intentioned leaders, and a debate that is 100% opinion.

You can't defend that. You can only outrank it.

So PIPs for everyone!

Co-author the map upfront and most people will find their way. And in the rare case they don't, you already have everything legal was ever going to ask you for anyway.

Funny how good management works like that.

Lead on, Dave & Mar

PS: The next MGMT Second Brain workshop is September 10 at 11 AM ET. 3 hours, live build, end to end. You leave with your judgment captured in a system that drafts your expectations, your feedback, and your reviews the way you would write them yourself. Grab your seat.