Why I Stopped Writing PIPs
Builder Note: Detroit. 2025. Staff member. Documented performance concerns. Supervisor ready to escalate. The blueprint says: issue a PIP. The reality: this person has never worked somewhere that didn't eventually discard them. A PIP isn't a performance tool in this room. It's a threat. I didn't write the PIP. Here's what I built instead.
The Accountability Commitment is available as a free download.
The first thing I did was slow down.
Before any conversation about performance could happen, I needed to know one thing: had this person ever actually been in a room where someone said
Here is what this role requires,
Here is what success looks like,
Here is what I need from you,
and here is what you need from me
and then waited for a real answer?
Not an offer letter. Not a job description. Not a verbal check-in that nobody documented.
A real conversation. With signatures. With mutuality. With the organization's commitments named alongside the staff member's.
In most organizations that conversation has never happened. The PIP is the first time expectations get written down and it happens after something has already gone wrong.
That's not accountability. That's ambush.
So I built something different. I called it the Accountability Commitment.
It has six sections. It asks the staff member to name their role in their own words, not recite the job description, but actually articulate what the organization is counting on them to do. It asks them to name where they are still growing without framing that as a deficit. It asks them to map how their values live inside their daily work, concretely, not aspirationally. And then, and this is the part most HR documents skip entirely, it asks the staff member to name what they need from their supervisor and from the organization to show up fully.
Both parties sign it. Before the year begins. Not after something breaks.
That document becomes the shared baseline. If a concern arises later we don't start from scratch. We return to what we already agreed on together.
The note for next time:
Before you issue a PIP ask one question. Does documented mutual agreement exist about what this role actually requires? Not a job description. Not a verbal conversation. A signed relational document that both parties built together. If the answer is no, that's where you start. Accountability without shared clarity isn't accountability. It's just power.
The Accountability Commitment is available as a free download.
This is The Builder's Notes. I write for the people who make it possible.