The PIP They Didn’t Expect Me to Refuse

How an organization ended up documenting its own bias — and signed it.

Less than three months into a role, I was handed a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP).

Not for performance. For personality.

I handed it back. And made them rewrite it.

I almost didn’t take the role. I’d been burned before — interviewed into cultures that talked beautifully about values and psychological safety, then discovered that what they meant was “we’re safe for people who don’t push back.” I’d learned to ask harder questions. I thought I’d gotten better at reading the signals.

I was wrong. And I was so, so tired of being wrong at this point in my career.

The company hired me partly for a specific skill set outside of my main role — organizational development-adjacent work, internal ways of working, process design. I was genuinely excited. I settled in, learned the clients and client work, got to know the team. When the time came to take on that internal project they were so excited about, I approached it the way I approach everything with my clients: mapped it out, built a proper process, presented it for approval before moving forward.

There was one component I flagged as non-negotiable. Not because I was being difficult — without it, the work would have been theater. A performance of listening and improvement with no actual mechanism for change or accurate feedback. And I said so, very clearly, when they pushed. It was a dealbreaker for me to do the work. The CEO and COO didn’t like that. Not even a little bit. The meeting ended strangely. I figured: we’re professionals, a bit of friction, we’ll work through it. This is how work works. I won’t be moving forward with this fully elective internal project, but the role I’m actually paid to do is going swimmingly; they’re just not ready for org development, and that’s OK.

I moved on, thinking it had been strange but actually appropriate to the culture, based on what I had witnessed and heard from my peers up to that point.

About two weeks later, I was called in for my three-month check-in with the CEO. He opened with pleasantries and then, without discussing my actual review or the peer feedback I had received, he offered to move me from full-time to contract. The company would still appreciate my work. I just wouldn’t have to come to SLT check-ins (or receive extended benefits, team bonding opportunities, etc.). I wouldn’t have to be in the relational parts of the job. It would be “more comfortable for everyone.”

That was the offer. Get the output, lose the person.

Huh?

Once I dug into what was actually being said, it was clear they wanted to keep leveraging my value for clients and work while removing the parts that required me to exist in the room. To remove the layer of having to deal with me in any real capacity. Due to the minor friction we’d experienced, this was apparently the only possible outcome they could see. Framed as a gift.

I adamantly said thank you for the kind offer, but no. I told them they were welcome to fire me if they felt I wasn’t a fit, but I wasn’t interested in being contracted out of the parts of work that required me to be present with coworkers. My role at the company was inherently a relational one, internally and externally with client management, and I quite enjoy the relational aspects of workplaces. I was deeply confused. I knew the prior disagreement had been tense, but I genuinely didn’t think it was a moment professionals couldn’t work through with a proper check-in, some expectation setting, some role alignment.

They looked confused right back at me. She’s not angry. She’s quite calm. She thinks we can bridge this. She wants to stay? Oh, OK! We can do that…

So they put me on a PIP. The first in the organization’s history, and the first in my career.

I can’t recall exactly, but there may have been an unavoidable chuckle when that was proposed. I genuinely wasn’t sure they were serious at first. I also had not, at this point, heard any peer feedback or any reference to my actual performance being poor. By the end of that meeting, tensions had subsided slightly, and I was told to await next steps from my direct manager.

What the Documents Said

After that meeting, I was presented with the actual feedback (at my request) that describes me as having a “powerful quality that could be intimidating, but her warmth and generosity make her approachable.”

In the same review, compiled by the same organization at the same time, I am described as “aggressive” and “authoritarian.” Those colorful headers added by senior management, not used by any team member.

Same person. Same weeks. Same behaviors, viewed by different people through completely different lenses — then folded into a single document and used as the basis for a PIP.

Here is what the PIP said, and here is what it didn’t say:

It said I displayed “unconstructive frustration” in conversations with leadership. That I had a tendency to discuss process issues using a “negative tone.” That I had “demonstrated disrespectful communication to leadership.“

What it didn’t say: that in my peer review, the majority of colleagues described me as a “transparent communicator,” someone who “brings great energy to the team,” who was “integral to team bonding,” who peers found so impressive they wrote “I trust her” unprompted.

The peer feedback was genuinely contradictory — not in a ‘some people liked you, some didn’t’ way, but in a structurally incoherent way. The same behaviors and traits were praised and criticized by different people. “Transparent and direct communicator” appears as a positive from multiple reviewers. “Abrupt and direct” appears as a concern from another. “Integral to team bonding,” “brings great energy,” “warmth and generosity make her approachable” — and then “aggressive attitude” as a section header in the same document. “I find Jen so impressive! I love her energy, passion, and confidence. I trust her.” In the same doc as “Authoritarian.”

The section headers used the words “Aggressive” and “Authoritarian” to label those clusters of concern. But if you read the actual peer quotes underneath — the things people genuinely wrote — you find language like “can come off as intense in some situations” and “room to consider the impact of her delivery style.” And honestly, who doesn’t?

The gap between what peers said and how leadership chose to label it is where the whole story lives. Someone made editorial choices about how to frame my behavior before that feedback ever reached a document. Those choices were not neutral, and dare I say it, not particularly constructive either.

OK… OK… So, What Happened Next?

I received the proposed PIP.

I didn’t sign it. Not as is, anyway. I wasn’t being defiant for the sake of it. I’d progressed far enough in my career to recognize what was happening and I’d learned, slowly and at real cost, to extend to myself the advocacy I’d always been so willing and passionate about extending to others.

Instead, I gave my manager constructive feedback on how the document could be revised to even attempt to be legal. I asked them to make the goals SMART: specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, time-bound. I pointed out that “the CEO should like you by the end of 60 days” — which was, in effect, the actual underlying goal — is probably not a legal performance standard. I noted that for every concerning piece of feedback there was a directly contradicting positive, and asked what methodology determined that the negative outweighed the glowing.

I told them I couldn’t sign it in good conscience as written, but that if they revised it to reflect something that could actually be measured, I would sign it and engage fully.

I was essentially coaching my own PIP process. Which, looking back, is very me, but also says everything about the situation.

They revised it.

After my feedback, a competency matrix was created as a starter baseline and scoring tool, which included a 1–5 scale. It gave me 4s in leadership, clear communication, and perceptiveness. 3s in collaboration, optimism, empathy, and adaptability. The notes beside those 3s read things like “opportunity to demonstrate openness” and “opportunity to be more diplomatic.” Like my career up until this point hadn’t been fully centered on my ability to effectively rally teams and leadership toward common goals.

By their own matrix, I was a solid, developing mid-career professional. Not someone in crisis. Not someone failing. Not someone who should be on a PIP. Someone who had been in the role for less than 90 days and was doing well by every technical measure. Is 3 not… average?

I had forced them to reconcile and measure their own biases.

The PIP still didn’t mention my actual performance once, but it was an improvement.

I signed it. And then I engaged fully. I had decided to see what happened. For the plot, as I would say now. I had never experienced anything like this in my career and I wanted to know how it ended.

Week one check-in: 5 out of 5. “Super strong — the previous state of frustration led to a lot of the former issues.” Every single check-in after that: great feedback, no concerns, headway being made. She even suggested a company happy hour. She’s sociable!

I passed the PIP with flying colors — which is the only logical outcome when a PIP was never actually about performance.

There was a bonus at the end of it. I’ve always assumed it was either guilt or a preemptive legal calculation. It’s possible it was meant to compensate for being paid below market while my male colleagues received more than their fair share, but that’s a conversation for another time.

I was still there, many months later, when I eventually chose to leave for a more aligned role. But my trust in leadership and the way I engaged for the remainder of my time was the equivalent of my version of average or meets expectations. I would have finally deserved those 3’s. They weren’t getting my full brilliance they attempted to dim.

What I Want to Say About What Went Down

To be clear: this was still soul-crushing, even knowing I wasn’t the problem.

I had done everything right. I had interviewed carefully. I had asked about culture. I had looked for signals that they actually meant what they said about openness and direct communication and results over politics and ego. I was transparent about my communication style, my skill set, my drive. I was met with enthusiasm. “Amazing! We need that energy here!”

I believed them, or I believed the version of themselves they presented.

And then I found myself sitting across from leadership being told that my direct communication style — the thing I had spent years calibrating and refining to ensure tone was right and impact matched intent, the thing clients actively praised me for — was a problem. Not because it wasn’t working, but because it made a few people in power uncomfortable.

There’s a quote that changed my life when I found it years ago. I’m paraphrasing because it’s lived in my body more than on a page:

I am not intimidating. You feel intimidated, and there is a difference.

I am not harsh or aggressive. I am direct, honest, and sure of myself.

If that makes you uncomfortable, it is not my character causing it.

My presence simply challenges what you are used to.

I didn’t have language for what was happening to me yet. I didn’t yet have the word “ableism” sitting cleanly in my own vocabulary as something that applied to my own experiences. I sure knew the misogyny was blatant — being labeled “aggressive” and “authoritarian” for the exact same behaviors that get men described as “decisive” and “visionary” is a well-documented pattern I’d lived before.

But the ableism was quieter. More insidious. Baked into every “she’s just not a fit” and “her communication style is challenging” and “struggles to read the room.”

I was being assessed against an invisible standard of how a person should move through professional spaces — a standard that was never written down because it didn’t need to be. Everyone who fit it didn’t even know it existed.

I was autistic with ADHD and didn’t have that language for myself yet. I’m also a woman who says what she means and means what she says, and I have always moved through this world with a level of conviction that makes insecure people uncomfortable, makes insecure “leaders” uncomfortable. Ope! I notice what’s broken and I name it, I question what I don’t understand without shame or an agenda. In environments that value that, I thrive, and people trust me. In environments that have built entire social structures around not naming what’s broken — around actively ignoring what their teams are consistently naming themselves — I am a threat to that preferred status quo.

That experience marked the beginning of a burnout cycle that took years to fully surface and even longer to name.

What I Ask and Tell Myself Now

The PIP wasn’t a performance tool. It was a social compliance tool, a formal mechanism for pressuring someone to be easier to be around. Smaller. Softer. Less present. Less inconveniently capable. When you can’t technically fire someone for being autistic, or for being an annoying woman who doesn’t perform deference, you build a paper trail that looks like performance management. You use the organization’s own processes against the very person those processes were supposedly designed to protect.

Leadership didn’t catch what was happening and dismiss it for what it was. They authored it. That’s the thing that has stayed with me longest — not that the bias existed. Bias exists everywhere. But that it moved through formal process and became official and well-documented. That it was put into a document with a signature line. That I can reference these documents myself to this day. That I was asked to sign my name to a description of myself that I recognized as deeply misrepresentative and false. That I actually provided constructive revisions to something I could have likely walked directly into a courtroom with. Thankfully, for them, I have never been a litigious person when it comes to my own life.

A final scoring note next to “Positive & Optimistic” on my competency matrix wondered whether I was being genuine or just professional. It’s a fair question, and a revealing one. Because you can’t have it both ways. You either build an organization where people feel safe to show up as themselves, or you get the performance you’ve required them to maintain. In that process, you might lose someone’s critical eye, discernment, problem-solving — the exact things you hired them for in the first place. The diversity that actually moves effective organizations forward. By the end of that PIP, I had learned to give them exactly what they measured. They got their version of 4s and 5s. They didn’t get me.

And I was lucky. Lucky enough to be far enough in my career to see it for what it was. Lucky enough to have the professional confidence to push back without it destroying me. Lucky enough to know what a SMART goal was. Lucky enough that my immediate manager was a young woman genuinely trying to do right by everyone involved, without hurting her career in the process by pushing back against what we both knew was BS. And lucky that the process ultimately bent toward something more fair because I insisted on it.

How many people don’t have those things? How many sign the PIP because they need the job? How many internalize the document’s description of them — aggressive, authoritarian, not a culture fit — and carry it forward into the next role and the one after that, letting it chip away at their confidence and their earning potential and their sense of what they’re allowed to be in a room?

I know the answers to those questions because I’ve lived them. The before, the during, and the after. I’ve lived them in many different workplaces and at many different levels. I’ve lived with the costs and consequences of having a brain that diverges from expectations.

I’ve watched others live with them, too. I hear it from the people I’ve coached and worked with — the ones who came to me carrying the words from performance reviews or relationships as facts they’d internalized, finally ready to ask whether any of it was actually true.

Most of the time, the thing they were told was a performance problem was actually a mismatch problem. They were in the wrong environment for the way their brain works. Or they were the only one in the room willing to say what was true. Or they were being held to a standard that was never written down — the standard of making certain people comfortable just by existing.

The fix for that isn’t coaching that forces you to unknow yourself. The fix is naming it and living in your strengths around people who can see and nurture those strengths, not people who mean to degrade them in service of their own biases.

So: if you’ve been handed a document that describes you as aggressive, authoritarian, difficult, meek, complacent, not outspoken enough, too outspoken, not a culture fit, before you accept it, ask yourself whether the people who wrote it could tell you, specifically and measurably, what “better” looks like. Ask whether the feedback contradicts itself. Ask whose comfort and idealization is being centered by the standard you’re being held to.

And if the answer is what I think it is — if this is a system reaching for formal process to legitimize what it can’t say out loud — then you have every right to refuse to sign it.

I did. And I was fine.

More than fine, actually. But the story doesn’t end with me. It ends with how many people don’t have the tools to see it in time.

That’s the gap I work in. That’s why this work matters. And that’s why I’m telling this story now instead of keeping it in a folder I haven’t opened in years.

Jennifer Phillips is a relational health coach and organizational development consultant, and the founder of **Morrin Consulting**. She works at the intersection of self, connection, and systems — which is a fancy way of saying she helps people and organizations figure out what’s actually broken and why. This is one of those stories. There are more.

You can find Jennifer on **LinkedIn, through her [website](https://morrinconsulting.com/), or follow her on [Substack](https://jenniferphillips8.substack.com/)**.

Photo by Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash