Placed on a PIP for Her Tone

Spoiler alert: she is a woman of color.

As I wrote about before, it’s important to know the signs that your employer’s performance improvement plan is a trap.

PIPs are rarely about performance. They are about documentation. They are about building a paper trail that gives an employer legal cover for a termination decision they’ve already made.

For some employees, this is often more obvious than others.

My client, a woman of color, was placed on a PIP for her tone. Her employer complained she would “respond to feedback with a raised voice and an argumentative tone” and that her “communication style should be always in a professional tone.”

Seriously?

Tone is not a work requirement. Tone is not in your job description. Tone is certainly not something bonuses are based on. So how, exactly, is tone any kind of “performance” that needs “improvement”?

It isn’t. And they know it.

Tone policing is rooted in white supremacy, a tool used to control people who refuse to bow down. It has a long, dark history in this country. Going back to slavery, looking at a white overseer the wrong way could result in a lashing. Talk back? You could be lynched as an example to others.

That history didn’t disappear. It just put on a suit and moved into HR.

What my client was being told, beneath the corporate language and the carefully worded documentation, was this: you are too much. You take up too much space. You refuse to make yourself small enough for our comfort. And we are going to use this process to punish you for it.

If this is happening to you, it is not you. It is them. You are standing up for yourself in an environment that expects you to be weak, meek, and under control. That is a threat to their power.

The truth is you cannot survive a PIP built around tone. Not only because it’s a racist dog whistle, but because it is entirely subjective. There is no metric. There is no finish line. Every time you think you’ve met the standard, the the goalposts will move.

When a PIP is loaded with subjective deliverables, you are being set up to fail. That is not a process you can win. It is a process you need to exit, strategically, with your dignity intact, and with as much money as possible.

That is exactly what I help people do. Need assistance? Start here.