Cultivating Gratitude
Koan #20
A few years ago, a friend of mine, Nancy, lost her job. To put it more bluntly, she was fired. It was her first job out of school and she had the misfortune of hiring into an extremely bad culture.
The company had put Nancy in a number of difficult positions where she wasn’t given the tools she needed to accomplish her job. After repeated conversations with her manager concerning her performance, she was put on a performance improvement program, commonly referred to as a PIP.
Shortly after this happened, she called me, wondering what she should do. I explained to her that PIPs were not, in most cases, designed to actually improve an employee’s performance, but that more often they were a means of firing an employee. In short, I told her to start looking for a new position. The writing was on the wall.
Nancy was understandably distraught, wondering what she was going to do if she didn’t find a position by the time she was at the end of her 90-day PIP. As it turned out, she did not secure a new position before her 90 days were up and as I predicted, she was fired soon thereafter.
This was a difficult time for Nancy. It was the uncertainty that haunted her most. But within a few short weeks of her dismissal, she accepted a job offer at a new organization with a much better culture.
