I watched a situation at a friend’s company where there was a junior employee that got put on a PIP but found a new job before they could fire her.
What had happened was in the first 2-3 years or so her boss was apparently super easy going and didn’t assign her work that was as challenging or career-developing as the work that was being assigned to people who were similar to her level but on different teams. So she got good reviews and was promoted and after she switched teams her work quality was not up to expectations and so she was placed on a PIP. By then the boss who had put her up for promotion had left the firm so she had no backers.
My friend had the job of trying to get her out of it - she worked hard but there just wasn’t enough time to ‘catch-up’ to where she should have been. There were no behavioral/work ethic issues, she was just too far behind compared to what they were paying her so she was on the path to being fired.
Was this really the best option here? From my perspective this was more of a management screw-up, but I would suppose there may be bureaucratic inflexibility as far as being able to apologize for an ‘accidental promotion’ or being able to give the employee a longer period of time to do remedial work. Still feels like they just swept the problem under the rug to me, though.