The first issue of Course Corrections made one argument: the appraisal system is not broken so much as it is working exactly as it was built to. A financial instrument wearing the clothing of personal development.
That issue was about design. This one is about the premise underneath it.
If you look at the full landscape of how employment actually works – interviews, ghosting, hiring, layoffs, notice periods, performance management, voluntary exits – the dysfunction is systemic. The entire arrangement rests on a premise that both sides quietly agreed to, never formally committed to, and now find too costly to abandon, even when it is clearly not working.
The premise is that employment is a relationship. Not just a professional one, but something closer to permanent. Loyalty-based, identity-forming, mutually invested in each other’s long-term well-being. Organizations borrowed the language of family, tribe, clan, crew and what not, because it worked. People who believed they belonged somewhere worked harder, stayed longer, and asked fewer uncomfortable questions. Early in a career, the workplace is also your social world. The language of belonging lands differently when you have not yet learned to separate the two.
Employees were not passive in this. The fiction was useful to them too. It provided identity, community, and the psychological security of feeling that the arrangement was durable. Both sides entered an agreement that neither explicitly negotiated, and neither fully intended to honor under pressure.
Where it breaks, and on whose terms
The fiction holds until one side needs the exit. Then the power asymmetry becomes visible quickly.
When the employer exits, the tools at their disposal are formidable. A performance improvement plan that is, in most cases, a documentation exercise preceding a predetermined outcome. A layoff announcement that arrives as a calendar invite with a separation agreement already drafted. A severance offer that comes with a legal waiver as standard. At that point, the organization’s HR and legal infrastructure is repurposed precisely to manage this transition cleanly. The employee on the other side navigates it alone, under time pressure, rarely with equivalent counsel.
When a genuine business crisis arrives, there are sometimes alternatives that organizations decline to explore. Pay cuts distributed across the workforce, taken voluntarily by employees who understand the situation, have saved companies that a layoff announcement would have hollowed out. This requires honesty about financial reality before it becomes a crisis – which most leadership teams resist because it is an admission of vulnerability. The cost of that reluctance is absorbed by the people who are eventually let go.
Any company with a functioning business intelligence layer already has the signal it needs to make targeted workforce decisions. What stack ranking adds here is a meritocracy alibi for what is, at its core, a budget outcome.
Notice periods complete the picture. The same employer who will pay to buy out a prospective candidate’s notice period at a competing firm will hold a departing employee to the full term or demand that they pay themselves out. In both cases, it is the employer’s interest that gets served. That is not a policy inconsistency. It is a values statement.
The employee’s version of the same theater
It would be easy to stop here and let this read as an indictment of employers. It should not, and is not, because employees are not blameless.
The employee who stays in a role they have mentally vacated – collecting compensation, contributing the minimum, searching quietly for alternatives – is running the same bad faith playbook, albeit with a smaller balance sheet. The resignation letter that cites growth opportunities when the real reason is eight months of eroding trust is the employee’s version of the calibration room.
There is also a specific incoherence worth naming. Employees who leave with two weeks’ (or two months’) notice whenever a better option appears, and regard this as a reasonable exercise of personal agency, often consider pay for the same time period an inadequate severance when the exit is initiated from the other direction. The terms of at-will employment are the same in both cases. What changes is who initiated the exit and who absorbed the disruption.
Neither position is unreasonable on its own. The problem is holding both at the same time, inside an arrangement that neither side is willing to name honestly.
What honest looks like, and what it costs
The organizations that handle this better are not more virtuous. They are likely just more precise about what the arrangement is.
Removing stack ranking is not softness. It is a decision to evaluate people on what they actually produced, which requires managers to have direct, specific, and uncomfortable conversations rather than deferring to a forced curve. Most organizations will not do this because it is harder and removes the budget certainty the curve provides.
The honest version of a performance improvement plan is a direct conversation that happens from day 1. This requires a manager to expect and maintain accountability without institutional cover. The incentives rarely support it. So the conversation gets deferred, performance deteriorates further, and the PIP arrives as a surprise to the person receiving it, which destroys whatever trust remained.
On notice periods: one month is a reasonable ceiling for most roles. Enough time for a genuine handover. Not so much time that the departing employee is stranded in the unproductive limbo of being present without being trusted.
The cost of the fiction
Employment will never be a family (or any of the terms in fashion or out of fashion). Families break up too, as it happens, and the comparison never held under scrutiny. What it is and what it should be treated as is an honest, time-bounded alignment between two parties who understand what they are actually exchanging.
The systems that persist – appraisals, PIPs, stack rankings, notice periods – are artifacts of an organization trying to manage a transactional reality through a relational vocabulary. They do not fail because the people running them are dishonest. They fail because the fiction makes honesty structurally expensive.
The organizations willing to pay the cost of honesty – saying clearly what the arrangement is, evaluating people on what they actually did, having the hard conversation before the file needs building, and letting people go with dignity rather than paperwork – are not being noble. They are making a compounding investment in organizational trust.
The ones that don’t, well, they will keep wondering why the gap between what leadership believes is happening and what the organization is actually living keeps widening.