She had the highest numbers on the team. They still put her on a plan.

Maya called me on a Tuesday afternoon.

She had just been told she was on a Performance Improvement Plan.

She was also one of the top revenue producers in her organization. Three consecutive years. 100% Club. That's the annual trip companies give their top performers, all expenses paid, first class flights, luxury resort, you and your spouse or partner. The kind of recognition her manager used to brag about in QBRs, "quarterly business reviews."

Now she had 60 days to "demonstrate improvement" in areas her manager couldn't even articulate clearly in the meeting.

She wasn't crying when she called me. She was eerily calm. The kind of calm that happens after your nervous system processes something so disorienting it doesn't know which emotion to hand you first.

"I keep thinking I must have done something wrong," she said. "But when I look at the data, I actually didn't."

That sentence stayed with me.

Here's what I've learned after working with high performers navigating the most disorienting chapters of their careers:

A PIP is rarely about performance. It's a signal. And like all signals, what matters most is how you interpret it, and what you do next.

This is exactly the crossroads I work through with clients in the Activated Leader Diagnostic.

If Maya's story is landing a little too close to home right now, that session was built for this moment. [Book your Diagnostic here.]

Then keep reading, because what happened next is the part most people get wrong.

Maya made one decision in the first 72 hours that changed everything.

She stopped trying to pass the plan.

Not because she gave up. Because she finally understood what the plan actually was.

A PIP aimed at a high performer is almost never a performance document. It's exit choreography.

And once she understood that, she stopped exhausting her energy defending her value to people who had already decided, and started using that energy to design what came next.

Here's what the next 60 days looked like for her instead:

She documented every win from the past three years, not for HR, but for her own clarity and her next interview.

She shored up relationships with the people who had seen her work up close.

She got radically clear on what she actually wanted next, not just what she was qualified for.

And she started having quiet conversations with people in her network, not desperate "I'm looking" messages, but real conversations rooted in genuine connection.

Six weeks later, Maya resigned before the PIP concluded.

Two offers in hand. Walking out on her own terms. More confident than she'd felt in years.

The PIP was the worst thing that had happened to her professionally.

It was also the forcing function that changed everything.

There's one more piece to this story.

The three questions I asked Maya in our very first session reframed everything for her.

I'm not including them here because they only work inside a real conversation, not a newsletter.

If you want to work through those questions for your own situation, the Diagnostic is where we start.

See you next Tuesday,

P.S. If this issue is describing your week right now, don't sit with it alone. Book 30 minutes with me here. That's all this needs to be.

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