Manager puts employee on a performance improvement plan after they write a date in the wrong format: 'They're just looking for an excuse to fire you'

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  An employee looks upset at her desk, surrounded by papers.

  _{Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.}

• Manager has put me on PIP over a silly mistake.

  

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• Commenters gave their takes on the story.

  

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• There are lots of metrics to measure your success in the workplace. Maybe you have internal markers of success that you can measure yourself against. Maybe you have concrete goals that you try to accomplish in a certain time frame. Maybe your managers and bosses check in with you about how you're doing, and you have chances to have a discussion about it. You hope that you're given consistent feedback, enough to help you wrap your head around the ways you can improve. You can't read your manager's mind, so the least they can do is spell it out for you. Feedback doesn't always come at the most convenient time or in the most convenient way, though. Sometimes it kicks us down the road and makes us wonder what we did wrong. And when your job is on the line, you often can't afford to receive too much negative feedback. If you do, you might be put on the shortlist for termination. But there are usually a few steps between mistakes and firing. Sometimes that means being put on a performance improvement plan. These words probably send a chill down most of your spines. 

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  An employee puts her head in her hands at her desk, surrounded by papers

  _{Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.}

• Nobody wants to be told that they're on the outs at a job. We all want to feel like we're constantly improving, or at the very least maintaining our skills. It's nice to be challenged, and sometimes challenge comes with failure, but consistent failure is an uncomfortable thing. The person in this story was called out for a mistake that they felt didn't deserve to be as big a deal as it ended up being. Scroll on to read the details of the confrontation and see what commenters had to say. Some of them weren't convinced we were getting the full story.

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