Make sure your letter of resignation makes it very clear that you are not leaving the company you are leaving your manager. I’ve done a lot of work in the past for the CIPD and it’s very clear from their research that in fact most people leave companies for exactly the same reason. So big up the company and nail the bastard that’s made your life a misery.

You probably sucked at your job to be getting ‘performance managed’ so often. If you do your job correctly it is practically impossible to manage you out of a business in this way. To set you up for constructive dismissal I would have to give you tasks to do with insufficient time or support to do the job, which in return leaves me wide open for a bullying case. Bullying cases in court are won 90% of the time because the manager doesn’t know the difference between correct performance management and just plain picking on someone, either way that person was usually underperforming.

As said earlier, never burn bridges. But hand the letter in, with a nice warm internal smugness, you’ll never forget. All the best with the new job, well done.

Go back?

Let me guess – you consider you have perfected ‘performance management’ and may even carry it out all the time

But maybe with better management and support you wouldn’t have to bully put your staff under ‘performance management’ all the time

So maybe you just suck at your job? Either way an unpleasant post – when really its good news for him to be moving on and he has been very open about the stress he has been through.

There’s always two sides to every story.

Just read the original thread, my opinion is they weren’t trying to get rid of you. As seniors they have to justify their jobs by either explaining why they are not hitting targets and what they’ve done to address the situation. If they keep saying to the board “team is under performing” just as you said yourself with nothing done to address the issue then your manager and director are likely to be disciplined themselves. This was your key to go away and prove that even though your team are understaffed and under performing you have done everything to further train your existing staff to perform better or performance manage the ones that refuse to try to do better even when given the right support. Your biggest mistake was not making your under performing team members accountable for their actions. You took the whole thing on your shoulders resulting in the buck stopping at you. This isn’t passing the blame it bullying is making the actual people under performing accountable for there performance. It’s easy to let someone go who’s still on probation without any consequences but they kept you.
I wish you the best in your new job but remember don’t take the fall for other people’s shit.

As much as you want too, try and leave on good terms. At my last job I gave lots more notice than was required and up until I was escorted out of the office early on the day I finished (something that not even sacked employes encountered) I was a model employee putting in top quality work and plenty of it, so the way I was removed from the building without even being able to say goodbye to friends was upsetting.
I left to follow a new path that failed to materialise, so returned to a similar type of work but higher up the promotion scale with a new company , shortly after a client of my old employer started to work with us but this meant working alongside my old employer which was funny as the person who escorted me off the premises was now face to face with me over a conference table and if I had made a fuss leaving it could have been tricker, although he has tried to blank me in meetings I always remain professional.
You never know when you may encounter your old company / boss so leave as amicable as you can unless you decide to try for constructive dismissal.
Mind you it sounds like something that used to occur in a company I worked for years ago, it was called performance management the company would manage people until they left rather than letting them go, increased sales targets, lots of negatives on one to ones, extra training courses etc.

I knew my cake tasted strange.

Don’t start with the resignation, have a bit of fun with the boss and see what happens first!

You never know what the outcome might be and you’re fireproof. Well, not fire proof, but fireproof, if you see what I mean

Sorry not read all the replies

but thanks for the happy ending….

I’m happy for you that you’ve managed to find another job. I’d string the person out all day and then hand in the resignation letter (dated from tomorrow…Sunday). I know people (me included sometimes) say not to burn bridges, but sometimes you’re sure it’s a bridge you’re never going to cross again so **** it, why not.

I was shafted big style early on in my career by a couple of guys who exploited my naivety big style…both of them older and more politically cute than me. On my last day, the absolutely massive service manual I’d been writing was sat on my laptop with no decent back-up to speak of on the main server. There were lots of other things on there that these two would have needed. To be honest, I’ve no idea why they didn’t confiscate the laptop immediately once they’d made me redundant.

There was a certain satisfaction in typing “Format C:” (or whatever it was you had to do back then on a windows 3.1 machine) and watching everything get deleted and handing it to my soon to be ex-boss. I’m sure there were ways and means back then to get the data somehow but it would have been a massive pain in the arse for them. I knew I’d never end up working for them or asking them for a reference anyway. Sometimes you have to just get one last boot in, if only for your own pride.