Opinion ID: 167100
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Pippin's work performance

Text: 6 Burlington evaluated its engineers and technical staff annually to determine the size of bonus awards. Burlington's evaluation process called for each employee's supervisor to prepare a draft evaluation, and then to meet with other supervisors collectively to discuss and rank each employee compared to all other employees with the same job position. 7 Burlington compiled its evaluations on a ranking form that compared employees in three categories: Rank, which ranked employees within a particular employment category; Rating, which gave each employee a letter grade of SE+ or SE [significantly exceeds expectations]; E+ or E [exceeds expectations]; M+ or M [meets expectations]; and Percent Bonus, which showed what percent of eligible bonuses each employee actually earned. 8 Pippin's annual evaluations indicate he performed well in many technical aspects of his job; however, in the words of the district court, he lacked certain `soft skills' and was repeatedly told to improve his relationship with management and fellow co-workers. As the district court summarized, Burlington Resources viewed the Plaintiff as one of its worst employees for a number of years and ultimately terminated his employment. 9 Indeed, in 1999, the last ranking year before Pippin's termination, 2 Pippin ranked last out of thirteen senior engineers, and his evaluation form provided: 10 This has become a repetitive theme: You need to quit having a strong confrontational attitude about Division management. You need to become part of the solution, or you are part of the problem. Continue to build technical, not experience-based, production engineering skills. Quit relying so much on your experience, prove your ideas with data. 11 In 1998, Pippin was ninth out of eleven senior engineers, and his comments included: Mike needs to dramatically improve his versatility to build endorsement from others. He has made some improvements this year in improving his soft skills, and he has looked for opportunities to mentor others and had some success. Mike needs to make an immediate, decisive shift in how he supports our efforts at BR however, for him to progress in his career here. Mike has had several opportunities recently to build endorsement with Division management and staff, and has avoided making that commitment. Consequently, Mike has low endorsement from the management staff and me that he needs to take steps to rebuild. 12 In the years leading up to 1998, Pippin's rankings consistently placed him in or near the bottom half of his colleagues, and his supervisors' comments uniformly indicated his greatest development needs were in the area of soft skills, including particularly communication and teamwork. 13 Although there does seem to be a pattern of Pippin struggling with his soft skills at Burlington, and he was ranked last among his Senior Engineer peers in 1999, he did have several positive performance comments in all of the evaluations in the record. For example, Pippin's listed strengths in his 1999 evaluation include [b]road-based experiential production engineering and field skills, being a self-starter, producing a [h]igh quantity of sound field engineering work, and [p]lanning, prioritization, and organizational skills.