The part in quotes is the lead's manager talking. By the time you're being performance managed, your boss, their boss, their boss, etc. know about it, and the higher you go in the chain the more you're just a line in a spreadsheet that needs to be eliminated. You're on a 100 person team that needs to figure out how to get to 97, and you're the low hanging fruit because you're already marked. What you (as an IC) assume is your boss being a dick is actually a vast mechanism behind your boss, including upper management and HR, pushing them to resolve the situation.