I don’t personally have anything against organizations who use a fair (and non-bell curve mandated) performance classification system - after all, employees do seem to appreciate a formal classification - but to do so annually is a bit like waiting for the Easter Bunny to show up each year and then wondering how many chocolate eggs might be waiting for you.įor me, the Easter Bunny of performance management should come monthly, preferably bi-weekly, but ideally weekly or even daily. Second, annual performance classifications are simply a cop-out for bad leadership. (Thanks Jack Welch, although he now refers to it as ‘ differentiation‘.) To further the point of stack ranking, in Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense - written by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Bob Sutton - the authors state, “performance rankings can lead to destructive internal competition, which can make it tough to build a culture of knowledge sharing.” Well that’s just great. There is proof the bell curve of performance is bogus, but employee stack ranking remains entrenched in an organization’s performance management practices. Rather these groups fall into what is called a “ Power Law” distribution. found that performance in 94 percent of these groups did not follow a normal distribution. and Herman Aguinis (633,263 researchers, entertainers, politicians, and athletes in a total of 198 samples). Research conducted in 20 by Ernest O’Boyle Jr. But, as Josh Bersin brilliantly notes in his Forbes post entitled, “The Myth Of The Bell Curve: Look For The Hyper-Performers,” we need not use this process any longer: Forced to plot employees against an arbitrary curve - where a certain number of employees must be classified as low, medium or high performers to fill out the curve - it creates angst for the manager, and depression, envy, guilt, rage or happiness for the employee. It’s the process where employees are pitted against one another as the manager is encumbered to fill out a bell curve of annual performance for her team. There are several reasons for the pervasive disdain and melancholy that drips from office walls and laptop screens on behalf of performance management processes.įirst, there is an organization’s fixation on performance stack ranking. It’s long been sport in the corporate world to take potshots at the performance management process. With regards to the robots - who are coming for our jobs - will they love performance management too?īut first, some background. Employees have been or are about to sit through a one-hour performance review, based on their efforts over the past year. Since the New Year rolled around, many of those managers have been in the midst of their organization’s annual performance review cycle.

By some estimates, there are well over 100 million managers of people in the world.

Stack ranking capital one