8/3/2023 0 Comments Stack ranking sociolo![]() In order to better stand out, top performers have an incentive to work with as few other top performers as possible, which both limits their individual growth and prevents top performing teams.Here are some of the other issues critics have with stack-ranking: Even after you’ve completely eliminated unacceptable performance, stack-ranking still requires you to assume you have an underclass of employees that should be culled. Imagine your system does everything you want it to, and over many years the sense of competition instilled in your staff has gotten rid of all but the best performers. Most bizarrely, the principles of stack-ranking don’t allow for the idea that stack-ranking can be effective. So it actively worked against attempts to create a high performing team. Microsoft’s system simultaneously insisted that employees within teams were on a bell curve and that all teams are on a flat line. Worse still, your ranking is arbitrary and there is no room for anything but one uniform ‘reality’. Stack-ranking means your performance evaluation is at least partially separated from your actual performance, and often inappropriately tied to your colleagues’ performance. It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.” “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, two people were going to get a great review, seven were going to get mediocre reviews, and one was going to get a terrible review. In that original Vanity Fair article, one former Microsoft employee neatly sums up the critical fault of stack-ranking. On the surface, it seems less cruel to assess relative ability, rather than inherent ability. ![]() ![]() While there is stress in having to categorise those who report to you, stack-ranking provides a framework for tough conversations. Figuring out who the top employees are can help an organisation better understand their ideal candidates.įinally, stack-ranking can be particularly appealing to managers. What’s more, stack-ranking generates continual renewal, as every year people in your organisation are assessed and the weak are culled. And who wouldn’t like a system that rewards the former and weeds out the latter? In-company Darwinism seems like a winning formula because it promises an environment of competitiveness where employees push themselves to excel and innovate. Every organisation has its superstars and poor performers. There’s an undeniably pleasing logic to ranking employees. Clearly Facebook maintained the faith, and while exact numbers are impossible to come by, it wasn’t the only company to do so. Since then Microsoft, Amazon, and General Electric itself have all backed away from stack-ranking. A widely acclaimed Vanity Fair article from 2012 linked the decade long fall of what was the world’s most valuable company to the now former CEO and his preferred performance management practice. If Jack Welch and General Electric made stack-ranking famous, Steve Ballmer and Microsoft made it infamous. The essential premise of the ranking system is that your top performers deliver your most impressive results and should be rewarded for doing so the bulk of your staff demonstrate adequate levels of performance and that your bottom performers should be dismissed (the ‘yank’ in rank and yank). General Electric had a three-tier 20-70-10 system (top 20 per cent, middle 70 per cent, and bottom 10 per cent), while Facebook has a system of at least seven tiers. It assumes a workforce can be broken down into a number of discrete performance levels. Basically it’s company-wide survival of the fittest. Stack-ranking (also called ‘rank and yank’ or the ‘vitality curve’) is a performance management system made famous by General Electric. It details how the social media giant runs its stack-ranking program, and is filled with disgruntled ex-employees railing against its injustices and arguing that it created a cult-like environment. That’s the thrust of a recent report by CNBC. ![]() Is one of the causes of Facebook’s scandal plagued 2018 their performance management system? Critics say that while the practice might be appealing, it results in troubling outcomes. Facebook has put stack-ranking back in the spotlight.
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