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Ask Slashdot: How Does Your Company Evaluate Your Performance?
jmcbain writes "I'm a former Microsoftie, and one thing I really despised about the company is the 'stack ranking' employee evaluation system that was succinctly captured in a recent Vanity Fair article on the company. Stack ranking is basically applying a forced curve distribution on all employees at the same level, so management must place some percentage of employees into categories of overperforming, performing on average, and underperforming. Even if it's an all-star team doing great work, some folks will be marked as underperforming. Frankly, this really sucked. I know this practice gained popularity with GE in the 1980s and is being used by some (many?) Fortune 500 companies. Does your company do this? What's the best way to survive this type of system?"
The best way to survive is not to play the game.
What's the best way to survive this type of system?
It's called a union.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
"What's the best way to survive this type of system?"
Find another job where they treat you as a human being.
If you've got some serious skills, tell them to stick it and go work for a smaller company that's been around a while. Right now it's an employee's market so to speak with respect to certain technology skills (I've been off the market over a year and still get 10+ recruiters calling me a week, and I'm not all that great at all!). My thinking is that you've got more choice than they do, and that after you and hopefully everybody reading this reply, and then some, tell their HR departments that this kind of performance review bullshit is why you're leaving, things may eventually change.
If employers start seeing their very-hard-to-replace talent walk out the door because of draconian, 30+ year old management paradigms, they may be forced to change.
1. quit job
2. build start-up
3. ???
4. Profit!
5. hire jerks that gave you bad stack result
6. treat them stack performance game
7. Revenge!
Only it doesn't work, because this type of system ensures that only the top percentile remain in the team in the long run, meaning that last year's top performances become this year's average target.
In short, if you're an overachiever, you'll raise the bar for everyone else, including yourself. It's a self-defeating system.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
You don't raise the bar for everyone. The median remains the same no matter what happens at the extreme.
The only solution is to get another job because you cant win. You can get higher up but by then all you really do is internal politics, stabbing your friends in the back and running around PR-campaigning for yourself. Work, not so much. If you really like politics, lies, distortion and stuff, get a job in politics instead of masquerading as a coder when you in reality is doing politics full time.
HTTP/1.1 400
1. create dummy identities in your team
2. make those dummies look underperforming compared to you (I know, this is the hard part)
3. next stack ranking comes, they get in the pool, so you are above average.
4. profit!!!
I believe this technique is called "stack overflow" and I bet it will work for microsoft for another 30 years at least.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
I work in healthcare and the model often used is Brenners Novice to Expert. This looks at the development of an individual in their practice. While a great model since it allows one to compare themselves to themselves and looking for improvement, it also promotes team work. Of course this is a little difficult to apply many software firms. Another model is using a 1-5 scale, where 5 is exceptional, 1 is unsatistifactory, 3 meets criteria, 4 is exceeds criteria, and then they tally these for whatever metrics used and divide to get an average. Comparing staff to each other does not develop team work and only works in competitive environments like sales where you want people to outdo each other.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
At a former employer I joined a team that was under-performing. I worked hard to get things back on track and I did my absolute best. At my bonus meeting my boss told me that I had done a great job and I was the best performer on the team by far, but he had to give a certain number of people a good review, some a fair review, and one an under-performing review. He didn't do this by job performance but by length of service, and since I was a new guy he gave me the poor review so I got almost no bonus! After that I didn't work so hard....
Search for Microsoft's 'Cannibalistic Culture' a mere few hours ago.
And my company evaluates each person. Most people get an average score. Plus a standard inflation-based raise.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
What's the best way to survive this type of system?
Set up your own religion like L. Ron Hubbard.You could also found your own Fortune 500 corporation but that's more work. Which ever path you choose it boils down to the same truth, if you are the grand poobah you don't have to perform, only punish your underlings for not doing so.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Overachieving isn't guaranteed to get you a high ranking. It's a political game, much like popularity in a high school. It's not about how well you perform, it's about who you know.
Does your company do this?
Yes.
What's the best way to survive this type of system?"
Gamify. At my company, what makes things even worse is that to be considered in the top 20%, you have to show initiative and contribution *outside* of your core responsibility. This involves:
Whatever you do, absolutely never, ever get your head down for long periods and just get things done. That is the road to, at best, an "average" rating. You see, by doing your job well, you are simply doing what is expected of you. It does not matter how complex or easy your job is - no one knows or cares. All they see is someone doing their work.
..but leads to really bad behaviors in a static or shrinking organization.
The large company I work for has just scrapped it after about 10 yrs when HR finally heard the pleas of managers.
Survival when the org is static or shrinking includes understanding what is the "currency" of your manager and *all the other managers* who have teams that are pooled with yours. Get known as a high achiever not just with your manager but the others. At least in our company there would be an annual meeting of those managers at some point to work out the rankings in there respective organizations to have the parent org come out to the required distributions. Horse trading ensues. Being known by your manager's peers helps you in that meeting.
Performance measurement is for sissies. Getting along with the boss/owner, that's where it at.
This might be a difference in work-place culture, but whenever I choose a job I always only considered the fixed salary part for comparison. If I was happy with that, the job is ok. If I need some bonuses to make a decent living, it was re-negotiation time. The nice consequence of this is, that I don't care much about the rigmaroles with performance reviews to decide on the bonus. That makes me very relaxed and whatever comes in is just a nice bonus and nothing I really need. In the end by not caring, I swim along with the average, but I still can tell them to get stuffed if the idiocy becomes too rampart. And being the one to stand up and voice what everyone is thinking sometimes makes you popular or someone to be consulted beforehand.
In the companies I worked for, the more formal and stupid the system was, the easier it was to gamble. I liked best the system with self-defined yearly goals, where the road to success was in the skill to formulate impressive sounding goals where the non-performance was hard to verify. Or to be part in projects that get shut down because of reorganisation before being delivered. That never got me top rates, but before going through the hassle of digging through the bones for some real data average success and bonus (or slightly above average, if I bickered too much about my valuable contributions) was assumed independent of the actual performance.
For me that gives the best results for a minimum of exposure to the whole idiocy.
This ensure that the company only keeps burnt our overachiever and political sharks.
With a little bit of luck it'll drive them into the ground.
And anyway anybody working for microsoft deserves "advanced corporate management techniques" being applied to him or her.
Don't put up with that shit. Vote with your feet and quit your job. Stop being a bitch.
Or, depending on your region work opportunities and your physical appearance, start being one.
I've been on a company that follows this aproach
They had a fixed percentage to put into above the average, result: ... ...
- some years a few good people had an average evaluation -> good people get frustrated -> good people leave
- some years a few average people had a good evavluation -> good people that last year got an average evaluation get frustrated
They also had a fixed percentage to put into bad evaluation, result: ... ...
- some years a few average people had a bad evaluation -> average people get frustrated -> average people leave
- some years a few bad people had an average evavluation -> average people that last year had a bad evaluation get frustrated
From year to year there seems to be a group of good people, lets say 30%, that try to get into the 20% openings for "good evaluation" the result is 10% will always get frustrated and consider the system unfair because they consider themselfs above average.
Everyear, a lot of people (perhaps 40%) are not incentivated to fight for good performance because they are not good enough or not willing to sacrifice personal time/life to achieve that mark, nevertheless they are good enough to have an average evaluation, they just go with the flow ... ...
For these people the system has no impact whatsoever
All in all, the system seems to have some advantages but I'm not sure the advantes are greater than the disavantages.
How to survive? ...
What are you aiming for?
To be on the average evaluation, you usually don't have to do much, after all you must be better than the bottom 10% or 15%
To be on the above average evaluation if you are on a star project on the company and if you are good you have a good change to get a good evaluation, if you are on a marginal project, don't even try it you will have to work 2x has hard as someone on a star project to get a good evaluation.
And offcourse there are politics, some people will get a better evalution not based on performance but on social connections ...
Between the people that don't care if they get fired, the people that won't fight to get to the next evaluation level and the people that would fight to have a good performance even withough the system in place, this system is only having impact on 25% of the people.
The company i work for doesn't really do performance reviews in the sense of giving a score. If you're good enough to remain employed after the trial period, management assumes you're capable of doing your job unless given a specific reason to reconsider. Since they know this, whenever an employee underperforms, management's initial assumption is that it's their fault. This has worked remarkably well, and employees overall stay significantly longer than the industry average.
We have regular evaluations, of course, but they are not comparative and mostly serve to give advice on how an employee can improve their job as well as giving credit for what they do well.
Important stuff
In short, if you're an overachiever, you'll raise the bar for everyone else, including yourself. It's a self-defeating system.
Nope... only need to run faster than the some of co-runners, no need for over-running the tiger.
(I can't believe I wrote the above, even if "logically" sound. I refuse to compete with anybody else but myself... the colleagues are there to collaborate with them!!!)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I think we're still a Fortune 10 company... we manufacture consumer products globally, and have a global performance evaluation (PE) process. I will be as generic as possible in the terminology. Oh, I'm a manager who conducts PE's, and also a volunteer on the personnel development forum (PDF) for non-management personnel.
For PE's, we have a top-tier level that's limited to 15% of the eligible pool. In my department so far this year, we've not nominated enough people to meet that 15% (we're in a new region, and all of the local employees are new). Then there's 70% to 85% of people that are achievers. This bracket is slightly open because there's an allowance of 15% of under-achievers and non-performers. The key is, we're *not* forced to bracket anyone into the lower tiers. And like I said for the top tier, we're not forced to bracket people into that tier, either.
Our system makes sense. Not everyone can be a super-star; even when everyone is a super-star, there's always a small percentage that have a little bit of an edge. And because we're not forced to rank anyone as under-achievers, we recognize that even the weakest link might be carrying his or her weight -- and carrying weight (do your job) is all we ask!
To prevent abuse, all of the top 15% and the lower 15% (if any) all go to the PDF committee that I mentioned I'm in. There, my fellow managers and I review the proposals for the highest-achiever rankings, and we all have to agree. Basically, you can't screw your way to the top, or other methods of brown-nosing.
And as a low-level manager (organizationally-speaking), I'm subject to the same process at my pay grade. And I'm fairly happy with it.
--Jim (me)
This pretty much guarantees a rat race.
Everyone tries to get ahead of each other. This can work, if the metrics are totally objective, but they rarely are. Even if they were, it's a high stress way of doing things. Only a certain personality type thrives under constant stress. These people will usually leave and set up their own business
Also, MS hires good people. If you are competing against other good people (not useless dolts), then it's hard to win on ability alone. It's far more effective to do a reasonable job, and suck up to your boss / make your boss look good / advertise your "achievements" to your boss's peers, etc.
Eventually, the people who are good at the game get promoted, and forget that the game is actually a bad thing. They start consciously rewarding people for playing the game (not getting fooled by it, but actually expecting their workers to game the system), and madness prevails.
Being a (scumbag) contractor, my performance reviews are very simple and binary - a) all ok, please carry on/do new project b) not ok, goodbye!
On my team, we use a sort of 360 degree review process. The people I manage meet with me and my boss on a quarterly basis, and we use the time basically to check in on any issues we've identified, check on any goals set in the last quarterly review, talk about training / certification progress, listen to any concerns they bring up with people / processes / environment, etc. At the end of the review, I leave the room and the employee gets to talk to my boss about me, without me in the room. Then I come back in, my boss leaves, and we talk about my boss without him in the room. My boss and I aggregate and anonymize the top 2-3 things that people mention about us, and that becomes a part of our reviews.
My firm does evaluations by making you take of your shirt you are then rated by the number of stripes on your back :(
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Within: Is to remember that the ratings are subjective. Make friends. Particularly make nice with the boss. Then perform competently so they have no reason to downrank you, while having reasons to rank you above the other competent people.
Without: Is to leave for a place that uses a sane management system. There are plenty. Some of them are eating Microsoft's lunch right now. People who are actually competent software engineers are in extreme demand right now, there's no shortage of jobs for that skillset. A recruiter can get you a list of a few hundred positions for you to choose from on a moment's notice.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
That's my basic response.
If this matters to you, talk to your employer. If they push it through without taking on board your concerns - that's precisely how much you are worth to them.
That doesn't mean quit if they don't give in (that's up to you), but either they will listen and adjust (and thus, problem solved), or they will ignore EVERYTHING you do (and thus, lots of energy not wasted trying to get them to change).
Do you really think a huge company will just arrive at such a scheme overnight? Do you really think they will take kindly to you knowing better than whatever CEO instituted or approved that scheme? Do you really think they care that some people are marked as underachieving when they are not. If they did, they wouldn't have such a scheme already.
Make your concerns known (if you dare), and then suck it up. Either play the game or get out. That's a business rule that applies to 100% of such schemes, no matter what the size of the organisation. And the fact that you are in that position means that your predecessors and co-workers sucked it up when it was first proposed or they joined the company.
... is be ranked the best.
FTFY.
Every end has half a stick.
Probably the best way is to be popular within the group or at least NOT unpopular. As a popular person, your manager will see you as sombody who gets along with everybody else. This is espeically important in a "Star Team" group where all members are performing brilliantly. The manager will look at the people who get along and rate them higher than the people who are a little different. The manager will grade down the 'unpopular' staff because they always seem to be in conflict or the naysayers or such.
The above was my personal experience. I learnt pretty quickly in my career that I didnt really "fit in". whilst I got the work done I always got lower gradings on these kinds of things.
I would like to say that its something you can change but often its not somethign you can conciously change. Its your personality. it's who you are. there is no real changing of that. The reality is probably that the only way you could improve your rateing is move to a department where there are people less popular than you.
Hmm. wow that sounds really dodgey, doesnt it! :) Excuse me, I have to go and put in a job application that's just come up on the companys internal job board.
What, too obvious?
The quick answer is quit as soon as possible. This would make the system not work especially well. The problem is that this approach is not taken by everyone so the real answer is to assess what is happening and maybe stay if there is a future for you. If there are good motivations for the bad review and a reward and recognition if you improve plus a fair and honest system then it might work.
If you realize that the reviews are based on other things than your performance and you are screwed no matter what you do then the only thing you can do is leave and leave early. This is because in a system like at Microsoft there is a big value in a person who accepts a bad review and still stays.
I used to work for Microsoft and my biggest regret is that I did not quit much much earlier.
This doesn't work though.
I can give you a real world example. My partner was a retail manager for a well known denim retailer, and was consistently the top in the country each year in terms of year on year growth no matter which store she was assigned to. The problem is only one manager was allowed to be graded 1 on a scale of 1 to 5 or whatever it was. She obviously deserved it as she was the one consistently performing the best, but this had issues.
If it was given to her year on year, the other managers felt they had no chance and just had no motivation to excel themselves because they were only going to get a 2 anyway - they could try really hard and almost do as well as her, but not quite, so why try when they'd get a 2 regardless? The worst part being these grades were linked to your annual rise, so no matter how hard you tried you'd only get a smaller rise against her.
So the management figured well hey, we need to motivate the other folks, so we'll give it to them for how hard they tried, rather than actual results, and so then it's my girlfriend who despite her stellar performance instead suffers and gets a lower payrise. Then she has no motivation to really continue to outshine, because she's not gaining anything for it, in fact, someone that performed worse than her is getting a better reward than she did.
Of course, the solution may then be to increase the number of people who get a 1, but then at that 1/2 boundary you have the EXACT same problem. Those who try real hard can never quite catch the top performers so are not motivated to do so. Really, the only solution is to instead rank people based on a sensible balance of effort and performance without any cap on how many can be deemed to be top performers. If you extend it to say 5 out of 30 people can have the top grade, then what happens when your survival of the fittest type management system gets the 6 best managers in the country in? well, the 6th one will fuck off elsewhere because they'll be getting shit on relative to the others. It'd be far better if all 6, or all 7, 8, 9, or 10 could get equal reward so that you retain the 10 best managers in the country, rather than stick yourself permanently with only the 5 best, letting the other 5 fuck off to your competitors.
The problem with your theory is that yeah, it works great for the top person, but what the fuck is the use in a system that means that 29 of your 30 staff just have no reason to be motivated? That's a complete failure of management.
I've personally not had a problem being in the top percentile myself, but I'd absolutely fucking hate to work under this system because it'd mean everyone around me was unmotivated meaning I'd be carrying the team - I want my coworkers to be motivated, I want them to do well, to be praised, to be given reason to care about their job, because that makes my life easier regardless of whether I'm a top performer, or a bottom performer.
At the end of the day these braindead systems exist because of inept managers who are either hiring the completely wrong people, or don't have the balls to tell someone truly inept, lazy, or incompetent that they're fired. These managers either can't actually figure out how well their staff are performing, or how competent they are, or they can, but just don't have any spine to do what's required to deal with them, and so they give them this absolutely failure of a crutch to try and automate the process for them but it merely serves to destroy motivation of those who can perform by giving them reason not to.
If you hire good managers you don't need this kind of crutch, the good managers will know who deserves what praise and reward, and who needs to be fired.
Most managers who I have worked for try to rotate the low ranking around. No one gets it often enough to come up on the HR radar. They were always happy to have a couple of people who knew that they were low performers, so that they didn't mind getting stuck with it every once in a while. And even the best folks can have a bad year over time. Think of it like pulling latrine duty.
The best managers I know foster an atmosphere where everyone's work counts the most, not a bunch of folks competing against each other. If I landed in a project where every single person had personal ranking as the top goal, I would get out.
Immediately.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Most competence systems I've seen has a 1-5 performance rating where 3 is performing okay, 4 well and 5 exceptionally. On occasion there's a 2 for underperforming and very rarely an 1 which is basically fail but it's rare because you shouldn't get promoted to that level if you aren't already performing like one. That's usually reserved for total mishires or people who've had some kind of personal breakdown. Saying that X% of your workers are underperforming is saying that your hiring process fails X% of the time - that figure should be close to zero.
Of course before that there's usually a set of skills that your employment level should have, so the demands on a "Senior Developer" is different from a "Junior Developer". Usually these are set up in a competence matrix, so when they're looking at possible promotions they can say yes, you're coding at a Senior Developer coding level but you lack skill X which is required to be a Senior Developer. Skills development is related but actually quite distinct from your work performance, you can have done your job excellently but done very little to improve your skill set.
Sane companies also look at professional development, if you're a first year Senior Developer whose performance has improved but still is below average you're probably a better choice than the 5th year Senior Developer whose performance has declined and is now equal to yours, those two are connected. It was probably a better idea to promote him to an okay performing Senior Developer than for him to be an overachieving Junior Developer. That's another reason 5s are so rare, if you are that good you should be in a position with higher demands.
That said, when it comes down to it managers can pretty much manage to tweak the rating however they want. That said, even the worst of managers want to look good to their team/departments bosses and customers. If they know you're critical for them to deliver on time and in good quality, you'll survive most of the office politics. But without trying to kiss too much ass, make sure your boss knows what you're doing for him. Don't expect him to find out on his own.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Network.
Find the smarter people who are better-connected than you, ask if they know why your idea is dumb. Get them thinking about it. Let it percolate.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Most of the problems raise when big numbers are translated to small teams. Probably, a 10% of a big corporation staff deserves to be fired, but that's not appliable to 10% of every team. Maybe several teams deserve to be fired alltogether (boss included) and some teams deserve an extra-bonus (ok, boss included), but the big numbers should achieve those global percentages.
Bad bosses apply the corporate percentages top down without changes because it is easier to manage and they can say "I'm not mean, it's the rule" but he is part of the problem. The spreading of the percentages should be distributed through the organization weightened according to the contribution of the teams and sub-teams, so there could be an uneven punishing policy, which is counterintuitively far much more fair.
This kind of management stupidity can only thrive in a company that's able to survive despite it's management. That means reasonable large and mature.
Basically, You need a stable field to play games on.
Now a startup is unstable, fragile and rapidly tanks if people play games. Plus the whole ting is focused like a laser and causes players to stand out like a sore thump.
The question on where you'd thrive is really simple and depends on whether you're a player.
TCAP-Abort
First-line managers who have to deliver against HR policies like this have my every sympathy. I was made a manager in a certain very large IT company. I managed a team of mixed fixed-term contractors, contractors and permanent staff. My manager came to me at the start of the new year to tell me that during the upcoming staff performance review, I had to make 15% of my permanent staff a 1 performer, 75% a 2 performer, and 10% a three performer. When I complained that I didn't have enough permanent staff of a low caliber (c'mon now, I was doing the hiring!), I was quite neatly told that if I couldn't make up the numbers from my workforce, then it would be OK as from his level he would meet his overall target for 3 performers by making ME one.
Actually, that's what ended up happening, not that any of my workforce found out about that 'deal'. I lasted a further four years of management in increasingly Kafka-esque circumstances until I decided that I should stop trying to rise up the ranks of management, give up and go back to being a techie. I've never regretted the decision, and I can sleep at night.
My performance is simply marked down as "godlike" for all categories and we're done.
So.. it has come to this
I have no idea how my current employer does performance review. I haven't had to deal with performance reviews in over 15 years. This is one of the benefits of working as a consultant on a contract, and one of the things I don't miss about working as an employee.
I personally find consulting to be a more civilized, sane way to earn a living. My total compensation gets negotiated up front, for some prescribed period of time. Then, when the time is up, we just negotiate again(1). Simple. No fuss, no mess. You know how much you're making, and you don't feel shortchanged when the bean counters decide to cut down on some fringe benefit.
I guess that periodic contract extensions would count as a periodic performance review, of some sort. But there's no bureaucracy involved, and I don't need to dance like a pony, in front of someone. It's purely a business transaction, and nothing more.
The oft heard suggestion of unionizing is a joke. It's never going to happen. If you want to unionize, sure, but good luck to you. On the other hand, if you want to become a consultant, that can happen today. Your choice.
(1) Yes, I've went through an occasion of an 800lb corporate gorilla deciding, by fiat, to cut all their consultants' rates, for budgetary reasons, assuming that everyone is going to accept it and that they have no choice in the matter. As my then-managers discovered, that assumption was wrong. One of the other benefits of consulting, you see, is far fewer questions of what happened at your last job. Naturally, contracts come to an end all the time, and one's services are no longer required. Nothing wrong with that. Perfectly understandable, and expected.
At my company, you write an evaluation for your manager in which you rank yourself as either needing improvement, meeting expectations or exceeding expectations on a variety of points, while your manager simultaneously fills out pretty much the same evaluation of you.
And then both evaluations are handed to a senior person in the office who doesn't actually know you that well or what you do, who gives you exactly the same, barely cost-of-living raise as everybody else he doesn't work directly with, regardless of what the paperwork actually said.
The disconnect is startling.
I have the pleasure of working for a very large multinational company which employ's over one hundred thousand people worldwide. The best way Ive found to ensure I get a 'positive' rating is primarily based on how well I get along with my leader. Ive had a 'below expectation' and 'exceeding expectation' while working in my current role. And I was working just as hard both times. One was conducted by an absolute fool, who was subsequently sacked and the other by a truly inspirational leader with whom I get along famously. In short, get along with your boss and you will always do well.
When you have a four-eyes-Meeting with you boss, just tell him "I will ignore stack ranking and I will not care about my stack index. I will do good and hard work and if that is not enough, just fire me".
From that time on, you are out of the treadmill and you boss will know it. It will give you peace of mind and will remove that Kafkaesque thing out of your head. If they fire you, it might 100% be due to cost reducations and it will be justified by the "stack ranking". So again, ignore this shit.
In my experience, there is a sufficient number of companies and corporations around who don't play this shit. Of those who play it, many if not most will accept you ignoring the system. Good people cannot simply be cloned. If you are *actually* a bad performer you will be booted out anyway, if you are a good performer they will find some equally shitty rationalization why they keep you despite having a bad stack ranking. So to conclude, ignore the shit and have peace of mind.
Just don't advertise all of this when some higher-up comes around. You don't have to make them feel ridiculuous in the public. Then all will be fine, even if your handling of the Stack Ranking will become known to the chain of management (up to the CEO). These are sleazy businesspeople, not maths professors.
This is so true :-(
By the by: other managers were in the same situation as I was; one solved the problem by telling his newly-promoted staff working for him that it was HR policy to give people a 3 rating for the first appraisal after promotion ..! Another happened to have a couple of people on a one-year placement as part of their degree course - they got a 3 to make the numbers up. I decided that in the future, I would always ensure that I had a doofus or two working for me to perform menial tasks and to take the hit.
The US Government, including uniformed services, also grades this way. A quota is enforced that prevents supervisors from giving good reports to good employees. The only way I have seen to win in this system is to put office politics and power games ahead of meaningful accomplishment. One has to "manage up", meaning that one has to keep one's nose stuck up the right rear-end. Those are the ones who do well, not the ones who put mission first in an effort to accomplish something. Because of this, the US Government spends more and more money, creates more and more agencies, and hires more and more people while getting less and less accomplished. Is there any reason to wonder about the US' loss of world leadership, military strength, and economic prowess?
So how 'bout that windows 8? Man what a load! I hear if you install it your computer will start speaking in tongues! User-friendly my eye!
Only it doesn't work, because this type of system ensures that only the top percentile remain in the team in the long run, meaning that last year's top performances become this year's average target. In short, if you're an overachiever, you'll raise the bar for everyone else, including yourself. It's a self-defeating system.
On top of that then there's the issue of actually measuring who the top performers actually are. Ok, with some jobs that might be fairly straight forward. However most of us here are techies, how do you measure the performance of a software engineer or quality assurance. (I ask because I know some of the people in the company get rated highly because their managers talk them up and the company gets this fantasy about how great they are. Should I mention I have a QA person now that basically had me waste months of company time "fixing" stuff that wasn't actually broken? But since this ones a top performer there's no way I was allowed to not fix it.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
The problem with systems like this, where you rank employees with respect to each other, is that it creates an atmosphere of competition in an environment where cooperation would be more productive. As a software engineer, I've yet to find one situation where competing against my peers has produced a better product. Management doesn't get this. The hierarchical structure of organizations lends itself to competition, so the people in charge tend to be competitive people and believe the best work comes from people trying to outdo each other. They seem to think that saying some other guy is a better employee will motivate his peers to work harder, when in truth all it does it create resentment or, if you figure it out, apathy.
Dont forget to back stab those around you. You are competing against them, not working with them for the greater good.
That might explain some of the M$ bugs we have seen.
Everyone, Including when you save the company by performing a miracle.....
Needs improvement.
That way no raise is warranted. We cant be giving out raises, how would we keep our record breaking profits?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
im not overly popular with typical HR people, cause i ask lots of questions during the initial interview, such as: how do you handle performance reviews? how is management reviewed (top down, 360, etc)? it weeds out bad places to work real quick. plus, its really fun to see the look on an interviewers face when theyre put on the spot.
I work for a Big Defense Contractor, and HR requires managers to "distribute" performance rankings. They're basically allowed to have one "top" performer, forced to identify somebody as a "lower" performer, and lump everybody else in the middle.
There's almost no actual managerial discretion, everything is done by HR's one-size-fits-nobody formula. Raises are set by a strict computer-generated curve. Every year, HR calls a meeting to lay out the "raise pool," and tells the managers to lie to their people about what's actually going on. My last boss was a crusty old 30-year man who never failed to give us a blow-by-blow account of the annual HR propaganda meeting...
I got introduced in this system twelve years ago. In the nineties I had never worked for a company which did such evaluation.
I have no qualms about evaluations per se, but when I heard how this worked, my immediate reaction was a real WTF moment.
I have in the course of school and my career been introduced into statistics several times, and I know the Gauss curve. So my first reaction really was, wtf. you do not go measuring and plotting your data, and then expand your bell curve. No, if you want to know if there are outliers then you do this match against your mean and your standard deviation. That way you can see the underperformers, but also the people who are really, really good (or one should investigate the matter).
However, the biggest wtf is really that I am working in a company with many engineers (master level engineers). I expect these people to understand these issues in probability/statistics and made a statement against this misuse of mathematics a long time ago, which is absolutely not the case.
I believe my company has the same system, only the complete gutting of bonuses years ago and the fact that a stellar rating gets you around 0.3% more on the pathetic annual salary increase means that no one cares.
My last performance review contained two directly contradictory statements from my manager, in what I suspect was an uncorrected cut-and-paste from the previous year. I didn't bring it up, because either way I was getting the same shitty raise. That's motivation for you.
Also, MS hires good people. If you are competing against other good people (not useless dolts), then it's hard to win on ability alone. It's far more effective to do a reasonable job, and suck up to your boss / make your boss look good / advertise your "achievements" to your boss's peers, etc.
Eventually, the people who are good at the game get promoted, and forget that the game is actually a bad thing. They start consciously rewarding people for playing the game (not getting fooled by it, but actually expecting their workers to game the system), and madness prevails.
I keep seeing this over and over that they hire good people. Everyone wants to only hire good people and why would good people with a poor rating at places like this work at such a place? Good people choose where they want to work. Bad or entry level people on the other hand get chosen by employers and have to suck it up just to get a job.
Also after you have a termination on your application or resume many places refuse to hire you or you work in another shitty company that can't find good workers who are willing to put up with the crap and lower pay even if you are a good performer but didn't make the metric. It makes you look incompetent and ruins your career. That is not really fair to the worker and his/her family.
I will even go further and say studies show when you turn your office into a dictatorship you do not even have to fire the lower performers. The good ones will simply quit leaving the bad apples who are desperate for a job to stay. Do you want to weed the out the bad apples? Or do you want to retain the cream of the crop? You can't have both in such a situation.
http://saveie6.com/
My primary workplace uses the 1-5 scale, but doing a perfect job of everything you're asked to do gets you a "3 - meets expectations." So the only way to get higher than a 3 is to think of things to do, and do a perfect job of them, before it even occurs to anyone to ask you. I averaged a 4-of-5 across several categories on last year's annual performance evaluation, which got me a year-end bonus equal to about 2 weeks' pay (which we tend to get most years) and a raise of... nothing.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
- work only on contract based no longer then 12-18 months per company. You won't be included in such rankings ... but you might get hired-and-fired faster then usual staff (but better paid)
- make yourself the only person with specific know-how about certain technical aspects (But to serve a niche can make you unemployed easy, for example if the niche is gone).
If there are not so many people that have comparable knowledge it is harder to rank you.
Specialists always get better ranking then generalists.
Software Developer@OpenMeetings project
Your GF should have been promoted to a trainer of other managers, given a raise and been told that she now only meets expectations and is competing with other top retail management trainers. Now she's responsible for creating more copies of herself.
They also need to break that group up. Make it a regional challenge so there are no more than 10 peers in a group at least. 5 is ideal. Then set the bar for top performance at or just above the best in the group the prior year.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
We all suck and should pray to the CEO each and every day we still have jobs or at least jobs in places where people aren't routinely eaten by tigers. One fundamental way to do this is to erect a byzantine HR structure which ensures that none but the politically astute few rise past the level of their incompetence while everyone else is left filling out endless self appraisals and evaluations. Another is to make it policy that in order to even apply for a different job in the company you have to have already lined up your own replacement. And since no one is really allowed to move outside of their own organizational structure anyhow, it's a near impossibility. And last but not least set in stone salary plans which, months ahead of the date of these so called appraisals, state that with few if any exceptions, there are, once again, zero dollars to give to anyone for any sort of bonus, benefit or increase, ever. The reasons, you can pick from the usual basket of nonsense: the industry's bad, the company didn't or won't meet its goals, market pressures, regional employment imbalance, you're too far above the midpoint (but be careful you never divulge what that number is or what it means), they have the wrong mix of skills and/or jobs, competitive pressures or 'drive to leverage'.
Then follow this up with the obligatory quarterly executive emails extolling the greatness of the company and how wonderfully it's doing. Exhort the workers to exceed all goals. Have HR grind out survey results proving that the company is the greatest company in the world to work for.
Stack ranking is basically applying a forced curve distribution on all employees at the same level
This is fundamentally flawed. Peer-referenced criterion is not an appropriate measurement of one's worth to an organization. Performance-based criterion is more effective. With peer-referenced, you are assuming that there is some sort of naturally occurring bell curve, which may or may not be true. You eliminate the possibility that 5 out of 5 employees might all be really good and instead are saying "John is the best and Frank is the worst". If Frank is performing well above the performance requirements, then what's the problem?
This same problem is prevalent in education. Pitting student against student has no educational value of measuring if a student can learn what they are supposed to learn. Johnny is the best at 4th grade math (got 100%!) and Frank is the worst, even though Frank got a 92% when the standard is 70%.
Stop being such a pansy. The only way to live this life of yours is to do better than the guy below you, so either step on his face to climb your way to top of the greasy pole or start sweeping floors. Step it up, you jackwagon!
"Your GF should have been promoted to a trainer of other managers, given a raise and been told that she now only meets expectations and is competing with other top retail management trainers. Now she's responsible for creating more copies of herself."
Which is exactly what she ended up doing. But how does that help the problem? someone simply fills her place and you still have the exact same problem again with the person who filled the space left by her exit.
"They also need to break that group up. Make it a regional challenge so there are no more than 10 peers in a group at least. 5 is ideal. Then set the bar for top performance at or just above the best in the group the prior year."
So what happens when you have a region where there happens to be 3 extremely talented managers? You've still got the exact same problem.
It's a broken system, you can't fix it by changing the parameters, the fundamental problems all still exist. The only solution is to use a more rational and forward thinking method of grading people that does away with these fundamental flaws altogether. What if someone has had the odds stacked against them because there's been a flood in their area but they still managed to break even? do you punish them for not achieving growth? The point is this - everyone's circumstances are going to be unique, so lumping them all into the same system is a recipe for failure - someone is always going to get treated unfairly and that has completely the opposite of the desired effect, it demotivates them. You can't escape the fact you need competent managers that can judge people based on their, and their store's unique circumstances.
At the end of the day these braindead systems exist because of inept managers who are either hiring the completely wrong people, or don't have the balls to tell someone truly inept, lazy, or incompetent that they're fired. These managers either can't actually figure out how well their staff are performing, or how competent they are, or they can, but just don't have any spine to do what's required to deal with them, and so they give them this absolutely failure of a crutch to try and automate the process for them but it merely serves to destroy motivation of those who can perform by giving them reason not to.
I think the term "manager" has been severely overloaded in the modern corporate world. I think there are at least three different types of management:
1) Budget management - bean counting and other forms of paper-pushing
2) People management - acting as a buffer between your team and the rest of the company, as well as dealing with issues internal to the team like personality conflicts, motivation, career path, etc
3) Product management - mostly technical and creative work all revolving around the life-cycle of a product from creation to end-of-life.
I think that a lot of the dysfunction in modern corporations comes from the intermingling of these distinctly different jobs under the common rubric of "management." You end up with people applying bean-counting processes to people-handling situations and the result is nearly guaranteed failure.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
One of the advantages of having my pay legislatively frozen for the past four years[1] is that my boss feels it would be a waste of time to evaluate my performance. Back when I actually could get raises, I had to do this hokey self-evaluation and then go over it with my boss.
[1] The Washington state legislature has frozen all state employee salaries from 2009-2013. Even though my salary is entirely grant-funded and I don't cost the state a dime, I still can't get a raise. Unfortunately, I don't think legislators understand how research universities really work.
Spend a little time in one of these companies to gain the prestige of having worked for them (that's probably one of the big draw cards of working at a company like Microsoft), then take that experience and "bank it" outside in a non-Fortune 500 company. If many people took this approach (and with some luck) the brain drain may cause these companies to rethink the stack ranking policy.
I think you're absolutely right.
One example that comes to mind is when I've been lead developer on projects before I've had headaches where the project manager would keep getting in my way because he was under the assumption that as he had manager in my title it gave him permission to try and tell my team what bugs to prioritise etc. when he had absolutely no clue what they even meant.
Really, project managers for example should be called project facilitators. That's what they're really there for, otherwise they get ideas above their station and just cause problems. I'd led a project perfectly, getting it to a position where it would've been ready 2 weeks before launch, but ended up shooting over for absolutely no reason than the project manager actually added cost to the project unnecessarily, for example, by demanding we add in features which none of our requirements gathering had shown a need for, no one would ever use, and ultimately, no one ever did end up using.
Thinking about it, the term "facilitator" would go a long way to solving a lot of said problems if you replaced manager with facilitator in these people's job titles. When they understand they're there in a support role, and not a management role, things run far more smoothly.
If you're a GS (general schedule) US government employee, you get rated as "met" or "not met" expectations. Everyone except true losers get across the board "met". Not that the pay changes much regardless. Pay and performance are pretty much uncoupled. Work hard and get paid the same as the lazy guy across the hall. And people wonder why government employees are lazy...
Poorly. Objectives that come and go and are often unobtainable. Shuffled from team to team and project to project with little training and preparation. Forced to work on previous projects or side projects that are not evaluated but are required to be done. Little to no understanding of what we do and the tools we are forced to use.
They evaluated us poorly.
Oh, and my company also uses "stacked rankings".
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
"What's the best way to survive this type of system?"
Overperform.
When it comes down to it EVERYONE has their own business. When you are traditionally employed, your business has one customer, and if you lose that customer by quitting or getting fired, you're out of business. Start your own business and remember each customer is an income stream. Multiple income streams mean more money and more security, and also give you the ability to fire customers you don't want to do business with.
This doesn't mean it's easy or even possible for everyone. My business was much harder to start than I ever thought it would be, but the challenges have been worthwhile both in income and in getting out of corporate BS like the stacked ranking game.
Middle managers who have no skills beyond playing office politics and self-promotion are pretty much stuck in the corporate rat race, but people with real skills that translate to marketable goods or services can make it on their own if they can learn how to build business structures and processes to run their business and a marketing plan to get customers.
The Slashdotter who said the best way to win is not to play the game was right. This post suggests one way HOW get out of the game.
And as a manager I hate it. I'm forced to play chicken with the other managers and try to make sure my employees get not less than whether I think they deserve. So instead of giving them the review I think they deserve I have to inflate it a little or a lot. I have to because nobody wants to evaluate one of their employees poorly unless he's doing poorly. And somebody has to get screwed if you have no poorly performing people.
I've worked for big companies (IBM) that had twice-a-year reviews that involved goal setting, evaluation of whether goals were achieved, and rating yourself on a bunch of silly categories. Bonuses were tied to your score. I've worked for small companies that tried to do the same, and I've worked for even smaller companies where there was no review system (or performance bonuses) whatsoever. I vastly prefer the latter. If I'm doing a crappy job and am in danger of losing my job then tell me. If I'm doing an awesome job and you're especially pleased with my performance then tell me. If I'm meeting expectations but not doing anything awesome then don't waste my time (and create awkwardness between manager and employee that needn't exist) by making me go through performance reviews.
I had a similar experience. Same system, large company. I usually get a 1 or 2. There was another person who deserved a 2. In order to give him a 2, they had to give someone (me) a 3. In order to give me a 3, they had to justify it, so my supervisor wrote a bunch of crap that was just plain false in my review. When I wrote my response, I copied my next two levels of management. I really didn't have a problem with the number. That's just the game.(even if its wrong). But there was no way I was going to let him write lies about me, that might be read by a future supervisor. After meeting with his manager and several hours of making my supervisor look like and idiot, they ended up changing all of the wording in my review. Later, my supervisor was promoted. I still walked away from the whole thing jaded and I am not nearly as motivated anymore. I am not sure if that is my fault or theirs.
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels.
I've worked with two types of companies; large ones that all had a fixed percentage allocation like Microsoft, and small ones that did it seat of pants or not at all.
The fact is no matter what sort of system your employer has, the whole process is a lie. You will only find out what they really think of you when it comes time to downsize.
Generally not having a fixed percentage system makes it easier to lie to the employee. Having a fixed percentage system can be unfair if you are on a team with all superstars. Basically though if you are on such a team it is a very unstable situation and will not last long because members of such a team will generally move on to better opportunities pretty quickly.
> To survive in an environment with a forced bell curve, let me paraphrase Shakespeare: "Kill all MBAs."
The people who do nonsense like this are often not MBAs. MBAs should be telling them why this is a bad idea. In my experience, MBAs are taught that this is a bad idea.
> if the company did its job correctly in the first place (hiring great people and not hiring bozos)
Unfortunately, this is hard. Sometimes you make a mistake and hire a bozo. Sometimes you hire a star, and he becomes a bozo. Personally, I like the motto "Hire slow, fire fast." which I think goes to your doing "its job correctly in the first place." Take the time to hire the right people. When you end up with a bad apple, don't take a year to get rid of them, especially if you have a 90 day probationary period.
Actually, that might be one thing that leads to systems like this. It's hard for a big company to fire just one person. They tie themselves in HR knots. But if it's standard operating procedure to fire X% every year, well that's easy! I'm not saying I approve, merely that I may see why this particular pathology develops.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I work for Dell. I got a 2 out of 5 on my review last year and did not get a raise. Last year was my first year with the company. The entire review was 'you were not here the entire year so relative to people that are, you did not complete all your objectives'. I then asked what objectives did I not complete, and I got some really vague responses. Then I got 'you are in a pay grade with senior managers, so you are rated relative to then. To make matters worse a 2 review blocks me from being able to find a job in another group. I have never seen anything like this. I never get reviews below a 3. I sometimes get a 4 and have no interest in putting in the hours necessary to get a 5. If I did that last year, I would have still gotten a 2. This is with multiple companies.
This review did not even mention the multiple monetary awards I got last year(they were small, but they pretend like they are a big deal). I probably got as many awards as any of the top performers and I was only there for 7 months. I did not expect a big raise. I expected some kind of cost of living increase and then I would get 7/12s of it. This is how most companies do it. I asked around and Dell does this alot. When you get a raise it is typically below inflation. This appears to be one way they are cutting expenses. There are not any 'cost of living increases' there are only 'merit increases'. There is inflation, if you don't get a raise, it is the same as a pay cut. Since money is only worth what you can buy with it. Odds are I won't get a raise this year either due to the bad revenue numbers and Dells pledge to cut $2 billion in expenses.
The part about how I can't transfer makes the review worse. You need at least a 3 on your review to get another job in the company. There are more interesting and more senior level positions in the company that pop up periodically that I am qualified to interview for. These are very competitive, so who knows if I would actually get them. I can't even apply for them. To show us what they really think of our effort, Dell now has most of its technical staff in my group reporting to people in India. We are matrix managed. A person I have never spoken to is responsible for my review. When we look up these people in the system they appear to have many people with similiar skill sets matrixed to them. So this is probably done in part to see who you can fire in the US and replace with someone in India or temporarily move this person to the US on a visa. Note that the Indian guys on the team are not blind and they say the same thing.
I am a very senior technical person and I can replace this position without a lot of effort. This place does seem to have people who stick around a long time. Apparently they are confusing me with people who will put up with this. Since that review I have cut my hours to 40 hours and any time I have to do off hours work I always make sure to take comp time. I did not always do that last year, but now they have shown that extra work is not rewarded, I see no reason to be bothered. To be fair, the group I am in at Dell is very reasonable about hours and we get 1 month off to start (2 weeks personal time/2 weeks vacation). I plan to use all of it.
It's theirs, and you did the right thing.
I'm not sure where you live, but in the UK, you'd be putting yourself at risk by not challenging it.
Here in the UK, if you get stellar appraisals but get sacked anyway because of an inept/threatened/jealous manager then you can challenge it in an industrial tribunal, and good appraisals would make sure you win your case. There have been a number of scenarios whereby people have been able to hold up good appraisals as evidence that they are not the problem.
If you allow an unfair appraisal to go against you and choose to just ignore it, then you're putting yourself at risk of unfair dismissal with absolutely no recourse for compensation.
If I've learn anything it's that what goes around comes around. When I worked in public sector some years back I suffered the same kind of thing, I was young and naive and even let them lead me into thinking that maybe I was the problem. I eventually left and my career has absolutely flown along in the time since to the point I'm far more senior, far better paid, and far more respected that my bosses were in public sector. I understand their department is currently facing the axe also and I don't expect their job prospects are good having just sat lazily vegitating spending their time attacking anyone competent enough to make them look bad for about 20 years of their careers.
It sounds like the best thing you can do is get out and move on. A change of scenery is a good thing if things get to that point.
My company used to do this and yes, it does suck. Not only because it does force unnatural rankings depending on the mix of people, but because the good old boys and people who have connections don't get weeded out as part of the process. I remember one of my good employees getting 'targeted' to land in the bottom of the rankings and having to haul the rank meeting manager and the HR person into a different room and asking if they wanted to continue tarring and feathering the good employee, or should I go back in and bring up the couple of 25 year plus employees who did nothing more than recirculate the air in a cubicle. Turns out they didn't.
How do you defeat this? Pretty much perception, perception, perception. To succeed in one of these things, the managers in the room folding, spindling and mutilating your annual contributions should all know who your employees are, approximately what they do, and have a favorable impression of them. This is a year long marketing effort to get recognition for your people, name them in staff meetings and in written status reports when they do something good. Death is some manager in the meeting that one of your employees did something to during the year, but they decided to wait until the review process to bring it up.
The difference between the guys at the top and the guys at the bottom are the ones at the top got talked about and everyone in the room said "Yep, good guy" while the ones at the bottom were people nobody knew, someone had a bad experience with them, or nobody understood their accomplishments.
So the marching orders are a) make sure you know what you're working on and that what you're working on has measurable value and is important to the business. If you cant identify the value and importance, simply stop doing it. Make sure everyone knows what you're doing. Make sure every time you interact with a manager that its a positive outcome or bring it up with you so you can repair the situation in advance of the review session. Market the heck out of your people and put them in front of as much management as possible. I used to send employees in my stead to meetings or have them make major presentations where most managers want to do it themselves.
Done properly, this could be a good tool. Not done properly (and it usually isnt done properly) its a stress inducing sales job and whoever has the best skills at presenting employees and hardballing the HR people will get the results.
There are also a number of other little things to pay attention to. I found out that each of these sessions has a hunk of money and stock options to give out to the group, but that they rarely allocate all of it and if it isn't allocated, that falls back into the general pool. So I found out that if I approached the HR person and asked if there was any residual we could divvy up among the top 2 or 3 people, they'd often do it.
All time and money saving ideas are punished.
... we get reviewed by other colleagues every year. So you have to be good, doing team work, etc.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Thus discriminating against the people most devoted to technology.
I know people at Microsoft, and know more than one who got a review that basically said "You met all your objectives on time, this is unsatisfactory performance, get out before we fire you". All of them were hardcore nerds.
It doesn't really matter much how good of a job you do, as long as you look better than your co-workers. So, stab them in the back to succeed in this environment. Make them look bad.
Every year on the dot, but the review has a form of self-assessment, where you provide your own performance rankings and your manager than either agrees or adjusts them. Result of the review can affect your annual cost of living increase by +/- 1.5% which is pretty pretty miniscule, considering the actual inflation rates, so the whole exercise is rather pointless.
Bow before me, for I am root.
I know they rank us. But it's all confidential and they won't even tell you your rating. Sometimes you can get vague things like "average" or "below average" out of them but the actual grad is confidential. No idea if there's a curve. The evaluation metrics are also unknown.
When I joined LM I was already cynical about these performance evaluations, so I tended to ignore it, but a friend of mine who joined around the same time took them very seriously at first. He worked extra hard and documented all of his accomplishments in detail. He made a very strong case for his excellent performance. He ended up with the same 3 everyone else got. His boss was honest/dumb enough to tell him straight out that he gives everyone a 3 because LM needs to keep the rates down to remain both competitive and profitable. My friend then adopted my attitude. I've moved on to better things and he is still with LM comfortably coasting. LM lost 2 high performing professionals as result. One left and the other quit trying.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
As a former project manager at a mid-size production facility, I think what should have happened is YOU should have been given the temporary title "Lead Dev / Release Manager for Project X" and this jackass should have sat the bench; or given you an assist. It's obvious you knew more about the project lifecycle and requirements than he did.
Project management is actually a very welcome management position if filled with the right person; your story could have been about ANY management position filled by a power-hungry jerk. I found PM to be, easily, the most valuable way for me to "manage". It was my job to keep track of the details the production folk didn't need on their shoulders, and it was my job to keep sales off of production's back. I got to set original expected timelines based on every other team manager's input and requirements, and then help them achieve these goals. I technically managed the production team, but I rarely had to do any more than direct my production managers, or fill in at another part of the team if we had a crunch time situation. Because I started in production, I could perform every task the production team did, albeit a little rusty, so it was easy to fill gaps in coverage when appropriate.
Sure, a whole lot of that is "facilitating", but that is what ALL management should be. A major reason management exists is there's a spot where the "project facilitator" (or any other manager) has to be able to pull rank. Sometimes, for business reasons, product features simply must be left out, or a new one patched in, and you need someone who can cause change without debate. A good PM isn't any happier than you are about it, and will have fought tooth and nail to keep to the planned schedule, but this is the perfect role to filter these types of mandatory changes through, rather than interrupt a production team's job: production.
Of course, whenever any manager pulls rank, it must be for a very, very good reason. I think it should be a requirement to briefly state why you're pulling rank to change the entire projected timeline, mothballing a project, or putting folks on an entirely new project. Details are optional, but a clear, solid reason behind the change is not. Unless you're getting shot at, putting out fires, or running an ER triage, there's always time to take 5 minutes to explain why your team's job just changed.
The first thing is that, as a manager of a small team, you do NOT have to meet a curve. That's only required at high levels with hundreds or thousands of employees in the pool. You DO have to rank your people in order and argue for them at a meeting with your peers. If you have a team of 6 or 8 people, I'll be very surprised if you don't know who your best person is--and who the worst one is. As a general rule, you ought to be able to rank your whole team in order from best to worst, with perhaps a few ties. (Generally, though, I didn't end up with ties.)
So together with your peers, you now try to slot 50 or so people into three rankings: 4.0 for the best 25%, 3.5 for the bulk of the people and 3.0 for the bottom 20%. (There is special handling for superstars at 4.5 and total losers at 2.5, but that's a post-process with no quotas.) The argument always revolves around strong 3.5 people who "ought" to be 4.0 and weak 3.5 people who "don't deserve" to be 3.0. Not a surprise; every manager overrates his/her own people. The pressure to meet a quota forces people to have hard arguments about how valuable each person's work really was. It can even help a manager see the importance of putting people on the highest-value tasks. At the end of it, there are typically two or three borderline individuals, but everyone else pretty much has the rating they actually earned. The General Manager takes the result up to the stack ranking at the next level, armed with appropriate arguments for the borderline folks.
One time, I worked on a project with high-visibility and lots of pressure. At review time, we told management we wanted to give about 50% 4.0 (instead of the usual 25%) and only one or two 3.0 reviews (out of a team of ~100). They pushed that up, and it was granted. We did exceptional work, so they let us blow out the curve. But it only happened once in 14 years.
What are the alternatives? Have a Union that gives everyone the same rewards regardless of the work he/she did? Doesn't seem like a winner to me.
So to answer the OP's question, how do you succeed in such a system, the answer is: work hard, do good work, help others who get stuck, and BE SEEN DOING IT. When your manager says "Jane is my best worker," you want all his/her peers to nod and say "yeah, Jane is great! She helps us out all the time!" When your manager says "Jack deserves a better rating," you don't want his/her peers to say "that lazy bum? He couldn't find his ass with both hands!" But most important of all is for your manager to actually see you as someone who gets stuff done. Whatever anyone tries to claim, most teams only have a few such people on them. They rarely go unrewarded.
--Greg
I'm a 'Softie. Have been for 3 years, so I've seen enough reviews and promotions to know that this system is crippling us from within. This is the quintessential suboptimal choice from game theory that's being made over and over a la John Nash. I worked on the infrastructure for a large project, but what that entails is that my work is always "under the hood". So even though the work I did was foundational and necessary for others, those who used my work to build "visible deliverables" got stack ranked higher than me in my team and sister teams last year. Needless to say, I wised up and started playing the game, since I know the underlying stuff much better, this year I built a slew of "visible deliverables", in the process at times undercutting some of my colleagues due to my intimate knowledge. So, this year, I've been indicated to be a top performer in our group. However, I know that I did it by gaming the system.
--Greg
You realize I'm perfectly at liberty to discriminate based on all criteria not related to 'protected classes'.
It's legal to 'discriminate' against idiots.
It's legal to 'discriminate' against crack heads/drunks etc (unless they get a very good shyster who claims they are 'disabled', then you are in a grey area.)
And when you can show a real hazard you can even 'discriminate' against some protected classes (e.g. Lead-acid battery producers can prevent women of child bearing age from working on their lines, unless baby proofed).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I'm not really sure who I work for. All I know is that if I show up on time and mail enough emails back to myself my bosses won't shout at me. At least I think they're my bosses...
All rites reversed 2010
Wait a second. Are you saying that having managers in a meeting 'brought work to a standstill'?
That's the exact opposite of my experience. 'When the managers away, real work gets done.'
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Since the criteria are relative rather than objective, you'd better be especially well-liked to avoid that bottom tier. Or sabotage. This type of evaluation system is an invitation for sabotage.
Always someone has power over you. The thing to consider is this: Is the power good, or bad?
Have the managers watch this video by Mary Poppendiek http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=MSYlqx1Yvqk. If the situation persists, then either accept it or leave.
There are a lot of negative aspects to Unions that force membership, excessively protect incompetent workers, raise the cost of doing business to the point where companies die or move. I think these are real and not unreasonable drawbacks. However, to me the major point of a Union, the base reason for it existing, the one last straw that no one should give up, is simply to force companies to pay a *living wage* We have come to expect as a given that health and safety are not compromised and I think that is largely due to a change in our society rather as much a change in law, although the two parallel each other. So I wonder, if the definition of employee, any employee is someone who can do work which is worth a living wage, what changes? Do jobs suddenly dry up? Or can the compromise between extremes allow all who work to just plain feed and cloth their children, maybe hope to have the same in retirement? Fear is a great modivator it is true, but is it the best? If so, then why not threaten kids in school, don't learn don't eat? It is the subtile undertone of our society now.
Of course, the solution may then be to increase the number of people who get a 1, but then at that 1/2 boundary you have the EXACT same problem.
No, the solution is to measure people against objective criteria, not by "ranking" them against each other.
I see no reason why the best performer amongst a bunch of losers should be rewarded in the same way as the top performer on average or exceptional teams.
Rank-based performance metrics are management failure, pure and simple. They are the product of "managers" who think "a good manager can manage anything, even something they know nothing about". They can't, because unless you know the field you have no way to apply objective metrics to the people on your team, and therefore no way to hire, fire, reward or punish anyone that isn't arbitrary and ultimately destructive.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
> Does your company do this?
No.
> What's the best way to survive this type of system?"
Work for a company that doesn't do this.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Wow, this really strikes a nerve. I worked as a financial systems developer for a large construction firm for close to a decade. They had a fantastic culture, it was a really great place to work; until our CIO was replaced by someone from GE who promptly implemented stack ranking. We literally wasted ~20 hours per person over a couple weeks working on (and refining) our "internal resumes". I would consider my ten person team to be very high performing, and at the end of the process, I was basically told that I was mediocre, and needed to step it up or risk serious repercussions. A few weeks later, and after demoralizing just about everyone in IT, she announced a "voluntary separation" program. Coincidentally, that same day, I pulled the trigger on another position (at a large software company) and I turned in my separation paperwork 15 minutes after I received the forms. I was denied for the program because I was an "exceptional performer". I asked how I could be both mediocre and exceptional at the same time, and never got a good answer. Of course I left anyway, and never looked back. The new CIO didn't make it a year.
In the Netherlands there is a legislation that every company with more than 50 employees (used to be 35) must have "workers council" that acts to create a third leg of the "table of power", the other two being the CEO (shareholders) and the Supervisory board.
If anyone is interested here is the full legislation http://www.ser.nl/~/media/Files/Internet/Talen/Engels/2011/2011_WorksCouncilsAct.ashx
This legislation also serves to cover all people that are not union members and their companies do not operate under the so-called "collective labour agreement" so that they can have a saying in the running of the enterprise.
As a former citizen of totalitarian state I was curious and fascinated so I applied and was voted in. I did not look into the history of how this councils came to be until one day a colleague told me that I enjoy special protection when it comes to sacking. I was rather appalled by this because in my opinion such protection might attract the wrong kind of people to the council (absolutely not the case in my company though) and generally rigs the game. I was told then that the protection was put into place on a later stage because many companies harassed the members of the council. Another colleague chipped in at this point saying that a company he had worked for deliberately divided itself somehow to companies with number of employees just below the required (see above). Indeed a culture had spread around that being in the council is not a good career move. I was rather shocked (we, east-Europeans, who lived under the previous regime, generally suffer from shocks of disillusionment because we saw the allegedly free world as an absolute antithesis to the totalitarian regime and might have idealized...hm, a bit) and decided to learn a bit more.
Historically, this legislation has been under attack with varying intensity more or less all the time. As you already suspect recently the intensity is relatively high, what with the last government trying to turn us into little USA (very roughly said, no offense meant, you know what I mean, it's just a short way of saying it). As far as I understand, the Dutch businessmen have declared the "polder model", which the Netherlands proudly displayed in the past, dead (briefly: it comes from the water management issues in the past and boils down - as far as I see it - to not allowing that one side in any social decision-making process takes all, as in "drinks the undiluted wine" while the others "drinks pure water". If the wine must be watered i.e. compromise must be achieved, then every party will take a bit of water in their wine). Such decisions are said to take longer to work out but they endure longer and do not crash and burn because the water drinkers start appealing from the next morning.
This news devastated me. I heard that it was because "it is not profitable enough" or "not competitive enough", I even heard not too long ago that the workers councils cost jobs. Oh, the things we hear from people with vested interests...I came to the Netherlands because of this kind of social contracts, because of the yet unsurpassed "liberty-package" as I call it, because, believe it or not, I saw the episode of Cosmos back then, behind the wall, called "Travelers in space and time" where I learned that there is a country in which famous person could say "The world is my country, science is my religion" by the time of the Galileo trial. I think all this is part of the national capital of the Netherlands; very precious thing. Why someone wants to do away with it is beyond comprehension. Can anyone seriously (and without agenda) claim that the social contracts were the reason for the economic meltdown? Not competitive? Seriously? Can I, please, have Mr and Ms Cheap labor come to live here and pay Dutch prices and then let's compete on the labour market! Please! Is the solution to poverty to bring the rest of the world to its level?
It maybe anecdota
It is fascinating how many of you don't follow more closely what is going on in Somalia which teaches you what happens when there is no functioning government of any kind.
Lets take the Somali pirates for example: the ransoms they obtain are communal property, people on their base get a cut just for being quiet, in effect the fruit of the pirate's labour is socialized amongst the community.
In tribal societies comunal property is normally the statuos quo and they would laugh at you by suggesting that every person should have stuff of their own property.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The quiet overachiever only gets rewarded if their team lead goes to bat for them, because nobody else even knows their name.
Also, the quiet overachiever on a team of overachievers still gets a 2.0 in a forced ranking system.
Performance review is trick used by HR to keep the flock together
Casteism
When a fairly large group of assessors assess an even larger group of direct reports, then in a "normal year", the OUTCOME will be a stacked rank. (Normal year = No recessionary trends, marked employee attrition etc) So seeing a pattern of stacked ranking should be just a way for the HR/administration team to confirm whether their initiatives in administering assessments are OK or not. Instead if each and every supervisor tries to fit his direct reports into an order, then it is tantamount to cooking the books. Unfortunately, almost all supervisors think that they are god's gift to the company and they have to "eff"up their reports. It gets worse if there is an announced quota of money to go around within the department as salary etc. OK