Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Kills Stack Ranking
Nerval's Lobster writes "Microsoft once demanded that its managers place their subordinates on a scale from 'top' to 'poor,' a practice that fueled some epic backstabbing within divisions. Last year, a Microsoft contractor with knowledge of the company's internal review processes told Slashdot that Microsoft was actively working to fix that system; just this week, the company announced that stack ranking was well and truly dead (and that's certainly one way to fix it). 'Lisa Brummel, head of human resources for the company, sent an e-mail to employees notifying them of the change today, according to my contacts,' ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley wrote. According to the memo, there are 'no more ratings,' 'no more curves,' and 'Managers and leaders will have flexibility to allocate rewards in the manner that best reflects the performance of their teams and individuals, as long as they stay within their compensation budget.' They're trying to encourage more teamwork and collaboration throughout the company. As we discussed on Saturday, Yahoo is adopting this method just as Microsoft is abandoning it."
Maybe Microsoft will be able to re-invent a better version of itself.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
And yet both companies will have the same outcome - continuing their long decline into irrelevant mediocrity. Maybe both companies should consider looking a little further up the management chain to discover what truly ails them.
A bunch of years ago a company I worked for was doing something similar.
They essentially demanded it be placed on a bell curve. So, in our group of 5 people, all of whom were good solid people who worked well together and got stuff built, management was insisting there be 1 awesome, 1 pretty good, 1 good, 1 needs work, and 1 terrible -- and that had nothing whatsoever to do with the individual strengths of the team, just some idiots vision of how these things should be managed. My manager didn't feel that anybody belonged below the top 1 or 2 rankings.
If you decide in advance that your ranking has to take on an artificial distribution, you end up with a really pointless management system which really just serves to give people with no knowledge of what really happens a nice easy to read (and often incorrect) metric.
It really does make for a pointless "management by inapplicable metrics" kind of culture. And so often it's all about making managements job easy and something they can point to the formulas -- and seems to offer zero insights into what is actually happening. The more companies blindly use metrics, the less they actually grasp what their organization is actually doing.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
OK we know from MS history they treated customers poorly. We know they treated mom & pop shops poorly. They treated the companies that make apps for them poorly. Now we find out they even treated the employees poorly. Honest question, did they ever treat anyone right? I mean besides the management figures making 7 figures. Wait, that might not even be true. Wow, sure am glad I never worked there.
I'm old, not dead. Well that's my 2 cents worth, your mileage may vary. I say what I think, not what you want to hear.
Yahoo is adopting it because it's a great way to get rid of dead weight, as long as it's used BRIEFLY. It's really not meant to be used in the long-term (as MS and several other have tried to). In the short-term, Yahoo will lose some dead weight. In the long-term, they'll get paranoia, indecisiveness, etc. (in short, a company culture of fear).
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
I think you glossed over my point. It's not these silly management initiatives which determine the outcome of a business's success but the core intelligence and culture of the business itself, particularly in its executives and management. Poorly-run companies are always latching on and off the the latest management fads because they lack core direction and competence.
...Yesterday's Solutions Tomorrow.
"I don't have to outrun the bear; I only have to outrun you."
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Yeah, if you know you want to lay off 20% of a large workforce, it makes sense to take some metrics-- including some subjective evaluation-- and develop a ranking of employees from "extremely valuable" to "a drain on company resources", and then cut the bottom 20%. Do that as a one-time thing, or even do a couple rounds in relatively short succession. That could work.
But if you make it part of the company culture, you're going to end up with a company of paranoid back-stabbers.
I work for a government-owned, contractor-operated lab where we are ranked 1..N, and it's not all that destructive. Why? Because there have been no significant raises in years! So, staff and management wastes months on performance reviews, then the results are put on file and never looked at. The end.