Another noggin’ floggin’ by Kimberly M. Wiefling, M.S.
One of the most distasteful duties I’ve performed as a project leader was to rank the people on my team, from best to worst performing, during an annual appraisal process. This is akin to ranking the usefulness of different kinds of music – it’s highly dependent on the music’s intended purpose, and subject to the taste of the person judging the music.
This so-called “forced stack ranking” is something I resisted at first, but regrettably I caved in and did what was asked of me. Afterwards I went home and took a shower to wash the stench of the whole experience off me. This was many years ago, before I developed the courage to overturn such unproductive practices, as I did later in my career when I championed abolishing performance appraisals at one company. (Don’t worry, it wasn’t a free-for-all. We replaced evaluations with respectful two-way dialogues every quarter between managers and employees to mutually assess results and align future actions with company goals.)
Simplistically, forced ranking works like this:
- Make a list of people in a team, department or organization.
- Place the names in order of perceived performance, from highest to lowest.
- Turn this ranking into some kind of “grade”, which is shared with the employee:
- Reward the top performers by using this ranking as a basis of distributing raises or bonuses.
- Punish, humiliate, sanction, or fire the bottom 5 – 10%, presumably to make room for more top performers.
I’m sure you can already begin to imagine some of the hazards of this system and the negative impact on individual and team performance. Please don’t misunderstand me. It’s not that I think that objective performance evaluation is impossible, or that performance management is evil. As a scientist I understand that the relative contributions of individual employees can be measured objectively, but it’s often very difficult, time-consuming and expensive to do so accurately. As a professional familiar with neuroscience and the psychology of human behavior, I’ve learned that our ability to judge the performance of other people is flawed – tainted by perceptual biases beyond our control, and often beyond our awareness. But it’s my role as a leader that causes me the greatest concern regarding this widespread practice. As a leader my job is to optimize the results of a team, not merely select top-performing individuals. If you stack ranked the best musicians in the world and had them play together you wouldn’t get the best band. If you stack ranked the best politicians in the world and built a team of them you would not get the best government. And stack ranking the best individual performers won’t give you the best team.Continue reading
