Vanity Fair had a very interesting article on "Microsoft's Lost Decade" and blames a lot of it on stank ranking.
"Eichenwald’s conversations reveal that a management system known as “stack ranking”—a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor—effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”
We had that system at Lockheed Martin.
ReplyDeleteHated it.
It was awful for managers too.
I remember sitting in "totem pole" meetings arguing with other managers about whose subordinates were the most superhuman. It became a referendum on the political skills of the managers, not the performance of the employees.