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The sad thing is that the managers participating in these sorts of activities are unable to connect cause & effect. For example, if you rank individual employe
by danek 10y ago
The sad thing is that the managers participating in these sorts of activities are unable to connect cause & effect.
For example, if you rank individual employees then you destroy teamwork and incentivise all sorts of behavior that's bad for the company. It hurts morale, lowers productivity, increases employee turnover, increases hiring costs, lowers product quality, etc. It's a vicious cycle. And for someone who thinks it's a good idea to rank employees, these effects will simply confirm their beliefs that they need to rank employees.
Why does this happen? In the best case, it's a misguided attempt at career development. Or it's a way to figure out who to give more money and who to fire. Usually there is an element of fear: "I'm afraid my employees will not work hard unless there is the threat of a bad performance review".
To be fair, ranking employees does sound like a good idea if you don't know anything about humans. Most management activities are really just things that sound like a good idea (but fall apart under scrutiny). To be more fair, bad management is the norm, so no one has good mentors and role models. "If everyone else does this, then it can't be wrong." It's another vicious cycle.
- abraae 10y agoWithout ranking of some form, how do you identify the best people and reward them accordingly?
- quanticle 10y agoThat's exactly the problem. You're assuming that there is a single metric of "best" that you can rank people on. Even in programming, there are a number of separate skills: algorithm design, systems architecture, debugging, etc. Is a programmer who can sit down with an unfamiliar codebase and be productive with it in a week's time "better" than a programmer who is great at designing scalable systems from scratch? You need a mix of technical skills, not just a team overloaded with whatever people and skills a particular manager finds interesting. I think the biggest problem with your statement is that you're trying to identify the best people, rather than the best teams.
- abraae 10y agoI'm just posing the question. We can assume that the HR people at Goldman Sachs are not idiots. There was no obviously better system or they and many other companies would have used it. So lets say you identify the best team (itself a flawed concept - is sales more important than development, since they bring in the cash?) , then do you propose to treat everyone in the team the same? What about the new hire into the team who is struggling and should never have been a developer in the first place? What about the lazy stoner? What about the girl genius who reworked the problem areas over a weekend? Should they all get the same raise because they're on the same team?
- metaphorm 10y agoyou're spending an awful lot of time worrying about hypothetical people. your argument would be more convincing if you started to explain your reasoning rather than just throwing out a list of cliches of "undesirables" in your opinion.
- abraae 10y agoI was responding to a post that appeared to claim that all we have to do is identify the best teams, not the best people. These hypotheticals are to illustrate that that doesn't work.
- metaphorm 10y agook, lets keep playing the hypothetical persons game then. the lazy stoner? sure he smokes up at home and comes in to the office late basically every day. he's also an outside the box thinker who pioneers the use of new technology on his team, and is an expert debugger who can view problems from angles his colleagues haven't considered yet and maybe never would have. the new hire who's struggling? its not her technical ability thats lacking, she's just going through some shit in her personal life. her father is sick with cancer and she's splitting her time between her tiny New York apartment where she lives with 3 roommates and her parent's house in the suburbs where she helps her overwhelmed mother catch up on laundry and sweeping the floors at home. the girl genius who reworked the problem over the weekend? well she's an arrogant workaholic and constantly talks down to her coworkers and drains the morale of the team. she spends a lot of time thinking about ways to make herself look better to the boss and eagerly takes full credit for projects she collaborated on with 5 other people, but she doesn't mention that at her quarterly review meetings. you wanna keep going with this game?
- visarga 10y agoYou can apply selection when you form a new team for a new project. Then you select the best people for that project. Ranking scores are unidimensional, absolute evaluations of people. They can be abused by adding penalties based on frivolous criteria. In China, Ali Baba and others have created a ranking for regular population, called the "social credit". If you make friends with someone who has a low rank score, your own score will be penalized (they want to control who people make friends with and socially isolate people by descoring them). Also, if you watch too many American movies instead of Chinese. These scoring systems (and even Google's Page Rank) pervert the normal behavior of people.
- mcintyre1994 10y agoKlout was attempting a social ranking too with eg Twitter, not sure what happened to them but I assume it didn't catch on.
- UVB-76 10y agoOn the latter point, I think this will become more prevalent in the future, and has really interesting applications in displacing trust as a dependency in interpersonal interactions. Once we have more accurate profiles on individuals, and the profiles are shared more widely, you could make much more informed decisions about who you want to share public spaces, interact, work, live, or even enter into relationships with.
- craigyk 10y agomaybe partial ranking, like a heap? Only try to identify your top 10%, and do so by peer voting?
- barrkel 10y agoA good team has people with a mix of skill sets. The "best" people depend on your choice of skill, but multiple skills are required to excel and it's almost certain no one person will be best at all. Sometimes it's the gestalt of the team that works well; sometimes there's simply no easy way to isolate contribution.
- Tactic 10y agoBy not rewarding based on "the best" (which implies comparison) and instead based on performance. Set realistic and definable targets for such rewards and follow through. Additionally, communicate these targets clearly. Allow for additional rewards for team performance. I believe this maximizes the motivation you get from rewards both on an individual and team level creating the "best" you can get. Although, realize, studies have shown rewards generally don't impact performance greatly.
- simula67 10y agoI would like to make your point clearer because I think there isn't sufficient visibility of this problem in our community. The problem here is 'stack ranking' or 'curve fitting'. The assumption behind this model is that the quality of workers you have will mirror a bell curve ( for example, 10% will be poor, 80% will be average and 10% will be excellent ). The management tries to identify these individuals and assign them ratings based on this assumption. Your promotion, bonus and pay hike is based on these ratings. The problem with this approach is that no matter how well you perform there are only 10% 'very high' ratings available. This means that if someone else succeeds, then the chances for your success has diminished. This creates an incentive for you to sabotage others at work and pitches team mates against one another.
- PascalsMugger 10y agoSo in a vacuum, yes people probably perform on a bell curve. But that bell curve is self-aware and will start sabotaging itself if you incentivize it to.
- basseq 10y agoI worked at a place that stack-ranked, and we didn't have this problem. It was typically pretty clear and well-accepted (by both leadership and peers) that high performers were in fact the best people. In a big enough company, you can't sabotage other people (because you might not work closely with them) and it's pretty transparent when you do so. The problems I saw were threefold: 1) Bad Managers - Far and away #1. The example of a manager leaving the ratings meeting comes to mind. Conversely, a manager who just has it out for you: that's the sabotage that I saw on more than one occasion (but that's not exclusive to stack ranking). [Edit: also worth noting that word got around and bad managers were avoided, so the system eventually would self-correct.] 3) Comparing Stretch Roles - Pure performance is tough. I never thought we gave enough credence to great people doing good in tough roles vs. good people doing great in easy roles. 3) Comparing Different Impact - We got to the point where we were trying to compare developers with business analysts. The former would have outcomes like "developed 75 test cases" and the latter would be "convinced the CEO to invest $1M". It didn't help that the business managers were better at quantifying outcomes than IT managers. (See #1.)