I often tell struggling grad students a joke that was told to me when I was a struggling grad student. "What do you call the guy who graduated at the bottom of

I often tell struggling grad students a joke that was told to me when I was a struggling grad student. "What do you call the guy who graduated at the bottom of his medical school class? Answer: You call him "doctor"" The point being, no matter how difficult or important the job, performance across the range of people doing that job will be more or less normally distributed. 50% of surgeons will be in either the second or third quartile, eg they will be closer to "average" than brilliant. A quarter will be in the first quartile, ie mediocre. Obviously this is just a feature of how statistics (and human performance) works. It is not necessarily anything to be worried about, and in fact unless those in the first quartile are "incompetent" (which I am using as an absolute and not a relative term meaning "incapable of doing the job") there's nothing that can or should be done about it. If you immediately fired those in the first quartile, all you would be doing is a) firing people capable of doing their jobs, and b) establishing a new first quartile with different people in it.