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This entire premise, that people are usually more or less equally capable at a given task, doesn’t correspond to my experience at all, across several industries

This entire premise, that people are usually more or less equally capable at a given task, doesn’t correspond to my experience at all, across several industries. It seems ideological, or philosophical or based on limited industries. It can also be dehumanizing to imply people can’t get any result from trying hard, or that everyone has equal abilities. I’m just not exactly sure why you are saying this, what it is based on, and what the goal is here.

jt2190 7y ago
... [P]eople are usually more or less capable at a given task... True. But few if any “jobs” held by knowledge workers are just a single, repetitive task, over and over, like Demming was observing when he studied productivity on assembly lines. So while you may find a team has variation among members when looking at a single skill, as a manager it’s really hard to pin down the success of the team to one thing done by one person. In fact, from a management point of view, “success” is often “we got the job done” and not “everything was done perfectly”, so a team member who does one or two things really well is treated more or less like an outlier, and their work averages out.[1] Unless... Unless the manager has unwittingly pitted the members of the team against each other, in order to find the “top performer”! This will reduce productivity of the team overall as they waste time defending against each other. A net loss overall. Don’t get me wrong, there are times when competition is healthy, but quite often it’s applied as a kind of micro-optimization that doesn’t really benefit the organization overall. (Many orgs have enough money to allow this nonsense, unfortunately.) [1] Try and write a job description for someone on your team, and you’ll quickly realize how complicated it is to even know what skills are key, which are nice to have, etc.
kqr 7y ago
There's an important distinction to make which I'm not sure I've successfully communicated: when I'm saying there generally is no "statistically significant" difference, I'm not saying everyone performs at the same level. There can be huge variations in performance between people. But this variation tends to be internally consistent. You don't have one or two workers that perform multiple standard deviations away from the mass. Think of it as drawing people from a distribution with large variance. When assigning bonuses to individuals, you're looking for statistical anomalies, i.e. you want to find that one person that appears to be drawn from a completely different distribution. That is what is very rare. Large variation in performance but without any statistical anomalies still means everyone is performing "within the systems natural boundaries." There's no reason to suspect someone comes at it from a completely different angle. That said, of course you want to minimise the variation of your system. If nothing else because it makes it easier for you to find the true outliers. But you don't reduce variance by giving raises to the top performers -- that will, at the very best, make them perform better, thus increasing variance further. Better try to reduce variance by bringing the other people up, which requires much more involved management than just giving more money to the ones with the high numbers.
- andrekandre 7y ago
  > Better try to reduce variance by bringing the other people up, which requires much more involved management than just giving more money to the ones with the high numbers. yes, bringing people up that are not doing as well, has in my (anecdotal of course) experience, resulted in huge overall gains for all-round team performance (people share info with each other, help each other, are more motivated etc) i would add, that unfortunately, the trend seems to be in the opposite direction...

jt2190 7y ago

... [P]eople are usually more or less capable at a given task... True. But few if any “jobs” held by knowledge workers are just a single, repetitive task, over and over, like Demming was observing when he studied productivity on assembly lines. So while you may find a team has variation among members when looking at a single skill, as a manager it’s really hard to pin down the success of the team to one thing done by one person. In fact, from a management point of view, “success” is often “we got the job done” and not “everything was done perfectly”, so a team member who does one or two things really well is treated more or less like an outlier, and their work averages out.[1] Unless... Unless the manager has unwittingly pitted the members of the team against each other, in order to find the “top performer”! This will reduce productivity of the team overall as they waste time defending against each other. A net loss overall. Don’t get me wrong, there are times when competition is healthy, but quite often it’s applied as a kind of micro-optimization that doesn’t really benefit the organization overall. (Many orgs have enough money to allow this nonsense, unfortunately.) [1] Try and write a job description for someone on your team, and you’ll quickly realize how complicated it is to even know what skills are key, which are nice to have, etc.

kqr 7y ago

There's an important distinction to make which I'm not sure I've successfully communicated: when I'm saying there generally is no "statistically significant" difference, I'm not saying everyone performs at the same level. There can be huge variations in performance between people. But this variation tends to be internally consistent. You don't have one or two workers that perform multiple standard deviations away from the mass. Think of it as drawing people from a distribution with large variance. When assigning bonuses to individuals, you're looking for statistical anomalies, i.e. you want to find that one person that appears to be drawn from a completely different distribution. That is what is very rare. Large variation in performance but without any statistical anomalies still means everyone is performing "within the systems natural boundaries." There's no reason to suspect someone comes at it from a completely different angle. That said, of course you want to minimise the variation of your system. If nothing else because it makes it easier for you to find the true outliers. But you don't reduce variance by giving raises to the top performers -- that will, at the very best, make them perform better, thus increasing variance further. Better try to reduce variance by bringing the other people up, which requires much more involved management than just giving more money to the ones with the high numbers.

andrekandre 7y ago
> Better try to reduce variance by bringing the other people up, which requires much more involved management than just giving more money to the ones with the high numbers. yes, bringing people up that are not doing as well, has in my (anecdotal of course) experience, resulted in huge overall gains for all-round team performance (people share info with each other, help each other, are more motivated etc) i would add, that unfortunately, the trend seems to be in the opposite direction...