Largely you're still ranking your performers from top to bottom, so it's a matter of placing the line at the bottom in the right place to get the desired percen

Largely you're still ranking your performers from top to bottom, so it's a matter of placing the line at the bottom in the right place to get the desired percentage. Even then there was still a lot of debate among department managers around people on the borderline least effective category. There were usually very clear outliers who were definitely LE (people clearly coasting, people who didn't show up to work regularly), and sometimes that was enough. Other times managers did have to push each other to be brutally honest about those who were borderline, essentially asking, "If you fired this person and got a replacement, would the replacement be more effective than the current person within 6 months?" Keep in mind it was never a hard quota, though in my case at amzn I did have a few times where the GM (so manager of ~1500 org) pushed back and said not enough people were in LE for our department, in which case a few borderline people did unfortunately have to get put into LE.