I work for a company with stack ranking. and was forced to stack-rank my team. The success of this system depends on 3 things a ) qualifications of the manager

I work for a company with stack ranking. and was forced to stack-rank my team. The success of this system depends on 3 things a ) qualifications of the managers doing stack ranking b ) perception management of the employees being ranked. c ) quality (impact and sophistication) of the projects people are doing ( a ) is hard to come by in middle-management ranks (because very few talents individuals stay in those ranks -- they either move up, or move out). ( b ) perception management (essentially ability to blame others, to create inflated perception of your contribution) -- is a horrible thing to do for a technology company who benefits from having introverts who just love to program. Those will often fall the victim to the 'smoke and mirror specialists'. ( c ) can simply be traced to poor up stream decisions/conditions. ---- - But how to actually deal with accumulated incompetency (as it happens especially in companies that must grow very fast) ? --- - The answers I heard here would work but in combination a) stack-rank projects b) within project evaluate performance of project's stakeholders/initiators in addition to the project team c) stack-rank all employees by using peer-and-outsider model that takes up 40% of the overall rank (so that if an employee has excellent enteprise impact, but an incompetent manager, as noted earlier, -- he/she will not be totally dependent on that manager's score)... And that also builds up better team work.