4 ms·

I like this part : > " Mayer also favored a system of quarterly performance reviews, or Q.P.R.s, that required every Yahoo employee, on every team, be ranked

by aikah 12y ago

I like this part : > " Mayer also favored a system of quarterly performance reviews, or Q.P.R.s, that required every Yahoo employee, on every team, be ranked from 1 to 5. The system was meant to encourage hard work and weed out underperformers, but it soon produced the exact opposite. Because only so many 4s and 5s could be allotted, talented people no longer wanted to work together; " Can somebody talk about his experience in the same conditions?

chiph 12y ago
Look up MiniMsft's blog -- he talked a lot about stack/ranking at Microsoft and the effect it had on the business. It wasn't a positive, let's just say that.
- hga 12y ago
  Yeah, I learned, probably from it, that that's exactly one of the results from this sort of stack ranking. At the extreme, it's almost impossible to assemble a "dream team", tiger team or whatever because absent sustained political cover, some of them will have to be assigned a 1 or 2, and be shown the door or otherwise have their career zapped.
  - vonmoltke 12y ago
    Raytheon has a four-bin(Far exceeds, Exceeds, Meets, and needs Improvement) ranking system that, while officially not a stack-ranking system, unofficially is because managers are under significant pressure to have their sections roughly meet corporate's expected rating distribution. The system is not a total clusterfuck because the "I" category, which gets you put on a Performance Improvement Plan, is allowed to have nobody assigned. A manager still needs to respect the E and F targets, though, so awesome sections end up screwing people over and mediocre sections end up rewarding people who don't deserve it.
    - redstripe 12y ago
      How can someone far exceed expectations more than once or twice. Aren't the managers just bad at judging expectations at that point?
      - xyahoo 12y ago
        I think it means "far exceeds the expectations at his current role". If you get several FEs, then it's time for a promotion.
      - VLM 12y ago
        In a political organization there's no problem with repeated "we were frat buddies in college", "we have fun going golfing together", "I've never met anyone who kisses up that much", etc. In practice you see it applied in very large teams with team wide metrics. Like 1000 people in a call center. The guy who hacks the system or gets assigned to a special team that naturally results in better results, can consistently win every time.
HillRat 12y ago
Fixed-distribution stack ranking is bad for precisely the reason pointed out -- because of differences between team missions, personnel, and capabilities, the values are basically scale-free when compared across an organization. It also means that employees, particularly at the upper management level, are graded relative to factors that are exogenous to their performance (if you do a great job running a declining or static business unit, you're likely to take a hit relative to an executive doing a worse job in a better sector). Rank-and-yank arguably worked well at GE because Welch was dealing with a large, unwieldy, and poor-performing conglomerate that had a lot of room for workforce reduction. But as the company got leaner and more effective, it got rid of the practice, and it's unclear why tech companies -- which one assumes haven't had time to get lazy and complacent -- jumped on the bandwagon. In fact, theoretically, if you're constantly cutting the bottom 10-20% of performers, and the quality distribution of new hires remains constant, at some point you should have pulled up the overall quality of the organization. The fact that you can't create a perfect organization by constantly cutting the lowest quantiles suggests that either something's wrong with the ranking systems used (which there is!), or that the practice has deleterious effects on retention, behavior, and morale (which it does!). Practically, this means that, as a manager, you get really good at piling up deadwood until the order comes down to swing the axe -- far easier to keep a few window-seat employees around to satisfy the Layoff Gods than to go to war every time you do your QPRs. You might also coordinate with lateral colleagues to move good employees around so you can keep them in the game.
- Domenic_S 12y ago
  The craziness is in the application. Across an entire company, sure, a normal distribution curve is probably reasonable to expect. But they make you take that curve and apply it at the team level, which makes no sense.
Marazan 12y ago
Stack ranking is one of those organisational things that so clearly has no value that it bogles my mind that companies adopt it.
- q2 12y ago
  and managers like it.
  - bsg75 12y ago
    because they can reduce their decision making to a spreadsheet.
- VLM 12y ago
  Define your metrics based on favoritism, calculate your numeric metrics based on favoritism, implement "difficult management employment decisions" based solely on numbers. Whats not to love?

by aikah 12y ago

chiph 12y ago

Look up MiniMsft's blog -- he talked a lot about stack/ranking at Microsoft and the effect it had on the business. It wasn't a positive, let's just say that.

hga 12y ago
Yeah, I learned, probably from it, that that's exactly one of the results from this sort of stack ranking. At the extreme, it's almost impossible to assemble a "dream team", tiger team or whatever because absent sustained political cover, some of them will have to be assigned a 1 or 2, and be shown the door or otherwise have their career zapped.
- vonmoltke 12y ago
  Raytheon has a four-bin(Far exceeds, Exceeds, Meets, and needs Improvement) ranking system that, while officially not a stack-ranking system, unofficially is because managers are under significant pressure to have their sections roughly meet corporate's expected rating distribution. The system is not a total clusterfuck because the "I" category, which gets you put on a Performance Improvement Plan, is allowed to have nobody assigned. A manager still needs to respect the E and F targets, though, so awesome sections end up screwing people over and mediocre sections end up rewarding people who don't deserve it.
  - redstripe 12y ago
    How can someone far exceed expectations more than once or twice. Aren't the managers just bad at judging expectations at that point?
    - xyahoo 12y ago
      I think it means "far exceeds the expectations at his current role". If you get several FEs, then it's time for a promotion.
    - VLM 12y ago
      In a political organization there's no problem with repeated "we were frat buddies in college", "we have fun going golfing together", "I've never met anyone who kisses up that much", etc. In practice you see it applied in very large teams with team wide metrics. Like 1000 people in a call center. The guy who hacks the system or gets assigned to a special team that naturally results in better results, can consistently win every time.

HillRat 12y ago

Fixed-distribution stack ranking is bad for precisely the reason pointed out -- because of differences between team missions, personnel, and capabilities, the values are basically scale-free when compared across an organization. It also means that employees, particularly at the upper management level, are graded relative to factors that are exogenous to their performance (if you do a great job running a declining or static business unit, you're likely to take a hit relative to an executive doing a worse job in a better sector). Rank-and-yank arguably worked well at GE because Welch was dealing with a large, unwieldy, and poor-performing conglomerate that had a lot of room for workforce reduction. But as the company got leaner and more effective, it got rid of the practice, and it's unclear why tech companies -- which one assumes haven't had time to get lazy and complacent -- jumped on the bandwagon. In fact, theoretically, if you're constantly cutting the bottom 10-20% of performers, and the quality distribution of new hires remains constant, at some point you should have pulled up the overall quality of the organization. The fact that you can't create a perfect organization by constantly cutting the lowest quantiles suggests that either something's wrong with the ranking systems used (which there is!), or that the practice has deleterious effects on retention, behavior, and morale (which it does!). Practically, this means that, as a manager, you get really good at piling up deadwood until the order comes down to swing the axe -- far easier to keep a few window-seat employees around to satisfy the Layoff Gods than to go to war every time you do your QPRs. You might also coordinate with lateral colleagues to move good employees around so you can keep them in the game.

Domenic_S 12y ago
The craziness is in the application. Across an entire company, sure, a normal distribution curve is probably reasonable to expect. But they make you take that curve and apply it at the team level, which makes no sense.

Marazan 12y ago

Stack ranking is one of those organisational things that so clearly has no value that it bogles my mind that companies adopt it.

q2 12y ago
and managers like it.
- bsg75 12y ago
  because they can reduce their decision making to a spreadsheet.
VLM 12y ago
Define your metrics based on favoritism, calculate your numeric metrics based on favoritism, implement "difficult management employment decisions" based solely on numbers. Whats not to love?