I worked on organizations with and without forced bell curves. Coincidentally, the 2 places I worked that had a stack ranking performance review did have a toxic environment. The other 2 didn't have a stack rank, and was not toxic. Is it correlation or causation? 310k
Hopefully your projects don't need anything collaboration if you stack rank
This fucking nails it. Nothing like ensuring your organizational contributors ditch any org wide goals by sticking them into the Hunger Games.
I agree that a full stack ranking of an entire org would create toxicity between managers, and it would be passed down to ICs. But there is no way to avoid some type of stack ranking. HR limits the number of promotions allowed (often driven by budgetary constraints) and the number of people allowed to receive the top performance grades. These limitations will force managers to do at least a mental stack ranking of employees to see who makes the cut now and who has to wait.
This practice is usually common in “hire to fire” corporate cultures, definitely toxic.
I'm somewhat new to tech, where the two companies I worked for did have stack rank. Which famous tech companies DONT have a stack ranking?
Yes, if it is done once every 5 years or so for weeding out the coasters, it's not supposed to be a yearly ritual.
Twice a year here.
Yeah. It really fucked C1 up bad. I don’t even recognize the company anymore
Stack ranking was born out of Jack Welch's theory that the bottom 10% of the company needs to be let go annually. Too many bad assumptions make up this idea. Stack ranking has been shown to actively kill any innovation culture a company has. It's great for blue chip businesses where there's no real growth left and execs just want to maintain bottom line to keep shareholders happy.
You know every company has stack rank right? Some are just more implicit.
Implicit is the word - this changes things
Stack ranking follows the principle of creating unhealthy competition amongst employees who then fight with each other to win some of the artificially created scarcity. Artificial scarcity is created for virtual goods like Position, Title and 2% additional increment.