Low end performer may very well realize they are at risk and know to get resume in order and start looking. Nice when rotten fruit falls off the tree.
The situation i managed had people of different rank and experience. How do you rank them. Presumably you look at their job description and rank them against the average person of that rank. But not easy. Easy to identify stars. Under achievers are more problematic.
Everyone in their division knows who the underperformers are. You just have to work in the division.
I was re-writing the code for the “options desk” ar the Pacific Stock Exchange when my late blooming sexual hormones finally kicked in telling me, oh, by the way….
My management very wisely told me good bye. I luckily had a good friend who had been urging me to go to work as a private consultant and showed me the ropes, along with how to rearrange my life to keep my deeper drives for sex and professional satisfaction on somewhat cooperative tracks.
Some people NEED to be fired.
Well as long as everyone is patting themselves on the back:
Managers always had a problem with me. But my IT clients loved me. My goal was to always create business apps that made their life easier. So many times I had a client pop up and say “well, were’d John go? Why can’t John do it?”.
I did have an IN box that I put everything my manager wanted into. Then I would leave it alone for a month and then it was no longer important.
Just sayin’,
MS
I gave the pump seal company about a three or four month notice. Somewhere along that stretch, my boss called me into his office one day. He said “Every day, someone in the field calls me and says ‘Steve’s leaving? What am I going to do? He’s the only one I can ever get a straight answer from’”. Another time, he called me in and said how much he liked having me in the department because “I can drop a file on your desk, and never hear about it again, because it’s handled”. I suspect he was trying to say he wanted me to stay, but he would never say “stay” out loud. If he had, I would have said something along the lines of “Would I be accorded the tiniest bit of respect and consideration, or would I continue to work like a rented mule, while Tom spends most of his day over in marketing services shooting the breeze?” (Tom was the coworker who gave the boss a song and dance about how I should do his work for him, and the boss, complied, ordering me to do his work.)
Steve…doesn’t pay to be the “go-to guy”
My last boss was a young turk that was more busy-work than business.
I won him over one day in the monthly one-on-one meeting:
I told him, “You know, Joe, if I had your job I would be doing exactly the same thing.”
One of my managers had several new women employees whispering in her ear about how–I guess–unfiltered I was.
Finally I said to her, “Susan! Have you ever tried doing good for the sake of doing good?” From then on I would hear stories of her singing my praises.
I’m really not that great haha.
Faithfully,
MoneySlob
The consensus from those who have been in companies using stack ranking is that people understand that someone is going to be knifed, so they take every opportunity to make sure it isn’t them. You find “me against you”, rather than “we work together”, you find siloed workplaces, your find coworkers undermining each other and worse.
If you need a numerical target to tell you how many people are “under performers” then you’re a terrible manager, and probably should be one of the workers instead. A good manager knows who performs and who doesn’t, and if you’re holding on to some non-performers until “disappear day” you are an idiot.
It’s a terrible system, another artifact of how Jack Welch corrupted business in the country.
In the IT industry that services the minions with hopefully good business solutions, you never get an “A” grade, just "C"s and "F"s.
The plaintiffs won’t play their cards in these conditions. It is not lost on them to wait.
I’m reminded for the Peter Principle, a book from the ‘60s. It teaches that star employees tend to get promoted again and again. That continues until they reach a position they can’t handle. Then their star gets tarnished and they are stuck in that position for the rest of their career.
The Welch system might be intended to identify those people and get rid of them. In essence you put them out of their misery and encourage them to move on.