The Management Approach Guaranteed To Wreck Your Best People

We can see this beautiful tree from our bedroom window.  In fact, it’s so beautiful we call it the Beauty Tree.  It practically sings with vitality and life; in spring and summer its leaves are glossy green with health, and the patterns of sunlight falling through its branches create a kaleidoscopic display of jewel tones and velvety shadows. The reds and oranges of fall are so brilliant you can almost smell them. Even in winter, there’s a stark elegance to its naked form.
But it’s not symmetrical – one side is fuller than the other.  I suspect that when it was part of the forest, before its neighbors got cut down, it had access to more sunlight on one side, and so grew in that direction.
Its asymmetrical shape doesn’t make our tree less beautiful; in my eyes it adds to its unique charm.  Its shape has naturally arisen from the tree’s response to its circumstances: if we trimmed it to conform to some rigid, limited construct of perfection, it might look neater, but it wouldn’t be as beautiful – or as strong.
Which brings me to my actual point.  I read a great article by Fred Allen here on Forbes just now, about why Microsoft has lost its mojo over the past decade. (Fred’s article is a summary of an article in the latest Vanity Fair by Kurt Eichenwald.)  The main culprit seems to be a management technique called ‘stack ranking,’ a futile and destructive exercise in trying to make employees conform to a limited, rigid construct of perfection – and, in fact, ‘pruning’ them to fit.
Here’s how it works: with stack ranking every manager is forced to rank a certain percentage of his or her employees in each of four performance categories: ‘top,’ ‘good,’ ‘average,’ and ‘poor.’  So let’s say one team has 10 people who are rock stars, and are knocking it out of the park every single day – innovating like nobody’s business.  The manager has hired great people, given them the resources they need to succeed, supported and developed them consistently – it’s a superior leader and manager and a superior team.  And let’s say there’s another team of 10 that’s not so hot: they’re meeting their objectives, but just.  The manager is OK – not great, not terrible.  On both of those teams, 1 person would get a stellar performance review, 4 would get good reviews, 4 would get mediocre reviews, and 1 would get a really negative review.
Imagine you are on the fantastic team. What impact would it have on you to know that, no matter how amazingly well your whole team did – only 1 of you would get a performance review that reflects that?  Unless you are a very unusual person, it would be deeply demotivating, and it would almost certainly force your attention toward how to show that you’re better than your colleagues, and away from how you can support your colleagues and the team to succeed.
Human beings, like most everything other living thing on the planet, thrive in response to consistent support and the removal of obstacles.  Forcing them into artificial and arbitrary constraints is generally doomed to fail.
“Stack ranking” is only one example of this kind of wrong-headed management:  having every department head cut a prescribed percentage out of their spending to reduce costs is another.  Yet another is the weirdly well-regarded practice of refusing to consider job candidates who don’t have a particular scholastic or experiential pedigree (or assuming that those who do will be excellent hires).
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not suggesting a free-for-all.  If a tree has a dying branch, you should prune it off, so it doesn’t tax the tree’s resources, infect other branches, or fall on somebody’s head.  But if a tree is healthy, beautiful, growing well…don’t cut it up.  In your organization, clearly define what great performance looks like: support, develop and reward those who perform well (both individually and in teams).  When people don’t perform well, provide clear guidance about what’s expected, give them the chance to improve, and if they don’t – let them go.
I’d love to get your sense of why these mechanistic, artificially constructed management techniques are so popular – and what we can do to make them go away…