This article triggered real world very tangible and pragmatic 1st hand experience.
The idea of forced ranking with a “firing” quota has theoretical benefits but in my experience it doesn’t, or is at least very difficult to, translate to sustained improvement. To be fair a select example where it does sorta work would be NFL training camp. A lot of people get cut from the roster while somehow trying to build team cohesion. I’m no football expert but I imagine the good staffs do their best (with long hours and hard work) to make the decision based on hours of film analytics vs subjective shooting from the hip. It would be a hard process to do in a quality way and football has a more controlled and defined set of specific visceral criteria.
In this response I’ll offer “real world” in business and take a particular time when I was immersed in the process and sincerely trying to work the “up or out” program. I was a Sales Director at AT&T (about 125 employees in the organization I was responsible for) when we implemented the idea — AND we were copying not just “GE” but others such as ENRON who at the time was a darling of Wall Street. As fate would have it ENRON was one of my largest clients and I was meeting with people up to and briefly including Jeff Skilling. I got a 1st hand experience over a period of several years. Here are the flaws as I experienced them, my last point I consider to be the most important:
1. The forced ranking became a substitute for authentic leadership. If a team culture is truly healthy performance, motivation and dealing with high-performance and non-performance needs to be a systemic consistent behavior in the soul of the organization without external slogans or imposed dictates from outside the team. “Forced” does not equal “data based authentic” rigorous leadership.
2. The forced ranking I saw was full of artificial defects. Different employees have different circumstances and to capture systemically the comprehensive verifiable objective data takes a lot of difficult and arduous work. The output “numbers” have a lot of variables underneath. To capture true performance in the spirit of quality improvement requires including circumstances, training, coaching, support, productivity displayed in service to organizational goals, on and on.
3. It sounds like it would be an objective, even handed, approach. It’s not. I did fire 10% only to go to meetings where peers had “fired” 2-3% mostly by a soft path of attrition. Top performers lost to competition got included in their 3% turn-over. It’s easy for ranking to be inconsistent.
4. It tends to be fear based vs. inspirational based and a lot of energy goes into maneuvering and manipulating for ranking vs. serving the business. This does not build teams. There is an old saying in basketball — best 5 beats 5 best (meaning a team of 5 working as a team can outperform 5 stars playing as individual prima donnas). Authentic inspired culture with calm but tough respectful data based feedback with authentic effort toward organizational objectives is hard, often very hard, to do. The push back I’m suggesting is that “fear” is toxic and grows like a cancer.
I’m not saying Sam Walton, Steve Jobs and Herb Kellerher built healthy organizations singing lullabies of Kumbaya but I worked extensively (over years) with Southwest Airlines and Walmart and the methods worked and were distinctively different than the ENRON or GE models. Count me as a skeptic about silver bullet solutions.
