Performance appraisals should aim at weeding out the bottom ten percent and bringing in fresh talent.
Did you know that performance appraisals in many large companies around the world have a restriction? No assessor can rate all his people normal and above. Some have to be classified below par. If you don't do this, someone else in HR will, and you will be considered less than competent.
There is a fundamental realization ignored by managers during performance evaluation about living beings -"Throw a stone and you can predict where it will fall; but throw a stone at a dog-and you may not know where to run for cover!" Living beings cannot be neatly fitted into normal curves, especially when the population size is small. Yet, this is what company after company is doing. `Tell me a better way', they would say. Managers do not have the heart to identify bad performers in their division. Even if performance is good, we need to weed out the bottom 10% and bring in fresh talent, else we will become ingrown.
Somewhere in the midst of a mediocre management, bosses rate their subordinates excellently, although there has been no performance to substantiate the rating. Sometimes into all this, someone reads the GE approach of force fitting people into the bell curve of the normal distribution. "Even McKinsey, you know, gets rid of the tail every year!" they say. And thus it is-one more unperceptive corporate abdicates its responsibility to set goals, evaluate performance, and determine not only what has been achieved, but also what assets have been gained in terms of the skill of its people. |
