When I was young, I used to joke that our management team needed a ManagementBase in the same way we had a KnowledgeBase to capture things we learned(1). As I got older...well, yeah, technology management seems to repeat the same mistakes, over and over.

Like stack ranking.

I was at Microsoft through the rise and (reported) fall of stack ranking. It looks good on paper, if somewhat inhuman -- "Oh, we're going to encourage our worst performers to improve or we'll replace them". In practice, it's so mired in unintended consequences that you'd be better off rolling ten-sided dice and firing everybody who rolls a 1. (From memory, Microsoft's stack rank directly lined up with a 20/70/10 policy where you heaped rewards on the top 20%, accepted the middle 70%, and aggressively managed the bottom 10%.)

Team managers went through this exercise once or twice a year. My group had about 40 people in it so, when the time came up, the team managers disappeared into conference rooms where they put a number next to everybody in the group, from 1 to 40. I was never in the room but I watched my gentle manager go into that room looking troubled and come out looking like he'd just read "Where The Wild Ferns Grow". Every single time.

And this created abnormal dynamics in the team. It turns out that stack ranking doesn't really motivate you to do your job better. The way Microsoft had implemented it, it motivated you to do things that were, generally, unrelated to your job BUT that benefitted your manager's peers. These were the things that would help you when it came down to a question of whether YOU or SOMEBODY ELSE got moved up the ranking -- if your manager's peers didn't know you or you hadn't helped them through the year, they were not going to care.

So, kudos, Brian Birmingham.

https://www.pcgamer.com/blizzard-fires-wow-classic-lead-after-he-protests-employee-evaluation-policy/

#management #technology #HR #StackRanking #GE #JackWelchWasAnAwfulLeader #reviews #people