The annual ritual of curve fitting employees, creating a performance bell curve is taxing and in a way, very counter to what it is supposed to achieve.
The very intent of creating a bell curve is "meritocracy" ! Identify and reward the people who are better than others, in terms of their alignment to org goals, their skills, capabilities and their ability to work with greater team !
So, say the organization asks the managers to identify Top 15% talent as well as Bottom 15% employees, obviously it becomes tough for managers to identify that bottom 15%. Some, a very few cases are obvious. But then it becomes difficult. The theory says, its all relative, so just stack rank and then do simple math.
So, I ve seen this tussle of getting the Bottom 15 %. And that pains me but does not surprise me.
However what surprises me is, managers, a lot of them, coming and saying I am OK with not identifying less than Top 15% even when they have "quota" to use, because folks , they think, are not really Top folks. The whole relativity theory goes for a toss at the TOP too.
So, bell curve, devised for rewarding top performers, in a way breeds mediocrity by pushing more and more people to the core of the curve from the both sides.
Its like a safe zone !
The very intent of creating a bell curve is "meritocracy" ! Identify and reward the people who are better than others, in terms of their alignment to org goals, their skills, capabilities and their ability to work with greater team !
So, say the organization asks the managers to identify Top 15% talent as well as Bottom 15% employees, obviously it becomes tough for managers to identify that bottom 15%. Some, a very few cases are obvious. But then it becomes difficult. The theory says, its all relative, so just stack rank and then do simple math.
So, I ve seen this tussle of getting the Bottom 15 %. And that pains me but does not surprise me.
However what surprises me is, managers, a lot of them, coming and saying I am OK with not identifying less than Top 15% even when they have "quota" to use, because folks , they think, are not really Top folks. The whole relativity theory goes for a toss at the TOP too.
So, bell curve, devised for rewarding top performers, in a way breeds mediocrity by pushing more and more people to the core of the curve from the both sides.
Its like a safe zone !
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