Stacked Ranking….just the words alone make my blood pressure spike. Not only is the name bad (does this sound like something your employees want to participate in?) but the process of stacked ranking is seriously flawed.
It’s a totally ineffective approach if you want to improve employee performance. While some may say that a model like this is needed to make decisions on where to cut if required, I would argue that a proper, individually focused performance management process will still give you better results to make that decision than a stacked ranking process. Otherwise, you are creating an environment where you have employees fighting for ratings.
With apologies to the WWE fans in the FOT house, I think of stacked ranking as an old school wrestling match where employees are pitted against each other to ensure they win. Employees and managers are being set up just like in a WWE match where Hulk Hogan or Macho Man Randy Savage wins over the Reaper or British Bulldogs. It essentially scripts an environment with winners and losers – the good guy gets the belt, and the bad guy, well, he gets hit with the chair.
Most importantly, stacked ranking has no place in employee development! I don’t need to know “who is the best” to effectively help employees’ development. In fact, that process is counterproductive. Who cares how they rank in any area? They may still need development, if not for this role, then definitely for the next one.
And keep in mind that rankings can also change year to year. One bad quarter should not send a quality employee packing. It’s much more cost effective to develop and turn an employee around than to lose their history and corporate memory, and have to recruit and retain a new one.
I’d argue too that stacked rankings are a good way to tick off your best hiring managers. With stacked ranking, what do you do when you have a record of hiring stars? Who gets the bottom ranking and is cast as the villain? For every champion they hire, do they need to start making sure they hire a villain so that they can have someone to send out the door if push comes to shove?
What happens when a manager has an employee who is a real workhorse – not yet the rising star – but they want to keep this person near the top? To do so, they are going to have to “play” with the rankings, which takes time away from actual employee development or coaching.
These are just a few issues I see with the process. I am very confident that this approach can very easily go bad and devolve into a cage match. By using stacked ranking to remove low performers, manager are going to be focused on how to rank their teams so they come out as the winner.
None of this does much to contribute to employee development or building a high performance workforce.
There are plenty of opinions out there about stacked ranking, so if you’d like to see other takes on this subject, you can check out the Raging Debates in HR Forum for insight from 10 experts (including FOT’s KD) and see the latest poll results where over 200 HR pros weighed in on the question.
Editor’s Note – Don’t Feed the Vendors is a special series at FOT. The goal of the DFTV? We get hammered
by third parties who want to write at FOT, so we give them a challenge. Write something cool and significant we can learn from/talk about inthe FOT style, and you can roll with the FOT crew. Try to sell our readership your product and/or provide a whitepaper, and we’ll openly mock your company in public for not understanding the DNA of our readership. Many inquire, few follow through once they learn they can’t post a workup of their latest “research”. For those who make the cut, we’ll offer up associate FOT membership as part of the Don’t Feed the Vendors stable.
Sean Conrad of Halogen Software is one of the ones who made the cut. Show him some love in the comments for being up to the challenge and not writing something that should be read on PBS.
Sean,
Seriously – have you ever worked in HR? I mean not as a vendor but in the trenches – wiping noses, tying shoes and zipping up coats!
First – your own link shoes that the 200 HR Pros – 75% believe that Stacked Ranking should be used in some capacity. 3 out of 4 HR Pros think their is merit in stacked ranking.
In terms of development – how should a company decide who they invest in and develop? Equally? A Players just love to be treaeted like everyone else – not!
Stacked rankings aren’t evil – bad HR Pros who use them as an easy way to manage performance are evil. Pros who are enlightened use them to drive results, motivate bottom feeders up or out and in the end raise the bar of top performers – not bring everyone to the middle.
Thanks for sharing your take – even if I don’t agree!
In the words of Knute Rockne: “The secret is to work less as individuals and more as a team. As a coach, I play not my eleven best, but my best eleven.”
Stacked rankings show you who your eleven best are. That doesn’t mean they work well together and create a more cohesive whole. The workplace is about teams and team work, not about individuals.
I have to agree with you Sean, sorry Tim. If 3 out of 4 HR Pros think stacked ranking is right, then 3 out of 4 HR Pros are wrong. 3 out of 4 probably think that current “best practices” are the way to go. That just means more of the same.
It’s time to start a new way of thinking. Start teaching your managers to be coaches. Let them build the team that’s going to take you to the championship. When the time comes that cuts have to be made, they’ll know who should stay and who should go…
Hey Tim!
Nope – I’ve never been the HR Pro – I admit I have an outsider’s perspective. I’ve been in the trenches lots with real HR Pros as a trainer and implementor with a vendor, but that’s where my perspective comes from. Sometimes that means I have a different opinion than most HR Pros – but I hope my different perspective generates some good discussion. I read, research, and participate in the community, so I do have an informed opinion.
In terms of deciding who you develop – well yes everybody! I think the reason most organizations do performance appraisals is to somehow improve performance – and that means development. You might invest more or less in some players than others based on performance and potential, but you don’t need a stack rank to do that. I’m arguing that an evaluation focussed on identifying areas for development is going to give you a better and more objective result to make those decisions than a stack rank can.
As a side note… if you have a Jordan as your star, doesn’t it make sense to invest pretty heavily on the other guys on the team that play with him? Focusing development exclusively – or even just putting more time/$ into – the stars I’m not sure is going to get the results.
Sure stars want to be treated differently – that’s what managers do. This is core stuff for your managers – they need to work to develop everyone on their team and do it in a way that is tailored to each of them and makes them all feel special.
@Brett Patterson – You seem to be thinking along the same lines I am, core management skills – coaching, development, building the team to get results.
Just because 3 out of 4 HR pros agree with something doesn’t mean it’s worth doing. In fact, it may even mean the opposite.
I’m with Sean on this one!
Never been fond of stacked rankings, I’m in Tim’s 25%.
Thank you for articulating my thoughts on this topic. I have other things to do (like wiping those snotty noses) than rack and stack my employees and force my supervisors to tell me who’s a 7, to get 3% or a 9 to get 3.5% and then go through the conversation of “if you knew this guy wasn’t performing, why did it take you 6 months to tell someone – or did you just have to put SOMEONE on the bottom of the pile.”
Perhaps I have not been fortunate to work in organizations that truly utilize stacked ratings effectively, but in the organizations I’ve worked in, its been used for evil, more than good – and its created more employee relations issues than developed A players.
Excellent post. Let me tell you yet another true story of how stacked ranking fails in the workplace. My husband has been with the same (very large defense contractor) company for nearly 30 years. In those 30 years, the only form of appreciation or recognition of his high quality work he ever receives is in his annual review. Those have been consistently excellent. This year, during a high stress project, my husband had his review. The manager starts out extolling my husband’s excellent work product, how much team members enjoy working with him, how he’s saved the company money through his efforts, etc. Then he gives my husband a “meets expectations” ranking. My husband came home that night and asked me to help him put his resume together.
I believe it all depends on ‘how’ you use the outcomes of the stacked ranking – rather than whether you should carry them out. Having good metrics is always useful in all aspects of running a business, and knowing who are your best performers would be one for me. However only looking at one in isolation can be dangerous. Why not carry out stacked ranking and then look at other data/aspects when making promotion or development decisions