Dear Reader,I spoke to about 150 folks at the CAST conference this past week. These are technical people that are broad thinkers and are on the cutting edge of methods to do testing in software. The conference was well attended by many of the large Silicon Valley companies that surround San Jose.
Interestingly, the most questions I was asked dealt with the recent "stack ranking" that is being done in many companies including Microsoft. In fact, Microsoft was clearly in the cross-hairs of many articles in the past month:
So, what is "stack ranking?"
Basically, stack ranking puts employees into groups like high performers, medium performers and low performers (or some variation of this). Hypothetically or pathetically, the high performers get the awards and bonuses, mid-performers keep their jobs and get a small raise and the low performers get a severance package . . . maybe.
This thinking was popularized under Jack Welch back when he mattered. The "rank and yank" culture was born and was all the rage of managers and HR departments in the States.
I wrote an article for IQPC some time ago that outlined the questionable thinking of ranking and other misguided management tools:
The reasoning I often hear for such efforts are that employees need feedback. True, employees do need feedback . . . but this? It creates artificial scarcity, competition and focuses attention away from the work. Making yourself look better takes away time and energy from actually being better.
If you have these vehicles in your organization, what have you seen? Let me know.
