OK folks, would appreciate your thoughts... Mainly as to whether you think I am being crazy or not.

Seems the execs at my company have gone gaga for a book called "Top Grading" and they want to classify all workers as "A Players", "B Players", and "C Players".  Their idea is that 10% of the employees should be fired as a matter of routine.

Now, in my company I have an amount of influence and power that is disproportionate to my position, as I am a quite well-respected industry figure (no I am really not trying to brag here... please believe me on that... but I know my position well...)

Anyway, today I basically got "in your face" with one of our execs and refused to categorize my workers with letters and numbers.  Told them that I would not disrespect my workers by putting labels like that on them.  Mind you, I have fired non-performers and have no remorse about that, and I am actually seen as a great talent developer.  My "students" usually go on to bigger and better things.  But assigning alpha labels to my team members?  Firing 10% just for yucks? No way, Jose. In my opinion, the moment I do that, I lose my credibility with my team. (Note, we are not in a layoff situation where we have to cut 10% to control costs.  These guys simply want to always fire 10% because they read a book that promotes this idea).

I am fully aware that my actions could cause me to ge terminated but I am making a stand on this... and I am well prepared to take the consequences.  If they do not want a person with my management style, hey I am OK with that.  I'll inspire workers for the competition.

So board regs, what do you think of all this?  Is LyricBoy being crazy, or principled? ???

Well, LB, you make a principled stand here; however, the day might come when you find yourself on the wrongside of the A-B-C's of middle management.  You know who's indespensable around here?  Right.
8)

I think you're right...first of all why label someone- if I were say a B player having that label would in no way motivate me to be an A Player

By the same token, if I were labeled a C player I'd be offended and somewhat humiliated that the company would "out" my lack of performance in that manner rather than approach me personally for evaluation.

As for firing 10% of staff... there are only two reasons to fire someone... 1) they do a piss poor job and need to go  or 2) you are a new supervisor and want to shake up the staff by letting them know you don't play games. But even case number 2 only one person needs to be fired and that person needs to be a piss poor worker.

They want to fire 10% of people because they read it in a book???

I know where my sacking recommendations would come from...

I don't want to land you in trouble here, but stick to your guns: it's a ****ing stupid idea to fire 10% of workers however well they're working.  Maybe the first 10% should include the pillocks who thought it a good idea...

They want to fire 10% of people because they read it in a book???

I know where my sacking recommendations would come from...

I don't want to land you in trouble here, but stick to your guns: it's a ****ing stupid idea to fire 10% of workers however well they're working.  Maybe the first 10% should include the pillocks who thought it a good idea...


What he said.

It's a damned shame there aren't more people like you in the workplace, LB.  Most people would go along with this stupid scheme because the higher ups said so with nary a thought to who it would affect.

enron did something similar, blind firings every year. look where they ended up.

There's a term for getting rid of 10% of something.

Decimate

It's what Gengis Khan used to do when he took over new villages in order to show he meant business.

If you're truly in a position to make a stand, it's definitely worth doing for your own self-worth.  If you're confident you can move onto a new position at a new job, all the better.  I've always avoided working for companies with a large amount of middle management types for reasons just like this.  The one I'm at now has a big management staff, but my branch is tiny and so far away, it's more like working for a small company. 

You're probably better off sending out resumes regardless of what they do, a company this deluded can't be good.

Thanks for the feedback, folks I really appreciate it.  here is a little more info on my "stand" and why I take it.

If we truly have somebody who is a "C Player", he or she would not be working for me, they'd be fired.  Once you take an ACTIVE worker and start calling them a "C Player" people start to label them as such and they never lose the stink of that title, even if they improve.  That ain't right and it stifles worker morale and initiative.

We had this ridiculous discussion about "You really need to be hiring A players".  I said "WTF?  Of course you hire the best.  Who goes out and intentionally hires a moron?"

As to the risk that I am taking, for some it may be seen as inordinate, but the reason that I have my position in my industry is BECAUSE I am a guy who takes a stand, does not BS people, and does not ask anybody to do something I would not do myself. I am brutally honest and because of this people trust me and I have all sorts of people who come to me for advice, because they know the conversation will never leave the office.  If I start labelling people as B or C types, that trust will be lost.  And my value will be gone.  At the core of my "value add" is my absolute credibility.  People do not always agree with what I have to say, but they will all tell you that I call it as I see it, period.

All this said I am prolly pretty safe on this.  I was hired by my company pretty much at the instruction of our largest customer, who was fed up with problems there and who knew I could solve them and quickly.  If they tried to touch me our customer would have a huge problem... and they are about 35% of our business.

But in any event I am prepared for anything.  I know that I am right and I would rather be a principled man looking for a job than a pushover collecting blood money.

  they want to classify all workers as "A Players", "B Players", and "C Players".  Their idea is that 10% of the employees should be fired as a matter of routine.

So board regs, what do you think of all this?  Is LyricBoy being crazy, or principled? ???


You are not crazy.  You are not merely being principled in your behavior towards your employees, however -- you are being principled in that you are looking out for the shareholders' best interests, because the practice you describe is one of the dumbest HR mistakes any business can make. 

There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that employee performance is normally distributed.  Using a Gaussian distribution ("normal distribution", or "bell curve") to grade something as poorly-measurable as employee performance is a fundamentally wrong idea.  Not "wrong" because it feels bad, it's "wrong" because employee performance is not normally distributed. 

As you point out -- anyone who needs to be fired should be fired (if through some misfortune of the intervew process, a company managed to hire an 11% population of morons, should they keep one on? :). 

Also, as you point out, because the practice is based on an unsound premise, employees subjected to it are justifiably demoralized.  The side effects are well-known and universal -- employees stop worrying about their actual work, because their new "job" is "make sure someone else is in the 10% that's due to get fired", and the rest is history.

The only legitimate business motivation (and by "legitimate", I mean "some evil person in HR figured out a way to shield a company against a discrimination suit when some evil person in Accounting figured out a way to save on the costs of a 10% layoff") for the use of such a performance appraisal scheme is that the company has decided to lay off 10% of its personnel, and wants to shield itself from discrimination suits.  Once the scheme is in place, at least 10% of the employees can be terminated "due to poor performance", which protects the company from the legal liabilities associated with layoffs, and against wrongful discrimination suits were it to order its managers to arbitrarily fire 10% of their staff.  And the truly funny thing, is, it doesn't even protect the company from lawsuits, while the negative side effects are the same as before -- and the remaining demoralized workers are generally less productive after the "not really a layoff" -- and the cost in lost productivity usually eclipses any short-term savings.  If a company really does need to cut headcount, the "just do an honest layoff of 10% of the staff and pay the money upfront" is the better business choice. 

If the company isn't actually trying to cut headcount, then why bother firing 10% your workforce, just to replace them a few weeks later?!  Where's the business sense in that?  Recruiting workers is one of the most expensive things a company can do -- unless you're in the HR department, your job isn't "reading stacks of resumes, playing telephone tag with candidates, and dragging co-workers to interview prospective candidates", right? 

The only people to benefit from a "fire one out of every ten employees, and immediately hire their replacement" are the ones in the HR department.  Lots of resumes for them to read through, telephone tag to play, and interviews to hold.  But is your company making any money from churning 10% (well, 20%!) of its staff through the HR department's hiring/firing procedures?  Last time I checked, the HR department was a cost center, not a revenue center.

So to summarize:  The policy's theoretical foundations are unsound, the only measurable gain it produces is increased employee turnover, which is good only for bloating the HR department's budget.  The revolving door of fires/hires reduces productivity because the remaining workers spend lots of time and money recruiting replacements for the 10% that got fired.  Morale is dealt a deathblow, which itself ignites a vicious cycle of back-biting/politics/one-upmanship/fiefdoms that further contributes to productivity declines, costing the company yet more money.  The policy doesn't just make you feel bad it's a bad business proposition.

Damn, that was long.  If you skipped to here, read this essay on the subject on the Agile Management (and a few other of his posts, but the one I linked to covers this specific issue, and he says it better than I did), and come back with a business case as to why this book of theirs is wrong and will cost the company money.  It shouldn't be too hard, because it's poor practice.

This reminds me of Office Space, where they hire the consultants to decide who to fire and yet there are like eight bosses to tell Peter that he didn't put coversheets on the TPS reports...

Good job LyricBoy, may your employment remain stable and your workmates escape the HR guillotine :)

We had this ridiculous discussion about "You really need to be hiring A players".  I said "WTF?  Of course you hire the best.  Who goes out and intentionally hires a moron?"



unfortunately the people I work for do this regularly  ;D

   hiya...

  Hmmm, interesting.  The ten percent thing.  Ridiculous.  Reminds me of the "track one, track two, track three" thing from Freaks and Geeks...

   So long as the company is turning a profit you fire nobody and lay-off nobody...

  Who goes out and intentionally hires a moron?"



John McCain.

Anyway, I think Chucky had the right idea with the Ghengis Khan mentality.  It's about instilling fear, suscpicion, and insecurity in the workforce.  Does any of that improve performance?  Of course not!  People assume the guys in charge must be smart because they're the guys in charge!  Sometimes you gotta separate the men from the dogs!
:D

I think you're 100% in the right. There's nothing to be gained from doing this, all it does is instill a sense of distrust in the workforce. Not only that, but I'd be far more inclined to look for a new job if I had the sword of Damocles continuously hanging over my head.

There's a term for getting rid of 10% of something.

Decimate

It's what Gengis Khan used to do when he took over new villages in order to show he meant business.


Slight correction: It was the ancient Romans who practised "decimation," not Genghis Khan and the Mongols:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army)