The practice of ‘forced rankings’ or ‘stacked rankings’ as a routine practice comes in and out of popularity among human resource professionals and managers. It is often implemented during times of downsizing and then sticks around, insidious in its convenience in driving performance management because it produces pretty charts and graphs, while slowly sucking the lifeblood out of employees.  In my mind, it is a lazy approach to routine performance management, either giving both HR generalists and managers an ‘easy out’ in evaluating people (“you are a ‘2’ because I HAD to give someone a 2”) or preventing people who truly want to advocate and grow their people a disincentive because someone has to be poorly rated, so it is easier to leave some people behind.

In a startlingly frank discussion of the practice at Microsoft, Kurk Eichenwald at Vanity Fair recently published an article on how stack ranking created a disincentive to innovation and growth.  Check it out at Microsoft The Lost Decade.