5/29/2023 0 Comments Bell curve squeed![]() Unfortunately, many tools are used in terrible ways.īiggest shield for you should be “common sense”. If your organization teaches you something against common sense, watch out. Going beyond bell curve, there are many good concepts and models in management and psychology. If it is not a curve, something may be wrong. If HR team could get into these analysis, it may bring out something interesting and useful.ĭo not “implement” Bell curve. May be the org design itself is not correct.The culture of organization unit may be too brutal or too comforting. May be, there are deeper issues in entire group or business unit or business.Managers just want to avoid confronting team members to give bad feedback.The managers just do not understand the work content of the team members and are too busy/incompetent to actually measure the output.The goals are not linked effectively to business goals.The goals may not be well thought out.Then HR should have found ways to improve effectiveness. If the performance rating across organizations did not fit the model at org-level, this bell curve could have indicated it. It probably is a good tool to cross check performance across teams. Then how to use the Bell curve? Still, how to make a rating useful? As an employee if you judge yourself by rating – you are a fool. The issue is in using it for everything – from salary, firing decisions and promotions. The real issue is in taking such ratings too seriously. The problem is not in the rating coming out of such system. In sharp contrast, there are managers who claim that their standards are higher and penalize own members when there is no real comparative low performance. She would argue that under-performers are in some other team, not his team. If a manager is unable to face his people, would use all his might to deny low performance in his team. Their perception would prevail in performance rating normalization. And do not under-estimate the influencing and negotiating power of some of the managers.Then comparing “worst” performers across dissimilar teams is even more erroneous. Hence bad performers identification is even more subjective. Performance measurement itself is subjective, as acknowledged by wise managers.Only for those, all peer managers could get into details and decide the worst performer. This helps to compare only the bottom guys across all teams. To settle the issue of normalize across teams, managers might have to rank their people. The ratings are ‘normalized’ by all peer managers and senior manager to remove ‘subjectivity of managers’. Then these ratings are to be discussed in next level of organization unit. Each team would rate with maximum differentiation in performance ratings. Each smaller unit like a group or department would be asked to force-fit their people. Many times, official or unofficial quotas emerge. Further bad news – On very small sample size of 10 people team, the phenomenon of bell curve may not work. On the other, the bad performers may be equally distributed across all teams. Now, how to find these bottom or top 10 percent? One one extreme, there could be bad (worst) performers in one single team itself. Thus build up the organization hierarchies. Still there would be many such senior managers. With the concept of span of control, you will have 10-15 people working with each manager. But consider the following:ġ000 people are not objectively goaled and evaluated by same manager. If performance is measured objectively and in uniform way, this number will emerge naturally.īig question is – if this worked two decades back, why doesn’t it work now? Is it not true anymore? Credit: Ryan Hyde Flickr So, in company of 1000 people, there is high likelihood of having bottom 10 percent of bad performers and may be 10-20 percent high performers. Some wise people thought that it would apply to performance in organizations. From sand dunes in desert till the number of performers in large organizations. It helped to reward the high performers and weed out the non-performers.įirst let us look at its origin and how it ended up in large organizations’ HR toolbox. Every natural thing follows bell curve. It helped to ensure that performance ratings are well differentiated. Now junked by many companies, it seemed very good way to improve organization performance management. Bell curve is well known, rather infamous.
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