
The Coming Collapse of Average Managers and Employees - dekayed
http://blogs.hbr.org/schrage/2012/10/the-coming-collapse-of-average.html
======
kamaal
Its not going to happen.

The problem is most places don't even have a way to find out a average
manager. The reason is that management layers in almost every big company
works like a cartel, they know darn well how to preserve their self interests.
Generally you don't get to know until its often too late to do anything about
it. The people who suffer the most are not bad performers, but those who fall
out of managements favor or people who just can't get political and benefit
out of it. The actual performers are likely to be named arrogant mavericks who
are bad at team work. They won't be fired, but they will be treated so badly,
until they themselves see the wisdom in leaving.

Also this whole GE analogy in these kind of articles is MBA speak. That is
talking at high abstract levels, without absolutely knowing what they are
talking about. Stack ranking worked at GE not because Stack Ranking is
awesome, but because there was some one like Jack Welch to make it work.

Adhering to stack ranking to the letter but not in spirit will basically
amplify the problem. Guess who gets the least rank in a political system?

~~~
yuhong
Reminds me of this about Google:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4331584>

~~~
yuhong
And this one: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2536186>

------
lifeisstillgood
Ah hell.

Go all the way. Most of human value has been created since 1700- medicine,
transport, mechanisation etc. Most of that is down to a few thousand
individuals, from James Watt to Feymann. If we focus on increasing their
productivity (every tenured professor is given state funded housekeepers) we
may well increase the invention rate

What we don't increase is the spread of that through society to the benefit of
all.

That requires the useless middle managers and useless peons implicitly
referred to in this elitist piece of short sighted rubbish

~~~
marquis
Mexico has an interesting take on this: if you get into the upper echelons of
academia you can get a salaried do-what-you-want-publish-if-you-want job. Some
of the country's best thinkers are paid to think.

~~~
adrianhoward
Sounds like the same take the rest of the world used to have - and still does
in a few places.

Ahh... tenure... how we miss ya.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenure_(academic)>

~~~
marquis
It's different than tenure, they don't have to teach and I don't believe it's
associated with a specific institution. I'm not sure exactly what it's called
or how it works, I'll have to call a friend or perhaps someone here from
Mexico can comment.

------
hkmurakami
This kind of helps explain Japan's lackluster performance over the last 20+
years for me. The typical corporate culture there seems to focus on getting
the mediocre and lagging employees to perform up to par (mind you, their
systems for accomplishing this are rather impressive), rather than sharpening
the skills and maximizing the contributions of their Ace players (they
definitely exist, but are definitely not given their due compared to their
output).

~~~
patio11
Japanese mega corps are almost designed to be pathological for their best
performing employees. I don't know if that is significant enough to have
macroeconomic effects (all explanations of that nature strike me as suspicious
just-so-stories), but if you hypothetically think you're good at something, a
traditionally managed Japanese megacorp will attempt to a) dilute that
aptitude, b) put you on a career track which requires _decades_ to reach the
autonomy you'd have at a US company in months or a startup in minutes, and c)
compensate quality like a teacher's union does (I.e. forbid it and treat
anyone asking for it as a threat to social harmony).

That is not projection, btw. I played the game pretty well for 3 years. That
is just me describing a small portion of the well-understood rules of the
game.

~~~
hkmurakami
Let's just say that you lasted longer than I did ;)

------
droithomme
Hand waving and made up numbers. It's kind of annoying when someone uses
precise numbers that they pulled out of the air with no empirical basis as the
foundation of an argument.

At the end he asks about the organizations where 60% of value is produced by
40% of employees. Which organizations? How is value measured? No telling
because the numbers are just made up.

~~~
kfk
This.

And let's add the obvious remark that if this 40% is that good, than why it is
not firing the other 60%? Why do they keep them?

All in all, this is the kind of poor business talk that makes MBAs so
irritating.

~~~
heed
You don't need to say "this." Your comment reads fine without it.

~~~
natrius
If "agreed" were used instead, it'd perform the same function without being
called out by people who don't like internet linguistic trends. Clearly
indicating one's position in an argument is valuable, and "this" accomplishes
that.

------
btilly
It is good to see this discussed, but the principle is not news. In
[http://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-
Differently/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-
Differently/dp/0684852861) the point is made that average managers try to
bring up their bottom performers, while the best managers long ago concluded
that you get more mileage out of investing energy in the top ones.

Of course the world is full of average people. They have to wind up somewhere.
And organizations full of average people are never going to be able to take
the advice to work the superstars.

I'll believe that the slogan _invest in your best_ has been internalized by
our society when we devote serious resources to making sure that people with
IQs in the top 1% stop dropping out of school faster than people with median
IQs do. Anyone care to give me odds on this happening in the next 20 years?
I'll take the "No" side.

~~~
goldfeld
Do you really think people with higher IQ dropping out of school is an issue?
Firstly, there are some many other factors at play making a person a
"supertstar" (emotional stability, finding out what they love, creativity) but
let's agree IQ is one of them and an important one. I'd argue that people on
the top 1% are statistically people more interested in learning varied
subjects. So unless the person had serious family issues, which is something
hard to devote serious resources to pinpointedly correct, whether they drop
out of school is not as relevant as them finding what they love and having the
tools to learn it, on their own if they're so inclined.

~~~
btilly
I agree with you that IQ is far from a complete measure of what matters, but I
do think that it is an issue.

The reason why is because jobs that are likely to use the abilities of a high
IQ person generally require a high school diploma, and frequently require a
college degree. Therefore denying these people an equal opportunity to get
those credentials limits how effectively society benefits from their
abilities.

Also I should note that the matter is personal. I have a good IQ and yet I
came within an inch of failing to complete high school. Were it not for a
teacher named Bernie Bowker, I would not have graduated, gone to college, or
had any prospects of getting jobs where my abilities would be useful. I think
that that would have been a tragedy, particularly for me.

------
cdf
Even though GE is generally considered well run, let's not forget that it
needed a bailout by Warren Buffett during the financial crisis.

At risk of sounding like I am defending my own mediocrity, the average worker
and manager are going to be the ones who can last the distance.

Top performers have a nasty habit of getting promoted, or headhunted. Or
burnout. Institutional memory gets lost. Ultimately, it's the average long
distance runners who carry the torch to the finishing line.

Not that I dont think the best performers shouldnt be duly recognised and
rewarded, but overemphasis on top performance...that's the stuff Enron is made
of.

------
fkdjs
As someone who is on the 'high performer' list, I can tell you I have seen
this first hand and this is fine, we will work harder, provided we're given an
even more outrageous salary. Otherwise, I'm going to get burned out doing the
job of my coworkers / thinking for my coworkers every day, monitoring them so
they're more efficient and don't go off chasing down bugs incorrectly. I don't
need to be managed, leave me alone and I'll make customers and your boss'es
boss happy. But this all can get tiresome and it sucks. But give me that
bonus/salary and I'll continue on like a trooper.

At my last job, I was given more and more work, and I made everything work
without intervention, but I left due to low pay, now the old boss wants to
hire me back as the old system seems to go down a lot, while his cheap labor
source turns out to be more expensive than he first thought. There seems to be
a belief that we can just whip up the high performers when we need them, but
this just leads to burn out and turnover. just pay the high performers an
ungodly amount and all will be well.

~~~
SatvikBeri
High performers are still a great deal, because you can pay them 2x the salary
to get 10x the results. Few places realize this, but the ones that do are
wonderful to work for.

~~~
michaelochurch
_High performers are still a great deal, because you can pay them 2x the
salary to get 10x the results._

The issue, for many companies, is that the perks the high performers want in
exchange for this "arbitrage" that exists in hiring them-- very high levels of
autonomy, rapid career advancement, implicit trust from the first day of
work-- are considered unaffordable in the actual political context of the
company.

Companies won't give high performers 10x salaries because the high performer
might not deliver if the conditions are bad, but if they give them high
degrees of autonomy and interesting projects, that's visible to the less adept
workers and it becomes an issue for management. Managers know that if they let
their best people follow different rules, everyone will expect the same
freedom.

High and low performance don't seem to be intrinsic to people, in the sense
that mediocre people can turn excellent given the right conditions, and vice
versa. What _does_ seem to be intrinsic is that there are high- and low-
variance people. Low variance people are reliable ladder-climbers, and high
variance people are the creative ones who might have a mediocre year or two,
but then have a huge breakthrough. The top performers are, for the most part,
high variance individuals. High-variance people can also fail quite badly, in
certain circumstances, so companies are very nervous about hiring them at all.
The "corporate ladder" rewards reliable mediocrity, not intermittent
excellence.

Intimidation-based management (which has been dominant since 1800) regresses
performance to the mean, and its purpose is to reduce variance. When the
input-output curves relating skill and effort to productivity were concave,
variance-reduction was the way to go, because lower variance was equivalent to
higher performance. Now that we're in a convex world (at least in software)
variance-reduction fails us.

~~~
fkdjs
That's a bit of a generalization. Some anecdotal evidence... years ago when I
was but a youngin', I didn't get along at my company, got burned out and
eventually curled up in a corner and slept/played games. Needless to say I got
on the PIP (performance improvement plan). Then I got laid off eventually. I
was immature. My manager sucked, but so did I for not realizing this and
taking action.

These days, I am simply more mature, and I regret my past somewhat, but at
least I am good at learning in general. If you don't regret your past, you
aren't growing, everyone does. Now, after life has kicked me around, I know
people well, I know how not to be a condescending jackass, and be pleasant,
and get things done, and communicate to my manager honestly vs being passive
aggressive etc. And I have that same inner drive to figure things out. I'm
still the same person, I just don't bullshit around, I keep my mouth shut,
impress people with my actions, then lo and behold, when they come to find out
more info about me, I tell them, but before that, I remain an enigma. When I
came to my group, some underestimated me, I didn't lash out like when I was
younger, I just shut up and fixed their bugs.

I do think, as you allude to, certain people just have that knowing, they have
it in them, but for whatever reason, maturity, bad manager, etc., they don't
rise to the top. I think though, if you are mature, you will realize your
manager is crappy right away and address that. Part of being a star performer,
to me, is not just tech. ability, but non-technical ability.

------
kenjackson
This assumes mediocre workers will always be mediocre. I've always assumed the
job of managers is to find the right place for for bright people they've
hired. I've certainly seen mediocre talent turn onto stars in the right
environment.

~~~
flyinRyan
This is really the elephant in the room when it comes to any kind of ranking.
As humans we always want to make rankings like A is better than B who is
better than C... and so on. The reality is much more complex.

If you take K1 kickboxing history, you'll see that pretty much all the top
guys have all beaten each other at some point. This makes it pretty clear that
"best" is something that varies wildly and may even vary from day to day.

It's no different in software. I can tell you I've had times in my career
where I was on fire, out producing any teams I knew about. And I've had times
where the burn out was so bad I was producing nothing at all for weeks. How
good someone is just isn't static.

------
infinii
All these senior management types that praise Welch's philosophies seem
disconnected from the real world. They seem to think that by constantly
managing out under performers (even mediocre staff) and striving to only
employ high performers, everything will be peachy keen.

Sorry but this just doesn't fit the real world because in every company, there
will be menial tasks. Menial tasks that high performers will refuse to
perform.

Look at sports teams. The Chicago Bulls needed utility players to surround
Jordan. Does anyone think a team of 5 MJ's or Lebron's would succeed over the
long run?

~~~
kamaal
>>The Chicago Bulls needed utility players to surround Jordan. Does anyone
think a team of 5 MJ's or Lebron's would succeed over the long run?

To add further, if Chicago Bulls itself hire all Jordan grade players. Will
they want to the menial job of surround the actual Micheal Jordan or try to
become Micheal Jordan's themselves?

------
lostlogin
This reminds me of an article I read here ages ago on IBM's Black Team. It was
(and is) fascinating to me. In case someone hasn't see it,
www.t3.org/tangledwebs/07/tw0706.html. Discussed on HN here
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=985965>

~~~
mbesto
And largely referenced in Peopleware[1]. Good quote from that book:

 _There is a sense of eliteness on a good team. Team members feel they’re part
of something unique._

[1]- [http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-
Teams-e...](http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-
ebook/dp/B003I84OIU/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1352125364&sr=8-2&keywords=peopleware)

------
LnxPrgr3
Somewhat related idea: given an employee who's stellar in some areas and not
so stellar in others, do you try to even their attributes out, or do you
develop the areas where they're stellar even further?

I'm a fan of this line of thought:
[http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/0...](http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/02/mediocrity_by_a.html)

So many people are focused on bringing everyone up to some base level of
mediocrity in every imaginable area, but what if we instead focused on finding
brilliance, then doing everything we can to amplify that brilliance?

Which might, of course, include working on some of those areas for
improvement, but intelligently, with the goal of keeping those weaknesses from
impeding excellence elsewhere.

~~~
btilly
Gallup has studied this exact question. They have found that working on areas
of brilliance, and structuring jobs to work around areas of mediocrity, is
hands down massively better than trying to address weaknesses.

------
Mordor
Kinda fails when you don't have A grade directors running the company. Also,
how do you identify an A manager, unless you're really picking the
productivity of their A workers? Surely weaker managers attribute their
success to the weaker employees (to avoid being 'found out')?

------
SatvikBeri
Rather than getting rid of "average people", it seems more common to sequester
top talent. I think this is what's happening with small consulting shops and
startups. You often see small teams of incredibly talented people at a startup
or consulting firm that create a lot of the major innovations, then sell them
to the large companies that handle distribution, etc.

This makes sense because most people are average or below average. There is no
way that a GE or IBM can function without large swathes of ordinary people. I
doubt we'll see average performers disappear from big companies any time soon-
instead we'll see the continuing rise of small startups and consulting shops
with a few incredibly talented people.

------
gadders
The thing is, you can fill your whole company with go-getting geniuses, but
not every task in the company requires that, and if you give the boring-but-
necessary work to the whizkids, they're going to get p-ed off and leave.

Stick the smartest on the cutting edge stuff that is the true source of
competitive advantage for your firm. Keep the rest for the important-but-dull
work - HR, Payroll, etc.

------
randomafrican
I'm sort of surprised COst is not mentionned. Can every company afford to hire
only the best and the brightest ?

