As a friend of mine at Meta said, "It's ridiculous. If you're good enough to build a team full of high performers then you've inadvertently screwed your team."
True. I work in a team where everyone performs really well, because it's kind of impossible not to because of the stakes. But our leadership expects there to be someone in the bottom 5% every quarter. So we have to make stuff up and take turns in who's put in that.
I get that bottom 5% makes sense in some scenarios, but all nuance is lost. Enterprises rely on consistently when it's not always the right thing to do
> posted on LinkedIn her surprise at being lumped in with supposed low performers after receiving an “exceeds expectations” in her mid-year review.
FWIW, this is misleading. mid-year reviews only have three ratings: "below", "at or above", and "significantly above" expectations. a lot of employees like to correlate these to the end-of-year ratings (of which there are seven), but there is no such guarantee.
It’s wild to me that companies have come up with a way to screw over employees as they see fit. If I worked the entire year and met expectations or exceeded them, and then got lower rating at the end of the year because of a single project or a couple of things that came up in the quarter, then I call bullshit. And I say quarter because when you get the rating it’s actually been almost another quarter of work done and if there were concerns in that quarter they can be raised during the mid year review discussion.
It’s not annual performance evaluation if you don’t evaluate the whole year.
I remember from my time working in the US that you couldn't be too paranoid in the quarter in which you had the annual performance review. As a team was graded on forced distribution, team members were incentivized to screw over others competing for the tops grades. In other words, if someone with whom you seldom work suddenly wants to loop you into a project, you should be suspicious that it might be an attempt to blemish your perceived performance.
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