Performance Management Isn't a Favourite Rank Order

Organisations should deal properly with poor performance.

Avoiding it creates problems for everyone: colleagues carry additional load, managers work around issues rather than resolving them, and the person concerned may never get a clear explanation of what needs to change.

But I don’t think that automatically makes ranking everyone against everyone else a good performance system.

The two questions are different.

“Is this person meeting the expectations of the role?” is an absolute question.

“Where does this person sit compared with everybody else?” is a relative one.

A strong team still has a bottom ten per cent.

So does a weak team.

That matters if the ranking itself starts being treated as evidence of poor performance.

The problem becomes even harder in complex organisations because performance is rarely perfectly comparable.

Someone may inherit a difficult service. Another person may be doing work whose biggest successes are failures that never happened. Some people create visible individual output; others make the whole team better. Outcomes can depend on resources, context, dependencies and decisions made long before the individual arrived.

That doesn’t mean we give up on judgement.

It means we should be more serious about it.

What was the person expected to achieve?

Was that clear?

What actually happened?

What was within their control?

How did they work with others?

What evidence supports the assessment?

Where performance was below expectation, was that explained early enough for them to do something about it?

Those questions feel more useful than beginning with the assumption that a fixed proportion of people must occupy the bottom.

There is a wider organisational point here too.

Performance systems cannot manufacture clarity that wasn’t present in the work.

If people spend the year with ambiguous outcomes, overlapping accountability and unclear expectations, a precise-looking score at the end does not remove the ambiguity. It can simply hide it.

Rigorous performance management matters.

But perhaps the rigour should start with understanding performance, not with putting everybody into favourite rank order.