The Coming Collapse of Average Managers and Employees

Its not going to happen.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?

Ah hell.<p>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<p>What we don't increase is the spread of that through society to the benefit of all.<p>That requires the useless middle managers and useless peons implicitly referred to in this elitist piece of short sighted rubbish

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).

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.<p>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.

It is good to see this discussed, but the principle is not news. In <a href="http://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-Differently/dp/0684852861" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-Differently/dp/0...</a> 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.<p>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.<p>I'll believe that the slogan <i>invest in your best</i> 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.

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

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.<p>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.

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.

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.<p>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.<p>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?

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 <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=985965" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=985965</a>

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?<p>I'm a fan of this line of thought: <a href="http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/02/mediocrity_by_a.html" rel="nofollow">http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/0...</a><p>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?<p>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.

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')?

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.<p>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.

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.<p>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.

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