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As employees, our expectations for performance management come from the system of giving grades in school.

What's interesting is that school grades often doesn't follow a normal distribution, especially for easier classes. I suspect that getting an "A" was possible for 95%+ of students in my gym class and only 5-10% of the students in my organic chemistry class.

In the same way, some jobs are much easier to do well than others.

So we should expect that virtually all administrative positions will have "exceptional" performance, which is to say that they were successful at doing all of the tasks they were asked to do. But for people who's responsibility-set is more consequential, even slightly-above average performance could be 10x more meaningful to the company.

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atoav 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

One thing where this analogy stops to work, is that more so than in school your performance in a company can be highly dependent on how well and/or timely others do their job. Your managers performance metric may or may not catch that. E.g. imagine you are assigned a project where you have to interact a lot with department X and now department X is running at/over capacity, so you are performing worse, because their part isn't done in time and each back and forth takes half a week. Now you spend half your time not being productive with no fault of your own and the others are 110% productive while setting the whole shop on fire. Based on that metric they should fire you and hire more people for department X, when in fact they should probably just hire more for them (or reorganize the department).

Another example where this analogy stops working is that in school the students usually get the same/comparable assignments, that is somewhat the point of those. As the goto hard-problem-person at my current workplace I am pretty sure that it is absolutely impossible to compare my work to the work of my collegue who just deals with the bread and butter problems, it isn't even the same sport. How would you even start doing a productivity comparison here, especially if you understand 0 about the problem space

	▲	iambateman 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Great perspective and I agree. This is the basic reason that performance management in an organization is so difficult and fraught. A significant percentage of people in an organization create the problems they solve.

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nightski 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Having a shifted mean doesn't mean they aren't a normal distribution. Not saying they are necessarily, but the anecdote you are providing isn't convincing.

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kurthr 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Perhaps, but due to the sampling of the distribution you would likely never know. If 95% of your samples fit in the top 3 bins, you can’t say much at all with certainty. Poisson, Gaussian, binomial, Boltzmann, gamma…

	▲	3 days ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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marian_ivanco 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That is not IMHO what he is trying to say, you don't shift the distribution, you measure if somebody passed a test. I the test is "passable" then one side of "distribution" is at least cut off. E.g. it's normal (and sometimes expected) that the whole class will pass without issues.

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dowager_dan99 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

if your scale doesn't have the atomic values at the top end to differentiate the data it's not a normal, it's Pareto or Zipf or some other power law.

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sokoloff 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Would “doing all of the tasks they were asked to do” really be “exceptional”? What could be exceptional about that? I would think it would be “meets expectations” at most.

	▲	iambateman 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I have an issue with this thinking, but I don't mean to pick on you...it's common within organizational politics. Managers suggest that an employee must "go above and beyond" their ordinary duties to get an exceptional rating. But that just means that "going above and beyond" is, in fact, a duty. The problem is it's an ill-defined duty which is even more susceptible to the whims of what the manager thinks counts as "above and beyond." Good managers give clear rubrics of performance. To me, "meets expectations" says that the employee's error rate was at acceptable levels and "exceptional" means they had almost no errors whatsoever.
	▲	dowager_dan99 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You don't really need a distribution to measure tasks that are binary in nature though, why bother with a Likert scale when you can just use a yes/no checklist? I suspect there's also a high correlation between the jobs/roles and the likelihood of being displaced by machine or otherwise, as measuring success is a key problem to be solved when "dehumaning" these jobs.