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The 10% World Of Group IT
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Date: 20th Mar 2004
In his autobiography published last year, the former CEO of General Electric (GE), the legendary Jack Welch, congratulated himself on introducing the vitality curve as part of the Company’s Performance Management process. The vitality curve is used by all levels of management in GE to differentiate between those 70% of staff who are vital to the organisation, the 20% who are star performers and then the bottom 10%. Under Welch the bottom 10% were either redeployed or, as was more likely, removed from the organisation. In GE this ranking process is carried out every year.
We understand that some Senior Managers in Group IT, presumably in a rush to prove that they are developing a high performance culture, have taken it upon themselves to their staff and put the bottom 10% on Performance Improvement Plans. In an email which was sent to LTU, one Senior Manager says “Bottom 10% performers need to be on PIP/Performance Management/Development plans. We talked this through at time of ranking.........”
Mark Brown, Assistant General Secretary, said that, “A policy of forced ranking is fundamentally unfair and potentially discriminatory. Rankings are not comparable from one division to another: being the third best employee in one division is not the same as being the third best employee in another. Rankings have no absolute meaning. All IT staff in the Application Development Division may be high performers, but ranking will force some staff to be labelled poor performers. The opposite may be true in another division. Equally, if the process is not done openly and fairly then how do we know that it’s not impacting adversely on one distinct group of staff more than another.”.
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