I have observed one common thing across different organisations I have been associated with, how the appraisal process works. Bell curve is the default standard. Over the many years; I have seen this kill very high performing teams by promoting silos, heroisms and also a rat race to avoid the bottom.

One place I remember very well was when I was coaching a hand picked team. This team was assembled by the business unit leader to adopt XP practices to switch from waterfall. This team was phenomenal, picked up concepts and intents of XP very well and showcased to the entire org on what lies ahead with the new ways of working. Then came in the annual performance review. Until that point I have not see the ill effects of a bell curve, it was always give your best and reap the benefits.

This was a curveball that no one expected in the team as they thought they were immune from the old ways of performance management. As per the process, one of them will be labelled as a non or poor performer and penalised. So much for a team of handpicked top performers in the org. In the end, the one who was named as poor performer left the team and the org. It was a lose-win situation, the org and the team lost a good developer but the developer got a bigger and better role due to the upskilling.

When I asked an executive about this, the answer I got was that “It works for me and everyone around. Why fix something that is not broken?” That was an answer that stumped me on how normalised this has become. I know I can’t fix their process overnight but planted a thought on them by reversing the decision process, why are they limiting the number of people who can perform better than that is expected of a role. Aren’t they signing up for less?

The executive accepted but said that too little can be done about at large corporates. Many of them are too big to fail and have a good market share that it is hard for them to get disrupted. I did not give up though, I was able to persuade some of the smaller companies that I was involved to look away from this bad system of finding a prey and become a prey. Bell curve or forced ranking is quite detrimental to collectively up the game for an organisation.