Purging with purpose, not preemption
On Jack Welch's bad advice, workplace assessments, and why Congress shouldn't hesitate to toss a few more members besides George Santos
As head of General Electric, Jack Welch famously embraced a policy of purging the giant company of the bottom 10% of employees each year. This policy, which required "forced ranking" of the employees, has some superficial appeal to those who like the language of ruthless competition in business.
■ But while Welch's "vitality curve" concept can trace some of its origins to the well-known and widely-applicable Pareto principle (otherwise known as the 80/20 Rule), turning it into an HR regime is an arbitrary choice.
■ Welch called it "candor", but for the process to be any good, the ranking mechanism has to be right, the assessments need to be accurate, and above all, the lowest-ranked employees would need to be under-performing through their own fault.
■ Anyone who has worked under a bad manager, gone through a sloppy training session, or been the customer-facing representative of a product or process going through a quality-control crisis on the back end, knows that under-performance can easily turn out to be a systemic failure rather than a personal one.
■ The 10% culling value is arbitrary, and it gets in the way of the much more important task: Consciously getting rid of people whose behavior is toxic. A good institution has expectations of behavior that are independent of performance metrics.
■ A person like George Santos should be expelled from Congress not for being a "bottom 10% performer", but for being an obviously malignant presence. He could have passed all the bipartisan laws under the Sun and conducted the world's most flawless constituent service, and still deserved expulsion for being crooked.
■ It takes a lot to get Congress to undertake an expulsion; it's happened only three times since the Civil War. But maybe it should happen more often; voters generally have a right to the representation they choose, but lack of fealty to the Constitution and shameless engagement in bribery ought to be compelling grounds for disqualification from office.
■ Taking action on toxic behavior isn't a matter of performance thresholds, be they 10%, 25%, or 2%. Lots of people can have their skills improved so that early underperformance can be transformed into later success. But too many people are good at getting jobs done but doing good work in a bad spirit. Good managers ought to be on the lookout for ways to purge contemptible behavior without delay.
