If you are a leader in a larger organization, I’m sure you have been asked to rank staff in your organization.
In my experience some leaders and managers are, unfortunately, using ranking and rating interchangeably while they are really an expression of two different scales.
Rating is an expression of how an employee is performing within the scope of a defined job type over a specific period of time.
Ranking is how the employee ranks against the overall review of competencies and skills within the organization, required to run your business successfully.
As an example, a Junior Engineer could be top rated but would rank lower organizationally against staff with lower performance rating. The point is that if you use ranking and rating interchangeably to adjust your organizational competencies, or simply the size of your organization, you risk losing staff members who are key critical to your business.
The dark side of keeping organizational ranking current is that it makes it somewhat more approachable to identify those ranking lowest relative to the changes you have to make. A word of caution – it is of course not always that straight forward and there is an obvious caveat with doing ranking if you apply it unconditionally on a raw “per team” approach.
Consider the following scenario: You have two teams reporting to you. Team A is a very large team on the production floor with basic technical skills, while team B is a small team of highly specialized individuals.
You are faced with a business demand to reduce your staff by 15% overall. From a fairness perspective, which is also important to continuous motivation, you could argue that both teams would have to chip in with a 15% reduction i.e. pull out your ranking lists for each team and cut the lowest 15%.
The problem with that approach is that you may loose significant talent in the specialized team that is either very difficult or very expensive to re-hire (often both), hence reducing by 15% in the specialized team has a disproportionate negative impact of your ability to be successful (remember ranking vs. rating).
My advice is that you:
- Keep your organizational ranking current
- Consolidate your overall organizational ranking as it relates to Business Continuity and Strategy
Want to know more?
Contact:
Soren Madsen, info@leadwithpropriety.dk