The baffling use of it in performance evaluations

The bell curve was designed to reflect an outcome not to produce one. Yet the proactive use of it as a measure of performance is becoming more and more commonplace, even though that was never the intention.

Today’s use of the model assumes there are an equal number of people performing above and below average, with small numbers of people with very low performance and very high performance. The chances of that always — maybe often — being true are very slim.

Using it to evaluate performance is baffling, because it forces supervisors and managers to fit their employees into categories they may not deserve. Sometimes it is even used to create fear as a motivational tool or to terminate employees.

Often called “forced ranking,” Bell Curve Performance Management refers to a system that requires leaders to rank their employees from top to bottom and assign predetermined percentages of bad to excellent ratings, usually for the sake of determining raises.

This forced distribution is a form of employee evaluation in which people are ranked against one another, not according to their adherence to performance standards. Read that again. They are ranked against one another! How can it not result in competition and the reduction of coalesced teams?

Another difficult aspect of this approach is that it presents a conundrum for supervisors. “What if most all my employees are great? If they’re all performing at the top of their game, but I’m forced to place them on a curve, I’m going to lose those who are arbitrarily placed into the lowest categories.”

It doesn’t seem ethical, and its legality should be questioned. At the very least, it’s discouraging.

In this day and age, when lack of staff is an issue, I suggest that using the bell curve in this manner is harming organizations. We know that money is not at the top of the list for why employees stay. Culture is. What does forced ranking do to the culture?

Many who are responsible for performance evaluations don’t like using this model because morale plummets as competition increases, which results in lower performance and output. It causes more problems than resulting benefits; it discourages collaboration and decreases productivity; it requires that managers plot team members along a distribution curve, sometimes resulting in the team members plotting against one another.

Put another way, do you really think it’s fair to categorize your employees in boxes designated as “top performers,” “average performers” and “non-performers”? And, if you do not have enough people to place in certain categories, be forced to do it anyway?

Those who are identified as high performers are rewarded. They may feel motivated and work harder to grow the company. Or they may feel guilty and marginalized from the team, which results in an uncomfortable work environment.

The scoring may also change from one supervisor to the next, because there’s often very little training — making the performance appraisal system unfair and inequitable. Some report that such unbalanced scoring actually demotivates and reduces creativity.

The rigidity of such a system is also an issue. Managers report that when they’re required to put employees in specific gradients for the sake of the bell curve requirements, teams suffer. It creates anxiety and risks further deterioration of job performance because an unhappy workforce is an unmotivated workforce.

We are biased by our beliefs and I, like most professionals, train in areas that reflect what we value. For me, sharing with organizations how to create blame-free and gossip-free workplace environments is a very high priority, so it’s not surprising that pre-assigning rankings based on a bell curve goes against my philosophy.

There is one more point: There should never be a surprise on a performance evaluation. If there is, it means that the employees did not get feedback in a timely manner, nor were they coached or trained to improve. Categorization often results in employees feeling blindsided because the criteria for placement on a bell curve is percentage, not necessarily performance. It describes groups as top and low performers, often because the adjacent category is full.

Gerri King, a Concord-based social psychologist and organizational consultant, is the author of “The Duh! Book of Management” and “Supervision: Dispelling Common Leadership Myths.”