Bottom 10% Shaved Every Year Forever

“In every evaluation and reward system, we break our population down into three categories: the top 20%, the high-performance middle 70% and the bottom 10%. The top 20% must be loved, nurtured, and rewarded in the soul and wallet, because they are the ones who make magic happen. Losing one of these people must be held up as a leadership sin – a real failing. The top 20% and middle 70% are not permanent labels. People move between them all the time. However, the bottom 10%, in our experience, tend to remain there. A company that bets its future on its people must remove that lower 10%, and keep removing it every year: always raising the bar of performance and increasing the quality of its leadership.”

“Not removing that bottom 10% [of worse performers] early in their careers is not only a management failure, but false kindness as well – a form of cruelty – because inevitably a new leader will come into a business and take out that bottom 10% right away, leaving them – sometimes midway through a career – stranded and having to start over somewhere else.”