Tackling The Bell Curve Conundrum

Recently I met with a CEO of a very innovative company and during the discussion, he said, “I can lose anything and everything except my people. I have built this team over a decade.”

The reason I took up this topic here because we mostly think about product and services, infrastructure, security, cloud, etc. but tend to forget people - who are the most strategic assets. No business-centric CIO can choose to ignore “people” if the organisation is driven by “purpose”. Happy employees build happy customers. The views expressed here are my own and may go against popular sentiments and I am raising this to have a healthy debate.

Raising The Bar – The Bell Curve Way

For over a decade, I faced bell curve in various organisations. I wondered on efficacy of this in making the organisation better. It is not always easy to implement the bell curve. If your organisation or team has a largely good workforce, you have to look at certain other parameters to moderate the curve so that you distribute them under the given distribution. During these moderations, while theoretically everyone is equal; there is a possibility that some are more equal than others. At times I see bell curve being implemented in small teams of excellent people and I wonder how this can work. I have observed in my experience those high performance people who have been pushed down because of perceived attributes, feel de-motivated or feel victimised.

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The basic premise of bell curves is to raise the performance bar in the organisation. While organisations that follow the bell curve think that by eliminating the lower end of the curve, they are raising the bar; in practice attrition happens on the other end as well. There are two ends of bell curve – over performers and under performers. Those who are outliers at the lower end find their way out; those who are smart outliers at the other end find themselves culturally not in sync of the rest of organisation and this results in their attrition. Attrition of high performers who feel they have been pushed down also takes place. The bell curve creates pressure on individuals to perform in isolation and can also cause concern for team excellence, engagement and trust. The attrition of over performers far undermines the benefit of eliminating under performers and if we sum it all, the net result is lowering the bar.

To test my understanding, I also referred to some of the interesting research and this vindicated my observation but with different point of view with specific data points. As per one of the researches, pay for performance will work to certain extent only but not a solution as you cannot continuously raise bar. Unfortunately, the herd of organisations continues with mindless copying of so called “good practice” or “best practice”.

Potential Vs Performance

My experience in engaging with people at both professional and personal levels has given me important insights into behaviour patterns which are correlated and can be best used in the professional life. I found my discussions on personal attributes yielded more results then professional attributes of individuals. I found people are generally happy when aspirations and passions are combined with performance. A cocktail of passion with performance creates a deadly result in terms of organisation value.

We often mix performance and potential which are separate. Even if we do separate the two, we use the performance appraisal as a tool to measure performance, but mostly we do not know how to measure potential of individuals. While KRAs only represent a very small percentage of capabilities, my observation has been that largely the potential remains untapped and ignored. This is one big reason why people leave as they do not see they are leveraged properly due to ignorance or otherwise.

Understanding of potential can happen through open engagement at personal and professional levels. This can also happen through social analytics as well. While we talk about analytics for our business and customers, I would like to draw attention of IT Chiefs towards analytics of “human capital”. The footprint in social and professional networks or elsewhere in Google is one additional aspect of knowing what people are capable of doing today. If we have some kind of search and analytics based on available platforms, we can generate meaningful information about our people and align them towards goals based on their capabilities. If it starts happening, in my view the bell curve will become redundant exercise. In my opinion, equal weightage should be given to performance and meaningful social impact and influence. The future of employment will be towards impact and influence and people who create it are future leaders and should also be able to impact the business positively. In place of bell curve, we can raise the bar by aligning passion towards the organisational goals using the appraisal system more positively to engage people more with business.

In conclusion, we need to understand our people better to raise the bar and conventional wisdom to work with bell curve may prove to be futile. Technology today is fully capable of delivering this and CIOs have greater responsibility to focus on people and empower HR chiefs and people managers to take right decisions on potential and performance and decide on the right strategy.

Reference:

_ “Punishing by Rewards: When the Performance Bell-curve Stops Working for You” by Chintan Vaibhav, Ali Khakifirooz, Martine Devos
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