The all-too-human tendency is to be nice to people -- particularly people with whom you work and see daily. Why cause a fuss by giving a student a low grade when you can give him or her a satisfactory one? Why convert an acceptable employee into a hostile one when you can easily report that he or she meets or even exceeds expectations?
To restrain this behavior, universities constrain their instructors' ability to give high grades, and employers do the same to their managers. As president of General Electric, Jack Welch was famous for requiring his managers to rank 20 percent of their people as "A players," 80 percent as "B players" and 10 percent as "C players." The "A players" got showered with promotions, stock options and other material rewards, while the "C players" either improved or found other employment. To continuously improve performance, Welch believed that you had to get rid of your bottom 10 percent every year.
Your average public executive does not, however, have the flexibility to remove the bottom 10 percent. In fact, in most government jurisdictions it is difficult -- and, most importantly, very time-consuming -- to remove even the bottom one percent. Moreover, in most jurisdictions, it is impossible to shower even the top one percent with many extrinsic rewards. At best, public executives are allowed to sprinkle a few dollars on their very best employee or two.
Still, the annual performance appraisal is an ingrained ritual of organizational life. The forms must be created, purchased at Staples, or downloaded from a Web site. They must be filled out and returned by the prescribed date. And, although managers procrastinate until the very last hour, the forms are inevitably filled in.
Then come the depression and the protests. No one -- even many of the top performers -- likes his or her grade. Everyone thinks that he or she is above average. The psychological literature is full of studies in which people rate themselves well above average. My favorite example comes from school principals in New Jersey. They didn't just think they were above average. Seventy-two percent of those surveyed rated themselves in the state's top 10 percent. Impressive, huh?
Imagine what happens when you disabuse a few of these principals of their own sense of self-worth? What would happen when a forced ranking system informs 62 percent of New Jersey's principals -- and over 85 percent of those who think they are really hot stuff -- that they were nowhere as good as they think? After all, a finely tuned forced ranking system would inform nearly a third of those 72 percent who rank themselves in the top 10 percent that they are actually below average.
Would this motivate them to double their efforts to get back into the top 10 percent? Maybe. Maybe not. Obviously, their personal situation, psychological outlook, and organizational circumstance will also affect how hard they will work to improve their personal performance.
Of course, these principals have other options. Working harder or not at their current school are only two. They can also apply for a job at a less demanding school; after they looked at who got the top rankings, some of them could decide to leave their inner-city school and apply for jobs in some nice, middle-class suburb. Or they could leave for a state that had a less in-your-face approach to employee appraisal. Or they could decide to get out of the education business altogether.
And who might decide to leave? It might be those principals in the bottom 10 percent -- the ones Jack Welch wants to show the door. But it also might be some of those in the middle -- people who are very good but didn't get a superlative ranking and who would prefer to work in an environment that did not annually challenge their sense of self-worth.
And what about the willingness of those school principals who stay to cooperate with each other. Each one works in a different school, so cooperation among principals across schools may not be as frequent or essential as is cooperation among teachers within schools. Nevertheless, society -- and students in particular -- would like these principals to help each other.
Sure their schools are different, their students are different, their communities are different. Nevertheless, school principals face a variety of common, core problems. For example, given what the research tells us, school principals need to engage their students' parents in their education. Schools contribute to their students' learning, but not as much as parents. Yet it is not obvious how a principal can get parents to help students with their homework (particularly if the parents are not comfortable with the material themselves).
As citizens, we want principals to help each other learn how to solve this important problem. We don't want them hoarding their secrets, just so they can get a higher ranking.
All management initiatives have consequences -- both of the intended and unintended variety. Indeed, every initiative is developed to achieve its intended and obviously desirable consequences. Still, there are other possible consequences -- perhaps a few that are not so desirable -- and someone ought to worry about them.
Thus, before any agency adopts a new initiative, it ought to gather a few of its most notorious skeptics (or maybe a few teenagers) to dissect the proposal and suggest what possibly might go wrong. Sure, things might go precisely as planned. But then again, the motivational assumptions upon which the initiative is based might not be quite the way real humans respond.
After all, you and I -- plus all of your staff and all of my students -- all of us know in our hearts: "I, of course, am well above average."
