![]() Over time, this establishes a false choice between seeking either A) an opportunity to grow and learn and develop in valuable ways on a high-performing team OR B) an opportunity to be rated highly and stand out above the crowd. And even though that person who is “least effective” might, in fact, perform better than a “highly valued” employee in another low-performing team, they are put on the same scale. If you end up working with a group of people that are performing incredibly well, there still has to be a “least effective” out of that bunch. When LE and URA quotas are pushed down to every manager - especially those that manage a team less than a 100 (or so), it creates a disincentive to work on high-performing teams. What I’m most concerned with is the substantial negative externalities unintentionally caused by the system. I agree with the importance of properly training managers and can understand the motivation behind the company’s quota mentality as well. You have a gift for unbiased assessment Ethan. Thank you for raising this difficult to discuss topic and examining it in a transparent and balanced fashion. Read a more thorough treatment of this topic on Medium, linked below. I hope that with Amazon's new Leadership Principle to be Earth's Best Employer will lead to changes. I spend my time now coaching leaders and posting in places like this to try to teach the missing skills to managers so that they can do better. But the process causes an incredible amount of anger, pain, and public distrust. They do "work" in that they force action and often many of the people pushed into departure are among the less productive at the company. There is an opportunity to train and support these managers much more deeply. But Amazon has more than 35,000 managers, over half of whom are either new to management or new to the company within two years. Even the charities I work with do fire people. In the cases when helping reasonably proves impossible after an honest try, managers need to be trained handle the painful, awkward messaging they otherwise prefer to avoid.Īddressing performance is a real need in any kind of company. Where I think Amazon falls short is in training managers to do the hard work of assessing performance fairly and then helping employees to succeed if possible. The goals came back in force the next year. The result was that managers quickly found it was easier to just move a problem to another unsuspecting team rather than to address it. ![]() Amazon experimented one year with removing some of the rules pushing for these goals. In short, Amazon believes that it is important to remove unproductive or damaging workers and believes (with some evidence) that some managers will not do this unless pushed to do so. It's much too easy to simply say "oh, Amazon is a big company and doesn't care." Those comments will come but it is worth looking deeper. So why does Amazon keep a hated system that draws frequent public criticism? In fact, often managers dislike the system even more than the employees. Please do not confuse my explaining what the company does with personal support.Īmazon has goals for rating people "Least Effective" (the bottom rating) and driving what they call "Unregretted Attrition." It should not be hard to figure out why a system that both labels people with these unattractive labels and then forces managers to hit quotas of each label would be unpopular. I do believe that I understand why the company does what it does. Since I know this topic will draw passionate flames and not all of you will read the full post on Medium, let me say clearly that I do not think Amazon handles performance review and what they call "Unregretted Attrition" well. Therefore, this post is a short summary of my full thoughts, which are in the Medium post linked in my comment below. I want to try to address this contentious hot topic, but LinkedIn posts are impossibly short to cover it thoroughly. Why do some people hate Amazon performance reviews so much?
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