I heard what makes the new evaluation system different is 15 percent have to be marked low performer while in the past it was 10 percent and that it has always been stacked. Is that true? It seems like there are many more steps for managers this time. The bonus thing isn’t a big deal when the bonus was often nothing to begin with
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Turns out they started laying off even top 15%. They just want to shed anyone. My old team's highest performer was laid off.
This is all about IBM not wanting to pay their employees bonuses, force attrition or put people on PIP. All leads to resource action. Nothing to do with performance. I guess IBM likes to litigate.
@je people like RT the co-k su-ka?
@js He is a person of trash
@qf You mean their right mind :-). Yes this may be nonsense to you. I know that it keeps me in check about the world and how cruel it can be.
@qc: You are laying it thick. None in his right mind believes in the nonsense.
@q6 This is an interesting insight. Last summer the stock price was in the $250ish range. Remember how a bunch of IBMers were starting to celebrate on LinkedIn when the stock hit $300? Now the price seems to be hanging in there, not moving that far left or right.
If what you are saying is true, the BOD simply wants more control because they don’t believe the ELT and their teams will be able to grow the company to where our stock price is 1.5X to 2X greater than it is now or back to where the company was before Ginni took the reins in 2011 / 2012 (which I believe was $100B). This is where the BOD and large shareholders will make some very serious, uber cash. And they want it yesterday.
The stacked rankings is the first of what I imagine many steps to drive a massive workforce transformation that will support the BOD’s growth objectives. Here my predictions:
Those who fall in top 15% - Unlike the good old days where they would be able to jump somewhere else for mo’ money, they will clutch on to this and find a way to work through burnout and stress to hang in there.
Those who fall in 75% - This fat belly will slowly get trimmed over time in a prioritized manner. Start with Shared Services first and then slowly gut the GTM teams. This group may have thousands of people who truly did the work to be the top 15% but got passed over due to politics, lack of visibility, etc.. Regardless of the state of the job market, these people will rightfully walk away and create their own path. These are the kinds of people we should all get to know.
Those in the bottom 15% - This is the scariest bucket, as this can be……anyone. At first I thought it was low performers based on the framework set in place, but who is to that it isn’t about NOT performing against expectations that were never communicate clearly to you.
So there will lots of attrition and RAs in the coming quarters, making room to pay some sweet salaries to folks from other tech, consulting, industries who can make IBM a $100B+ company yesterday.
@ph, @q0: I assume, it is the same person.
Your comment is trying to divert the discussion from the real problem and shift the blame.
The real problem is India. Jobs have been snatched away from Americans and given to Indians. In recent years, Indians became arrogant, in many instances, I heard from my Indian colleagues, the same work done by the Americans engineers working the projects I drive can be done by Indians for a fraction of the cost. With the Indian cabal at the top, jobs have been massively outsourced to India, while Americans are thrown away to the streets.
@q0 not until last summer. This board action shook the senior brass up very badly when the board directly took over such details. If you have connections, probe any band A that you know and watch their pained body language as they avert the question. It’s not to do with India; it is to do with an emerging loss of confidence in management’s ability to command. That loss is not good.
@ph, The last paragraph of your comment is pure nonsense. The board of directors does not get involved in the day to day running of the company. The board set policies and directions. So, if you are trying to absolve the Indian id1t at the top and his cabal, you are failing miserably.
IBM has been stack ranked every year since the mid-90s. For 3 or 4 of those years, corporate HR declined to impose quotas or distributional guidance but the individual Sr. VPs imposed them on their own in those years. One year, HR challenged a Sr. VP for this and lost resoundingly. I was in management when this started and only recently retired from management, so I had a front row seat.
What is different this year is that the IBM CEO was told that he had no influence over the quotas. The quotas were set directly by the board of directors and IBM’s top executives were warned not to question any aspect of the new policy.
@ky He-l yeah!
@ky Damn right!
The Works Councils (Unions) in Germany and Holland have not agreed to using this latest IBM performance system. They are completely unaffected by this 15/75/15 %. ranking system. How lucky these employees are to be protected from IBM's disgraceful behaviour towards its workforce. It would be great to have sight of the Works Councils grounds and assessment of IBM's performance management system.
Time to raise up folks! Stop letting the Execs bullying you… we can show them we have a backbone.
@j9 Albany has had serious integrity issues for many years, and meaningful change will require replacing Huiming and his team.
We will all find out next week won’t we!
There are some who can’t be ranked low performer due to knowing all the gossip of higher ups it seems (they are untouchable) and have been with IBM several decades and some of them are very low performers
@jd IBM leadership seems to have had it with mediocrity, so I am pretty sure those folks will not be protected by their buddies who will want to save their own as--s.
People can badmouth execs all day here. Some of you have given them clever names, as if you are bratty kids at a playground. Fact of the matter is IBM has steered the ship in a promise direction and they will only want the right people on board.
@StackedRankingsAreOkay problems the stacked rankings don’t target those folks with the typos in the decks etc. Those people are protected by their buddies. Those same buddies use the stack rankings to clear the path for their guys and favorites. So in the end the stack rankings will give you MORE of what you are complaining about
I’ve never understood why everyone is in such a tizzy regarding stacked rankings. This was bound to happen at some point at IBM, given some of the average to below average performance that absolutely pervades this culture. How many highly banded folks do you know who can speak coherently about our strategy, core products, and history? How many opportunities take months and months to progress? I’ve seen typos, lack of logical thought on decks, poorly designed and explained demos….what is going on here?
Organizations have every right to demand more from their employees. We can either rise to the challenge. Or we can just walk away.
In Albany there was never a mass layoff before this past November and we had quite a number let go with PIPs (we didn’t have stacked ratings for a number of years but even recently had people dismissed with PIPs not through the layoff but through firing).
@ht exactly they we-ponized it to give them justification and legal protection.
@h6 good point. In the US, getting a low rating in the Performance Review some times requires a Manager to put the employee on a PIP. The PIP is then very tough to successfully complete and when the employee does not meet the PIP, they are put on the layoff list.
Managers know this is a terrible situation for their team members and everyone is under alot of pressure. While this form of Performance Management is reprehensible, from a Legal standpoint is is sound because IBM can point to 2 written pieces of the communication with the employee that they were not meeting expectations which is justification for a layoff.
@g7 - Your comment is taken verbatim from the HR handbook provided to low line managers (bottom feeders) to parrot the masters orders. Reality is different. Many top performers were let go recently. The reason, they are expensive and the work can be done cheaper in India.
They have we-ponized this system to eliminate people they view as undesirable or disruptive. Actual performance is largely irrelevant. The system has been deliberately repurposed as a tool to quietly cull the herd, hidden behind a benign, bureaucratic name that gives leadership cover and plausible deniability.
That’s why you see people let go whose departures make no sense at all—often some of the highest contributors on their teams. Not coincidentally, these individuals also tend to be the most vocal: the ones who ask uncomfortable questions, point out inconsistencies, and challenge decisions that don’t add up.
IBM leadership doesn’t want thinkers. They want compliance. They want sheep. They want people who won’t question contradictions in words versus actions—people they can control, leverage, and exploit for their own advancement.
So the next time you’re required to take those annual business conduct and ethics trainings, remember this: they’ve already figured out a workaround. The system itself has been bent to serve ends it was never meant for.
What’s most troubling is how little outrage this generates. People should be upset and angry about this. And HR is not ignorant of it. They’re fully aware—and in many cases, they enable it and even encourage such nefarious manipulation of their own system.
Most companies don’t need a paper trail for layoffs and don’t base it on performance. Most fire people on PIPs. Are the “low performers” not getting fired?
Manager here. Sorry to share that Stack ranking with a Forced distribution curves are ways to (1) Limit how much IBM pays people by ranking them lower, (2) Helping IBM establish a paper trail to layoff people.
Here's how it basically works:
Top Contributor (5-15% of employees) = Big wigs know your name, outside of your project/team, in a good way. To get this rating, your Manager's Manager needs to be able to defend this rating and sing your praises and site specific examples of how you helped move the business forward. And other execs at that level need to agree.
Above Average (15% of employees) = Big wigs know your name on your project/your team, in a good way.
Average (~70-75% of employees) = You did your job and may have put in alot of effort but no one knew or could recall any of your contributions specifically.
Bottom Contributor (5-15% of employees) = You did not achieve your goals and/or you are unfortunately in the wrong place at the wrong time and your unit is getting ready for layoffs. So they need to start a paper trail to justify laying you off within the next 12 months or less.
I was a manager. They left performance evaluations up to us, let us determine distributions of bonuses and raises, etc. now they mandated 15% low performers and capped high performers. They had us push those metrics up to upper management (VP level) who used it for layoffs. We also had to make a big ranking chart for who was being cut. They were cutting people that had little to no "growth opportunity" and were regularly receiving raises and bonuses. They also denied bonuses to anyone low performer while previously you could distribute bonuses even to low performers. They neutered managers and hijacked a lot of that autonomy that made being an IBM manager tolerable. It was decent for a bit but it's outright toxic. I am at another company now and it's amazing the difference not feeling like your company is gaslighting you constantly.
@dq exactly
@dq what was our previous system then?
Who ever decided to bring back this ancient and disproven style should be marked as a low performer. It doesn’t work and is just lazy work on their part.
@ce is this how low performer was last year and the only difference is it’s fifty percent more people or is there more to the difference in the systems
It is stupid and even not allowed in some countries. IBM's definition of low performance suggests not being able to peform properly, which may result in PIP and dismissal. They should label it differently. But then again, they will seek excuses to people go.
Why did they bring this style back?
Stacked rankings is more that just allocating x% as low performers. We did have real stacked rankings for years and finally eliminated the worst because it is so toxic. But it seems to be coming back. In the bad old days, we had something that I think was called Team Based Decision Making (TBDM.) These were just horrible where at least at the third line level, every single person had to be compared to every other person. So you had a fully ordered list from highest performer to lowest. Not only was it a large waste of resources, it was also completely depressing.
When stacked rankings (especially when a fully ordered list is required) I'm not sure how you can really build team chemistry. We can all go to team lunches etc., but basically we are all at war with everyone else. If you do well, I do badly.
@OP can Alvind, Krabanaugh and the Pipmunks be labelled as low performers (they are low to mediocre performers) ? That will solve a lot of problems for the stack ranking.