We abolished the system where your manager has to place you and your colleagues on an untruthful scale.

Now your managers can tell the truth, but your managers’ manager places you and your colleagues on an untruthful scale! Very different!

I feel like a lot of companies do this. Managers are usually incentivized to give their reports good rating so they can show how good they are at developing talent, so companies force them to grade on a curve.

It’s called forced distribution and it’s bad for the workers and for the company. It’s far easier to sabotage others in your workgroup to bring them a lower/average rating than to try to get that one excellent rating that is probably going to go to the managers golf buddy anyway.

Quietly? Lol. My manager told me to my face. He said upper management only allowed so many “exceeds expectations” regardless of performance. He never bullshitted me. Miss that boss.

I’ve known several people in management in my industry (I’ve changed jobs a fair amount plus I’m in a consulting industry) who became managers and then either self demoted or moved over to equivalent technical roles specifically because they were forced to basically lie and say their great employees were average or even below average, couldn’t give bonuses that matched performance, and couldn’t give raises that matched performance.

It literally made them depressed to have to treat hard working people unfairly. So they stopped doing it.

Now that just brought the question to my mind: what does that mean about the people who do that and keep doing it? Are the just psychopaths? Sociopaths? Evil? Trapped?

I think the important thing to do is find the people who are forcing these dishonest review systems and challenge then directly on why they’re making managers lie about employees performance. Contact the ombudsman if they have one and point out the dishonesty.