I had a conversation with my manager that made me realise something was deeply wrong with how we were evaluating performance. I’d been reading about companies abandoning stack ranking systems, so I brought it up.
“Other companies are getting rid of stack ranking,” I said, showing him some articles.
“Why do you think we’re doing stack ranking?” he replied. “That’s not us.”
I was confused. “Our department ranks everyone - with quotas - into performance buckets: Great, Okay, and Subpar.”
“We do not have quotas per rank!” he insisted.
“So, everyone can be rated the same? We could all get ‘Great’?”
“No,” he said.
I paused. “Wait, so we’re basically being stack ranked here?”
The silence that followed told me everything I needed to know. Even the managers implementing these systems didn’t recognise what they were doing.
I’d been working in environments with forced ranking systems for over a decade. Every year, managers would gather to distribute employees into predetermined categories. Top performers got the highest ratings and bonuses. Average performers got standard treatment. Low performers got improvement plans or were let go.
The system forced managers to rank people against each other rather than evaluating them against actual job requirements. It created artificial scarcity where there didn’t need to be any. Good teams were punished because someone had to be ranked lower, even if everyone was performing well.
I watched talented people become demotivated because they knew advancement required others to fail. I saw managers spend more time justifying rankings than actually helping people develop. I witnessed the gaming of the system - people avoiding collaboration because helping others succeed could hurt your own ranking.
The research backed up what I was seeing. Companies with forced ranking showed lower employee engagement scores. They had higher voluntary turnover among mid-level performers. The systems were creating exactly the wrong incentives.
Microsoft abandoned their system in 2013 after realising it damaged collaboration. Adobe moved to a “Check-In” system emphasising teamwork. GE shifted focus to team building and development. Ford abandoned it amid class action lawsuits. The list went on and on.
The companies that never adopted these systems or quickly abandoned them - Google, Spotify, Buffer, Patagonia - focused on team performance, individual growth, and values-based assessment. They recognised that forcing competition where collaboration was needed just didn’t work.
The problem wasn’t that these companies wanted lower standards. It was that they realised stack ranking was actually lowering standards by discouraging the behaviours that drive real success - collaboration, innovation, risk-taking, and helping others grow.
What I learned is that performance management systems should fit the organisation’s culture and business needs, not force artificial distributions. The best systems focus on development over ranking, provide frequent feedback instead of annual reviews, and recognise that manager skill is critical to success.
The companies that made the transition successfully didn’t just remove rankings - they invested in training managers to have better performance conversations, established clear evaluation criteria, and created multiple feedback channels. They aligned performance management with business objectives and regularly assessed how well the system was working.
What I ended up doing was looking for organisations that recognised employees as whole people rather than numbers on a curve. The momentum toward more humane and effective performance management continues to grow. The question isn’t whether organisations will eventually change, but how quickly they’ll adapt to attract and retain the best talent.
The key insight is that abandoning forced rankings isn’t about lowering standards - it’s about raising them in a way that brings out the best in people and teams. The future belongs to organisations that can balance high performance standards with human-centred approaches to development and recognition.