I only know what I’ve read in the newspapers about KPMG’s boss’s ‘stop moaning’ embarrassment.
But one detail hidden away in those reports is disquiet about the firm measuring staff performance against a ‘forced distribution curve’.
Some of us know this device better as the ‘bell curve’. Either way, it’s imposed by people higher up the management pyramid to make life easier for themselves, without much thought about whether it makes the slightest sense to anyone else.
It’s an HR equivalent of those colleagues who still type messages all in lower case and with only the occasional nod to punctuation: its easier for me – youll have to find a way to live with it.
The bell curve brings an especially tone-deaf approach to the art of managing people. It insists on symmetry. For every ‘High performer’ you have in your team, you have to label someone else as below standard. You know that real life isn’t like that. But for the people creating spreadsheets who deal in numbers, not names, it makes their task oh-so-much simpler. If only human beings would just comply, form an orderly queue and fit neatly into their pigeonholes, appraisals and pay reviews would be much more straightforward.
KPMG’s chairman has apologised to his colleagues for the words he used. He refers to having ‘endured [his] own experiences’. Whatever else he’s gone through, those experiences include being admitted to hospital last March with coronavirus, and for that he deserves a lot of sympathy. Let’s just hope, though, that he doesn’t think his experience places him at some point on a wellbeing scale relative to others in his firm. All those human colleagues will have their own unique feelings about the challenges they face (as they did before Covid and as they will when it’s a thing of the past).
Doing without them might make management more complex, but when it comes to assessing human beings, forced distribution curves aren’t up to the job.