The wave of layoffs over the last two years has been on my mind for quite a while.
While the scale is visible, what is hidden from most of us is what preceded each one. In many cases, there would have been no conversation, no review, no warning. Just a calendar invite and a separation agreement.
The modern appraisal system, in most organizations, is not really a performance evaluation. It is an adjustment in the compensation budget, wrapped with labels of personal development. Your manager walks into the “calibration” with a fixed bonus pool, a mandated distribution curve, and a finite number of “Exceeds Expectations”/”Champion”/”MVP” slots to hand out.
What happens in that room is closer to a negotiation than objective assessment. How much your manager fights for you, and how far that fight goes, depends less on what you delivered and more on the maneuverability they have. You receive the result of that negotiation as feedback on your growth areas.
Here’s the unvarnished truth though. The system is not failing at its job. It is doing its job precisely.
Forced distribution is a financial instrument, not a philosophy of performance. It guarantees that total compensation stays within a predictable band regardless of who created how much value for the evaluated period. Stack ranking assumes that performance distributes along a bell curve. In most teams, a small number of people generate outsized value, and the people who quietly enable those people rarely surface on any dashboard. Applying a bell curve to that reality does not raise the bar. It manufactures failure where none existed.
This approach holds up reasonably well in stable, repetitive work where output is easy to measure. In a scaling organization, where people depend on each other to deliver anything meaningful, it quietly dismantles the trust and collaboration that made the team worth keeping in the first place.
The obsession with productivity compounds this further. At scales beyond the point where leaders can no longer feel the pulse of the work directly, they create tools that convert human effort into legible numbers. Activity tracking. Output scoring. Focus time metrics. The developer who spent a week unblocking three teammates shows up as a laggard. The one who closed tickets loudly gets the rating.
The tools measured motion. They missed what was real. We went with visible performance.
Raising the bar (every year, in many cases) inside a forced distribution solves none of this. It is the organizational equivalent of raising the poverty line and announcing it as progress.
What this creates, over time, is a trust gap that is structural rather than cultural. Leadership continues to speak the language of meritocracy. The organization lives the reality of managed headcount costs. People stop believing what they are told, because they have been paying attention long enough to see the pattern and are too tired and apprehensive to even be honestly cynical.
Yet, nothing changes. Companies demand precision where it suits them. Miss a revenue target and someone is accountable by end of week. But the systems governing how people are evaluated and let go operate on a different standard. The damage is slow, diffuse, and hard to pin on anyone. So they persist.
Flawed by design on one side. Precise to three decimal places on the other. That asymmetry is not an accident.
I have been thinking about how to surface that gap and address it in growing organizations, before it becomes an irreversible fracture. That thinking is what Course Corrections is about – a biweekly newsletter on organizational reality, starting with this piece.