TopGrading...Does your Company Insitute this?

Bootsie

I have a very serious owner that wants to institute Topgrading for all employees including executive management. If your company uses this as a tool, I would love to know how you implement and how you get your A, B, and C players list. Anything you do that you could pass along, I would most appreciative. My email is: [email]cathycook@myevergreen.com[/email].
Thanks!

System

what the hell is "topgrading"??

drehil

Thanks for asking that question. I have no idea either....thought I was the only one in the dark. Looking forward to the response.

mbeam

Not sure if it's the same thing but read a book on this a few years ago that had the same title. It reminded me of the Jack Welch GE way of doing business. You promote your A's, try to move the B's into an A position or retain their B status and move the C's out of your company.

Guess it depends upon your culture and how you perceive your workforce. Isn't that what we should be doing everyday? Also, have some faith that you're hiring the right people to begin with.

If you're hiring good fits for your organization and continuing to grow, hopefully if they're not a fit in one role that you may find another one elsewhere in the organization that is a better fit for them. That way everyone wins!

The topgrading method to me is too cut & dry as would hate to let good people go based on a premise that so many have to fall into each category. Sounds like a surefire way to end up with too many leaders or wanna be leaders and not enough folks doing the work. In every company there is repetitive work that needs to be done and think this method would boot out these team members.

ACU Frank

Nothing beats designing the Peter Principle into your organization...

morrisg

Topgrading is basically sorting your employee performers into the best "A” top 10% of your employees lesser skilled "B"’s and those who are the poorest performers "C" ‘s. The “C” employees would go, “B” ‘s would either develop into “A” ‘s or they also would go until you have all “A” ‘s. However, this is really an updated version of force ranking. Classic force ranking requires managers to rank employees within their departments from the highest performer to poorest performer, used often for layoffs or promotion consideration.

However in 2000, the Ford Motor Company instituted a forced-ranking system (Top-Grading) that attracted two class-action lawsuits alleging discrimination on the basis of age, gender and race. In 2002, the suits were settled for $10.5 million and Ford dropped forced ranking.

Brad Smart does the best job of showing how to do this and page 16 and 17 of his book "Topgrading" he quantifies this well. I would also suggest you go to the article. I’ve included a link that will take you there. On page 6 of this article he shows the same summary chart that he has in his text.


[url]http://www.smartandassoc.com/pdf/TopgradingTheOrganization.pdf[/url]