Runing Amuck

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's recent memo to employees declares (according to Business Insider): 

I've decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster. 

This brings back Jack Welch's famous (or infamous) practice of firing low performers at GE, and will inspire a new round of corporate-type independent school board members to suggest the same at their schools. But, there are compelling reasons to reconsider the often-lauded practice of automatically terminating employees who fall into the bottom tier of performance rankings. Hasty termination of lower performers can be both ethically problematic and counterproductive to organizational success. 

First, performance metrics often fail to capture the full scope of an employee's contributions. Traditional performance measures focus on easily quantifiable outputs while sometimes missing important collaborative, cultural, and supportive contributions that may be vital to team success. Employees who score lower on individual metrics might be enabling higher performance from their colleagues through knowledge sharing, mentoring, or maintaining important institutional memory. Keep in mind the valuable role played by a baseball player who is better for the clubhouse than on the field. 

The practice also ignores the significant role that environmental and systemic factors play in individual performance. Lower performance scores may result from inadequate training, unclear expectations, poor management, or misalignment between an employee's skills and their role. Terminating the employee without investigating and addressing these underlying causes merely perpetuates systemic problems while incurring the substantial costs of turnover. 

Furthermore, the threat of termination for lower performance can create a culture of fear that stifles innovation and collaboration. When teachers feel their jobs are constantly at risk, they're less likely to take creative risks, admit mistakes, or share knowledge with colleagues - all behaviors that are essential for organizational learning and improvement. This defensive posture can actually depress overall performance while increasing stress and burnout. 

A more constructive approach would be to view lower performance as an opportunity for development and organizational learning. This might involve having candid conversations to understand performance barriers, providing additional support and training, or exploring alternative roles that better match the employee's strengths. Not only is this more humane—something that is crucial in a humanistic organization such as a school--it's often more cost-effective than the cycle of termination and replacement. 

Of course, there are legitimate cases where termination is appropriate after good-faith efforts at improvement have failed. However, making this the annual response to lower performance metrics risks damaging both organizational culture and long-term success.