EN 70: Raising the bar or raising the floor?

“Raising the bar” is a tricky phrase. What does it mean to the person saying it? I immediately get a visceral reaction, while the context associated with it manifests in my brain. I’m going to go with what “raising the bar” means to me, my own interpretation and the way I’ve seen the phrase frequently used.

A world where, instead of the bar being raised, the floor is, that’s what I’d like to imagine. Such an idea would be more transformative, to companies and society. In fact, there’s no need to imagine a universe where raising the bar happens, we can look around and see plenty of examples. The discourse and management practice in which high performers are desirable and low performers are fired already exists, we just need to look at the vitality curve, pioneered by Jack Welch or the “up or out” approach.

Jack Welch’s idea was to fire the bottom 10%, the “C” players, which are non-producers. That way, we only have high performers, the “A” and “B” players. I’ll leave it to the reader to imagine the impact of such a system, and how it would feel as a worker. Wait, there’s more, do you remember Intuit laying off 1800 employees and labelling 1050 of them as “underperformers”? There’s a real impact of labelling a worker as a low performer, not only when they go out to the market again, but on their sense of self-worth. Jonathon Colman said it best in his reaction to the news:

If we regularly lay off the bottom performers, doesn’t that mean that people who once were high performers will be tagged as underperforming by no fault of their own?

As Jonathon Colman wrote, there are many reasons for underperforming, many are not the fault of the employee. In fact, there are many a people labelled as such that will flourish in a different environment.

When a plant withers, I tend to it, check the soil and if it has enough nourishment, sun, water, space, or any other factors that might hinder its growth, I don’t immediately blame the plant and throw it away.

Raising the bar is exclusionary and individualistic by design. The requirements to entry or to keep being in the group get tougher. It looks like a viable solution, if only reality was sufficiently simple and there was a sure-fire way to identify what better looks like. Unfortunately, we tend to do a bad job anyway and end up raising no bar, we just replace the bar with a contorted shape that most people won’t match.

If it hasn’t been clear by now, my opinion about raising the bar is not great. I don’t think the phrase has generally a good connotation—or impact—and it’s an excuse to ignore the system in which people work and live.

Instead of only focusing on the individuals, I rather focus more on the teams, groups, the water in which the fish swim. Give me a team that performs at a high level over a high performer individual. What makes a high-performance team is greater than the sum of its individuals. Instead of raising the bar, we could raise the floor, making the environment the most conducive for doing great, sustainable and happy work, that removes impediments and encourages collaboration, trust, knowledge sharing, creativity, experimentation, fast feedback…

I’ll leave it at that for this week. I haven’t covered the reality that, no matter the environment, bad behaviour or “underperformance” can still exist and something needs to be done about it. Another unanswered question for today is: what would a company and a society that raises the floor look like?

Interesting links

• Stop inventing product problems; start solving customer problems (Pavel Samsonov)

• Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported (Eliza Strickland Mark Harris)

• How Designers Destroyed the World (Mike Monteiro)