We never saw my youngest daughter, Veronica, after the first couple days of our recent holiday cruise.  You see, she signed up for the ship’s youth program.  The choice was hang out with Mom & Dad or her friends… we lost!!
 

The ship had an open dinner seating policy and it was fun to see Veronica dress up almost every night to go out and dine with her dozen or so friends in the formal dining room!
 

My wife Francine and I usually keep pretty much to ourselves when we go on cruises but not this one.  We couldn’t!  As we went on port tours, Veronica kept bumping into her many friends who were with their parents.  Thanks to our young socialite daughter we ended up meeting some very interesting people from all over the world!
 

Veronica became good friends with one very nice young girl from the UK who was living with her parents in Geneva.  We spent quite a bit of time with this girl’s parents. The father was a corporate lawyer who worked for a large US multinational.  We exchanged stories about working in foreign countries… him in the USA and Switzerland, myself in Ireland and England.  He told me that about a third of his caseload revolved around HR issues, specifically, performance management.

It turns out that performance management in the European Union (EU) is quite controversial, especially forced rankings. 
 

Forced rankings are when companies make managers evaluate the performance of their employees and assign a numeric value to each person.  GE’s Jack Welch was famous for making his managers divide talent into three groups: the top 20%, the middle 70%, and the bottom 10%.  And many of the bottom 10% were shown the door.
 

My lawyer friend told me that in the EU it is perfectly legal to evaluate and take action against someone who is not doing their agreed upon job.  However, problems start occurring when you take action against an employee simply because he or she falls into the bottom part of the forced ranking scale.
 

The reason is simple…
 

When an employer hires the employee, it is to do a defined set of tasks as outlined in a job description, not to compete against other employees, which is what forced rankings are really all about.  My friend also said that many of the cases he works on come from employees who feel they were discriminated against because of their age.
 

To me, this is another nail in the coffin for a fundamentally flawed way of treating people.  Employers in North America may have been able to get away with forced rankings in the past, but this will change as we adopt Europe’s more progressive outlook.
 

Companies should focus on improving the performance of ALL employees.  I believe the coming talent crisis is going to “force rank” companies; those that do not have enlightened HR policies and work cultures that attract, retain and engage employees will be left holding the short straw.