I work in a company that every 18 months or so hires some consultants to come in and examine some department to tell them why they’re not doing their job correctly.
Then, the consultants file a report, and management does whatever they were planning to do before the consultants were brought in. I assume that same phenomenon occurs elsewhere in Corporate America.
In one roundtable discussion with some other employees and a consultant, the subject was our annual review and evaluations. One of us made the “bell curve” comment–that on either end you have a relatively small number of outperformers and underperformers, while the bulk in the middle are just doing their jobs.
She said “Oh, that’s what the social engineers want you to believe.” BTW, she was one. The last place I worked, we graded things on the “J” curve, apparently so-named because of its resemblance to the letter. “These people (at the bottom of the ‘J’ were the low performers, and we dealt with them accordingly. The others were the high performers.”
Could someone help me out on this? It sounds like some social engineering mumbo-jumbo.