RE: How to combat ordinal ranking of employees

[Rip Stauffer <rstauffer@bluefirepartners.com>]

Tony,

A number of good suggestions have come from some of the other DENizens; a
lot of them wonderful. It sounds to me as if your manager's manager has very
little grounding in the System of Profound Knowledge; that basic lack of
understanding may make some of these suggestions incomprehensible to that
person. If you can get your manager's manager's attention for an hour, I
would suggest leading off with the Red Bead experiment. Give it a day or two
to let the ideas sink in, then follow with (maybe) Myron's idea or one of
the others appropriate to the individual. 

Unless this person learns, at a very basic level, that you can't separate
the performance of the person from the performance of the system, it seems
very unlikely that appeals to logic will help. Most managers base their
conclusion on faulty premises. It takes a completely different mental model,
mindset, paradigm, point of view (take your pick) to understand the harm of
what this manager is trying to do. In my experiment, the Red Bead is very
effective at beginning to pry open the doors of that understanding and
surfacing the flaws in the more traditional viewpoint.

Good luck....keep us posted.

Best regards to all,

Rip

Rip Stauffer, Senior Consultant
BlueFire Partners
1300 Fifth St. Towers, 150 So. Fifth St.
Minneapolis, MN 55402
612-344-1027
rstauffer@bluefirepartners.com