Leadership culture in tech companies: The rediscovery of the whip
Tech companies like Microsoft are targeting “low performers” and swear by a performance culture. This already had fatal effects back then, says Axel Kannenberg.
(Image: Me dia/Shutterstock.com)
What have you actually achieved today? And what do you actually contribute to the success of the company? Excuse me for asking so directly, but according to numerous Sunday speeches on the state of the economy, we must finally return to a culture of performance. That's what SAP CEO Christian “Performance, performance, performance!” says, among others. Klein and uses the L-word in interviews with such insistence that you can't help but wonder whether SAP was the deeply relaxed country school for the rattling mill on the rushing stream before his aegis.
Klein has also prescribed an evaluation program for his company that classifies the workforce: Blue are the top performers, Green are still meeting expectations and Yellow need to be reined in so that they quickly step up their game. Same game at Microsoft. Here, the new head of HR, Amy Coleman, has introduced measures to “strengthen high performance and quickly address poor performance”. So-called low performers can be placed under a performance improvement plan that sets clear expectations and a timetable for improvement. Those who do not want this are welcome to agree to a termination agreement.
And Meta has long since reached the point where such programs usually end: Here, the bottom five percent are to be fired across the board in performance evaluations, as boss Mark Zuckerberg announced at the beginning of the year.
KPIs instead of real work
In the current situation, such measures are easy to introduce. There have already been several rounds of redundancies, the economy is cooling down and fewer new jobs are being advertised. In the absence of good alternatives, employees prefer to stay with their employer and are more likely to be forced into a corset. After all, it's hard to get people really enthusiastic about a task and performance from above. Blanket pressure, on the other hand, is. In this respect, the software group is no different from the slave galley: the principle of the whip is tried and tested, doesn't cost much and everyone understands it – at the latest with welts on their backs.
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Ultimately, however, the internal signal remains fatal: the company fundamentally distrusts its people, has to micromanage and set up some pseudo-objective key figures. Intrinsic motivation does not thrive in such an atmosphere. A positive corporate culture certainly does not. There is also a risk that people will take their salary as compensation for pain and shrug their shoulders and optimize their work based on stupid KPIs instead of doing the real work – that they might even have liked to do if they had been given the space and trust to do so.
Back to cannibal culture
And it's not exactly forward-looking, either: no economic downturn lasts forever. During the next big growth phase, the company realizes with a surprised Pikachu face that the motivated employees have been driven out or burned out and no new ones want to follow. Well, how could you when you're competing with the seventh circle of hell when it comes to employer image? Donnerknispel, nobody could have known that beforehand.
Yes, you could have known that beforehand. A company like Microsoft doesn't have to look back too far: in 2013, they scrapped just such an evaluation program. It was called Stack Ranking, was introduced by Steve Ballmer at the time and set fixed guidelines on how many people had to end up with the poorly rated. The unanimous conclusion of the reports at the time was that Stack Ranking had led to a toxic corporate culture that was hostile to teamwork. One observer wrote of a “cannibal culture”. So we really need to get back to that, do we?
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It is easier to repeat history than to learn from it. And so the pig cycle of performance culture must now be re-enacted so that the boardroom can feel its self-efficacy. I wish us a thick skin until the fact that such programs do a lot to a company's performance seeps through at the very top. Apart from improving it.
(axk)
