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Low-performer quotas can lead to some “mea culpa” moments for managers — especially if a manager has been telling their team they’re all aces, says startup founder Stefan Mai.
Mai, who cofounded Hello Interview, previously worked as a senior engineering manager at Meta and a software development manager at Amazon. Both workplaces have instructed managers to be stricter in how they review employees, which has sometimes led to cuts for “low performers” or placements on performance improvement plans.
Low-performer quotas typically require managers to label a certain percentage of their teams as underperformers. The quotas can be a way for a company to push managers to expect excellence across their teams, hold stragglers accountable, and deliver the kind of critical feedback that some managers may have avoided messaging.
Those quotas can also lead to a whole lot of heartache when a manager feels their team is performing at its best, Mai said on “The Peterman Pod.”
Mai described a hypothetical “worst scenario” for a manager: They’ve spent the lead-up to the review cycle praising their team’s hard work, only to get an instruction from their director that “somebody’s got to be in that low bucket.”
“Now you’ve to go change your tack,” Mai said. “Those sort of like egg-on-the-face moments are what most managers are afraid of, and they try their damnedest to try to prevent those situations.”
A company tightening its performance-review process can also be a precursor to job cuts.
Three years after Mai left Meta in 2022, the company laid off 3,600 employees, or about 5% of its workforce. Many of these employees were labeled “low performers” — a title that trailed some of them after their exit. Months after the layoffs, an internal memo at Meta pushed managers to put more employees in the “below expectations” tier. For teams of 150 or more, Meta wanted managers to put 15% to 20% of employees in the bottom bucket.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees he had “decided to raise the bar on performance management” and to “move out low-performers” more quickly.
Microsoft recently employed a new strategy to handle those it viewed as poor performers, per an internal email to managers: pay them to leave.
Amazon spokesperson Sam Stephenson wrote that the tech giant, “like most companies,” has a performance management process that “helps our managers identify who in their teams are performing well and who needs more support.”
“The vast majority of our colleagues regularly meet or exceed expectations, but for the small number of employees who don’t, we provide coaching and opportunities to help them improve,” Stephenson wrote. “If they’re unable to do that, then we may have to discuss them leaving the company.”
To Mai, a good manager should be able to “message it appropriately” when employees are labeled low-performers.
“That way they’re not surprised, you’re not surprised,” Mai said. “The structure works fairly.”
Managers don’t always have that level of foresight — and others are simply new to the job or “immature,” as Mai put it. That’s where the real pain occurs.
“People have to go ‘mea culpa’ with their reports,” Mai said. “For everyone involved, most of which the actual person who’s receiving that news, it can be devastating. It’s pretty bad.”
Are you a manager who navigated a low-performer quota? Contact the reporter from a non-work email and device at [email protected]
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