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Tech CEOs are in their extremely hardcore, “No More Mr. Nice Guy” era. At TikTok and its owner, ByteDance, the idea of prioritizing performance over being “nice” has long been part of its DNA.
ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming once said that “people who always try to be nice aren’t really moral,” according to company materials. He was discussing differentiating performance, and said that trying to make everyone happy by giving low and high performers equal grades could harm TikTok’s best workers.
Zhang left the company in 2021, but his line on niceness remains in updated materials for managers, BI has learned.
TikTok did not respond to requests for comment.
TikTok sets quotas on how many workers can receive high or low scores in each cycle, and the company tells team leaders to avoid grading everyone at the mid-point, even if their instinct is “to avoid conflict,” according to documentation viewed by BI.
In its reviews, the company uses eight different ratings, ranging from “F” for failed to “O” for outstanding. In one division, the company said managers had to limit the three highest scores to no more than 5% of team members, and dole out the top four ratings to 10% or fewer employees, BI previously reported.
TikTok staffers are preparing for mid-year performance reviews this month. The reviews can be stressful for workers who have watched the company cull head count in previous cycles. In March, TikTok gave low scores to a wave of e-commerce workers, offering some a choice between a performance-improvement plan (PIP) or a severance package. It executed a similar process on other teams a year earlier.
Tech’s performance push
TikTok and ByteDance’s approach mirrors a broader push in Silicon Valley to better identify top and low performers. Microsoft tweaked its policies in April to help managers address lower performers, and Meta made it a priority in May to rate more workers as underperformers. The ByteDance approach also reflects a culture of high expectations and long work hours characteristic of the China tech scene, where the company was founded.
“It’s generally accepted that Chinese companies are quite aggressive about marking non-performers and basically asking them to leave,” said Rui Ma, founder of the media and consulting firm TechBuzz China.
While Big Tech’s management principles may seem harsh, direct feedback is a critical component of good management, said Deborah Grayson Riegel, an executive coach who writes about leadership communication.
“Often what we find is that when somebody wants to be liked, they don’t give direct feedback,” Riegel said. “Higher performers pay the cost because then their job is to manage the lower performers who don’t want to be there or shouldn’t be there, and so that drags them down as well.”
Current and former TikTok staffers said the scoring curve can seem arbitrary, however.
“More and more leaders were being pushed to rate people at the extremes,” one TikTok manager who left the company last year told BI. “Either exceptional, and doing really well, or doing really poorly and giving them these low scores that will eventually push them out of the company.”
The company asks managers to consider each worker’s self-evaluation and coworker feedback when assigning review scores, and department heads may later tweak ratings to meet distribution goals, one staffer said. The score distributions are set based on business priorities, though leaders are instructed not to share those details with reports to avoid the appearance of “forced distribution,” BI first reported.
The rating curve can breed some competitive animosity among teammates, one TikTok staffer said.
“It’s very internally competitive,” a former staffer said. “You can’t co-own a project really in most instances and claim joint results.”
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