Stack Rankings Will Be a Disaster for Federal Workers

The US Office of Personnel Management has proposed extending stack rankings to virtually the entire federal workforce by capping the share of employees who can receive a top performance rating at 30%, no matter how well they perform. The rule applies to career civil servants, but not to political appointees. Stack rankings have a long and toxic history in the private sector. Having been largely abandoned there, it’s now being resurrected, like some unkillable vampire, in the federal government to continue wreaking havoc in an even more critical place.

An early pioneer of stack rankings was General Electric Co.’s Jack Welch, which played no small part in his being named Manager of the Century by Fortune magazine in 1999. By 2022, though, he was The Man Who Broke Capitalism. That arc perfectly traces stack ranking’s reputation. Inside GE and across the corporate world that idolized him, managers sorted employees into the top 20%, the middle 70% and the bottom 10% - then fired the bottom. The practice helped build Welch’s reputation and then helped destroy it.