to everyone except anyone involved in laying someone off.
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Aside from the obvious problems with stack rankings, your final rank depends HIGHLY on how much your skip level likes your boss, and on up the chain it goes. If your boss isn't assertive/aggressive/liked by their boss, you're screwed no matter how you rank within your department.
Years ago, a buddy of mine at Bell Labs told the tale of a sixth level manager who ki---d off an entire tree of the org chart simply because he didn't like the fifth level manager.
Moral: Often times, it's got nothing to do with you.
Every LR has been slightly different. There's been some where manager's did rankings and then senior managers take those rankings and re-rank them into a larger list, and so on up the chain. Then there's been LR's that have started at higher levels than managers and they just get a list. I was let go because of two factors: My age/seniority/wage, and the fact that I was an SME for an older legacy s/w tool whose usage was going down. It was easier & more cost effective to let me go and give the support of that tool to a younger, less senior, and lower wage teammate to take over and let them take longer to solve problems & fix issues because the usage was dwindling making it less important. That decision to let me go was made at a director level deciding to stop supporting that tool at a P2 level and drop it to a P5 and phase it out. It didn't matter how high my manager had ranked me.
I'm not defending managers at Cisco. There's far more bad ones than there are good ones. The ones that do rankings based on relationships instead of performance are the problem.
Outside of Cisco, my Dad had been promoted to the shop foreman in an Instrumentation & Control maintenance shop. He was forced to layoff people under him, completely by surprise to him, and once he'd done the "dirty work" of laying men off that he'd worked with for 5-15 yrs, he was laid off by a higher-up person. This was a union shop, and there were no "rankings". He was just a "foreman" and not a manager since managers can't be union, but he was the guy who had to have the discussions with the affected people. So, no, not all people who give out the bad news are part of the problem and deserve your scorn.
"they did contribute by stack ranking a person behind closed doors"
Exactly. Their input led to the addition to a list.
Is it fair? No idea. But i do know that outstanding people got stuck under a bigoted manager. One person went from a great IPF to below average, but effort and achievement was high and much higher than in previous years. It was not based on reality.
Yes, that manager is directly responsible.
@1lpk+1kj7CqdT So you were “just following orders”?
Sorry, but if you lay people off (but didn't make the decision), you are still part of the problem. That comes with the territory of being a manager/Dir. And in most cases, they did contribute by stack ranking a person behind closed doors....then the bean counters/execs add in the additional salary layer to make a decision.
No one involved gets a pass. That's life. May they all get a lump of coal for the holidays.
Just remember that those laying people off are not the ones making the decisions.