The easier “solution” most teams default toward when someone is underperforming is to hire more people. But what I think most people don’t realize is just how much of a drag the low performers on a team are. Not only is their output below everyone else, but they lower everyone else’s output because they mess things up and other people have to invest time fixing the mess and trying to teach the person how to avoid it in the future.
I think there’s some opportunity to create more structured apprenticeship programs and other kinds of intensive training to help build up borderline performers into solid contributors. But in the absence of that, a good manager has to be able to recognize when someone’s performance is dragging the rest of the team down and let that person go.
“Mandatory firing” practices try to force this to happen, but just like stack ranking, it ends up being too crude an instrument. Within any large organization there are teams where every person on the team is a high performer, and teams were all or almost all the team are low performers. When you do any kind of stock ranking or mandatory firing across the company, you end up in situations where managers play ridiculous games like “hire to fire” in order to hang onto their talented team, or intentionally spread high performers out with a lot of low performers around them so they can always be “stack ranked” at the top.
Incentives are hard, managing a highly effective organization at scale is hard, and at the end of the day there’s no substitute for well-trained and highly skilled front line managers using their own judgement to make the best personnel decisions.