"Incidentally, not all systemic changes work. I’ve also learned that certain management techniques can actually make things worse when applied to a distressed culture. For example, I had always worked in companies with yearly and quarterly employee ranking systems, in which people were divided into three groups: overperforming, performing, and underperforming. So not long after I came here, we started a ranking program that graded on a curve: 45% into the overperforming group, 50% into the performing group, and 5% into the underperforming group. I didn’t know—and certainly didn’t intend it this way—that if you got the lowest grade, it was presumed that you were about to be fired. We started getting hate mail from people who argued that there was no way to rank people who worked as a team. The ranking system exacerbated the culture of fear and proved to be such a huge retention and motivation issue that we were forced to stop it after a year. In its place, we introduced a modified ranking program that better reflected overall employee performance."