Does your organization have a culture of mediocrity?
How organizations embrace inferiority, subverting traditional reward systems to marginalize high performers and reward mediocrity
Have you ever worked somewhere and noticed that things never seemed to improve, or if they did improve, it wasn’t by much? Have you ever wanted to improve something, only to find that the organization seemed optimized to frustrate its own ambitions?
It’s possible that organization has what Joseph C. Hermanowicz calls a culture of mediocrity. In his 2013 paper, he outlines how organizations embrace practices that perpetuate inferiority, and how traditional reward systems are subverted to marginalize high performers and reward mediocrity.
I’ve managed at numerous tech companies over the years. Some were high-performing, and some were not. Some had not always been that way. But every good one, and every bad one, had the same things in common: they all demanded success, they all valued quality, and they all wanted to grow and improve. No CEO ever told their employees “Make this place as mediocre as possible”. To somewhat misappropriate the proverb, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
In this article, I borrow Hermanowicz’s ideas and blend them with my own experience and other research, describing how organizations become mediocre, how you can test for it, and how you can fix it.
What does a culture of mediocrity look like?
All organizations have systems and processes to protect them from incompetence.
All people, regardless of personal ability, depend on the sustaining of their social and economic systems. For example: I work for [company], [company] pays me, so I have an interest in sustaining [company].
The problem occurs when an organization is comprised of mostly average and below-average performers, who must then decide what to do with the people who are more able than them. The response is to subvert reward systems to benefit the less able, and marginalize the most able. This causes the most adept people to be cast as deviants, but this is critical to protect low performers from their influence.
This anti-meritocratic behavior sustains the social systems on which we depend, so it is tolerated. As a result, groups become mediocre and fail to improve, or they improve a little, but not by much. They are purposely adjusted on an ongoing basis to be mediocre because mediocrity is actually in everyone’s interest.
A dissonance develops between explicit and implicit incentives. We are explicit in the desire to produce excellence, often creating strategic goals around these desires. However, actual operations are subverted to ensure mediocrity disguised as performance is the only possible outcome, because again, this sustains the system.
Take the example of a customer support department that realizes their support is poor, so they launch a project and work very hard to move to another integrated support environment. After a protracted project, everyone congratulates everyone, managers post an announcement, and customers continue getting the same bad support they always have.
In these environments, high performers stick out and become uncomfortable. They point out, rightfully, that the support is still bad, and the actual problem (which they understand) hasn’t been addressed. They explain how to fix it, but the problem is too nuanced for the less adept people to deal with, which is why it wasn’t dealt with in the first place. Their inability to interact with this information makes people uncomfortable. The high performers’ manager becomes similarly uncomfortable because they don’t know what to do with this high-performer and their disruptive ideas. New reward systems and programs are created to benefit high performers, but these systems actually stifle them further, because the systems remain governed by the culture of mediocrity.
How we become mediocre
Mediocrity is ingrained into an organization in two ways: hiring culture and authoritarian command structures.
Hiring culture
At first, a company theoretically consists of “A” players: highly skilled, highly competent people. “A” players want to be surrounded by other people who are as good as, or better than, them. But at some point, perhaps by mistake or out of desperation, a mediocre performer is hired. These “B” players seek to surround themselves with even more mediocre performers (“C” players), and so on. Over time, hiring systems and strategies are optimized to attract and hire middling performers and below.
Steve Jobs called these “B” and “C” players “bozos”, and coined the term “bozo explosion”. He considered the proliferation of “bozos” a serious problem at Apple.
A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. -Steve Jobs
I’ve seen this dynamic play out on teams of various sizes. At a certain point, it didn’t matter what metric I looked at because every one of them told the same story: the majority of the team’s outcomes came from the same minority of people.
What I saw with Woz was somebody who was 50 times better than the average engineer. He could have meetings in his head. The Mac team was an attempt to build a whole team like that, A players. People said that they wouldn’t get along, they’d hate working with each other. But I realized that A players like to work with A players, they just didn’t like working with C players. -Steve Jobs
Hermanowicz posits that the absence of strong hiring guidance from HR departments is a causal factor in hiring culture problems. I think that’s true, too, but it’s more nuanced than this.
I’ve inherited employees from other managers many times, usually due to a promotion, reorg, or an acquisition. A few times, it was apparent that someone wasn’t as high performing as advertised. Their old manager just didn’t know what competencies to look for in that role.
I’ve also simply made a couple of bad hires in my career. People seemed to know what to say in an interview, but once they had to do real work, they imploded. It’s well established that good interviews are not correlated with actual job success.
We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. -Laszlo Bock, Google
All this is to say the challenges of identifying incompetence before someone enters your organization go beyond a checklist from HR. It’s so important that hiring managers be able to identify “A” players and hold out for them, even if it means leaving positions vacant for months.
I began to realize this a months [sic] after he arrived. He didn’t learn things very quickly, and the people he wanted to promote were usually bozos. -Steve Jobs on John Sculley
Authoritarian command structure
Another facet of mediocre organizations identified by Hermanowicz is that goals and initiatives are driven in a top-down fashion.
Senior leaders can be responsible for hundreds or even thousands of employees. They (rightfully) lack the operational knowledge needed to identify root problems, but in authoritarian command structures, they take responsibility for directing work anyway. As a result, instead of fixing real issues, our focus is drawn to second- or third-order problems. Essentially, we spend our time dealing with symptoms of problems, because symptoms are easier to see. Work then becomes an effort in optics, not achievement.
It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do. -Steve Jobs
The only job of senior leadership is to set the tone and generate strategy. Every other operational decision needs to come from the bottom-up or middle-out: the people who actually know the business best.
In their management book, Nine Lies About Work, Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall identify nine things we generally believe to be true about effective companies that either aren’t supported by the data, or are disproved by it. One such “lie” is the idea that the best companies cascade goals from the CEO down, ensuring “alignment”. Buckingham and Goodall show in their analysis that the best companies actually cascade meaning, and that good goals are emergent within that context.
How we perpetuate mediocrity
As middling performers become more normal, innovation naturally slows as an organization spends more of its time dealing with the problems created by mediocrity (IE a lack of strategic success).
As innovation slows, changes in business metrics stall. Since they’re not moving, those metrics seem less important, so we stop worrying about them as much (IE we stop watching the things we should be tracking).
Because metrics aren’t valued, high performers are less able to communicate their value. As value becomes less communicable, mediocre performance feels acceptable, because you’re doing about as well as everyone else around you, so why do anything else?
This begins the marginalization of high performers. Their voices drown out in a sea of other voices, and these employees may even come to be seen as problematic because they disrupt the organization’s harmony.
How we can test for mediocrity
There’s no core metric that says “we’re mediocre”. Remember: organizations can only embrace mediocrity implicitly, not explicitly. Even the lowest-performing teams must be seen to generate something that looks like value.
What mediocrity might be
As with many things, a degree of interpretation is required, here. Having one of the following qualities doesn’t indicate cultural mediocrity, but having several of them combined in the right way might.
Problems with metrics:
- Measures don’t seem relevant to goals.
- Metrics don’t change, and everyone accepts this.
- People don’t know what the metrics mean.
- There are no metrics.
Problems with projects:
- Challenging projects are initiated, but don’t seem to move forward.
- People do large amounts of work, but don’t generate business outcomes.
- Difficult requests are met with resistance and excuses.
- People don’t ship.
Problems with people:
- Most of your productivity and ideas come from a minority of people.
- People do not seem to have expertise in their area of responsibility.
- Difficult conversations don’t happen.
- You feel pressured to hire people who are not qualified.
- Nobody ever seems to fail.
What mediocrity isn’t
- Trying something new that doesn’t work out. Changing your mind in the face of data is an indicator of intelligence and competence.
- Making a mistake, learning from it, and improving next time. Failure is a normal stop along the path of excellence.
- Problems and imperfections. Every business has challenges. The best ones solve those problems over time, but new problems always come about. This is normal.
- Intentionally producing substandard work. Sometimes, there are financial and business realities that preclude exceptional achievement. High performers might not like it, but they can adjust for this, and still be effective at producing outcomes to a defined standard, whatever that standard may be. An average steak will never be a great steak, but a talented chef will make an average steak the best version of average.
How we break out of mediocrity
The path to breaking out of mediocrity is not complicated, but it does require a strong stomach.
- Hire senior managers who are high performers and protect them from systemic mediocrity.
- Have them expose incompetence, and manage out low performers.
- Back-fill those roles with high performers.
- Work your way down the chain of command, replacing low performers with high performers, until you get to the bottom of the org chart.
- As high performers deliver and prove value, performance becomes the norm, and middling performers become less comfortable. They either rise to the occasion, or they are also managed out.
Is a bloodless revolution possible?
Whatever else low performers might be, they’re people first. They’re real humans with families, homes, and dreams. So, this “chopping block” mentality might seem extreme. I did wonder about this path, myself, for a long time. Could a mediocre performer somehow become an “A” player? Could, say, an exceptional manager with the right vision and good skills turn the tide without having to performance manage anyone?
Tadelis and Hoffman demonstrated that strong people management ratings reduced employee attrition significantly, but did not improve other outcomes. In other words, an “A” manager with “B” and “C” contributors will deliver “B” and “C” work. If the “A” manager wants “A” work, they need to hire “A” players to do it.
In a sufficiently meritocratic environment, the average person could conceivably jump a letter grade. A “C” could eventually become a “B”, or at least a “C+”, with enough effort. But a “D” doesn’t become an “A”, no matter how many strategy memos you issue, training sessions you hold, and 1-on-1 time you give. I made that mistake for too long.
This makes the manager’s goal here much more clear:
- Actually be a top performer (“A”s want to work with “A”s).
- Hire top performers.
- Keep them.
The last word: does mediocrity matter?
I’ve portrayed mediocrity as something reprehensible, and a lot of that is wound up in my personal values. I don’t like producing crap. I never have.
But some businesses are mediocre, and they survive all the same, for any combination of reasons. It is very possible to produce a meh product with OK support and grow 1–2% per year, keeping everyone employed and never doing anything too dangerous. I don’t know if I love that idea, but it’s workable, and it might even be desirable for some. Like I say above: mediocrity can be in everyone’s interest if it sustains the social and economic systems we depend on.
In the end, money drives all. If mediocrity is a problem, it doesn’t become one until it affects the bottom line. That can take years to transpire. In the mean time: “A” players, find your other “A” players, and do great things together.
