I’m sure he wouldn’t want me to say it, but Wayne Turmel is not really cranky. Feisty, perhaps. Persnickety at times. And he can bite when he has to. But, at the end of the day, Turmel is just too humorous and too caring to be really cranky.

Turmel is the host of The Cranky Middle Manager Show. A star in The Podcast Network firmament, the show is popular for good reason. Turmel is an engaging interviewer and his guests generally have something useful to say. The subject matter is management – for better and, every now and then, for worse.

A few weeks ago, he interviewed Aubrey Daniels, author of OOPS! The 13 Management Practices that Waste Time and Money. Among the discussion topics were forced rankings and stretch goals. Aubrey sees both as counter-productive. Forced ranking, he says, creates unhealthy competition instead of fostering teamwork. Stretch goals, almost by definition, cannot be met and so engender little beyond frustration.

I have, in my career, dealt with both, up close and personal. The forced ranking was done by senior managers behind closed doors. The purpose was not so much to filter out the poorest performers as the infamous GE program purported to do. It was done to bring to the senior managers’ attention the fact that they depend more on some staffers than others and yet they put all these employees in the same salary pool and try to treat them all equally. In other words, it was done not as a policy measure but to send a message.

Regardless of the motivation or the filter used, managers cannot help but rank their employees by importance. And, when push comes to shove (i.e., if you actually had to fire someone at the end of the ranking exercise), performance is not that important. Let’s face it, accounting clerks and customer service reps are disposable. Analysts are expendable. As you move up the food chain, experience and technical knowledge are harder to replace. You have, thereby, simply created a bell curve of importance. In any forced ranking, a top producing clerk would be vulnerable and a so-so performing employee higher up the food chain would be safe. There is churn at the bottom and status quo at the top. In other words, nothing constructive has really been achieved.

The way around this, of course, is to do the rankings not vertically (i.e., within departments) but horizontally (by level, across the organization). The competition, as you might imagine, would then be not with staff, but among the senior managers themselves.

It is obvious (at least I hope it is) that I am not a fan of forced rankings or bell curves. People should be rated on how they contribute relative to the needs and expectations placed on their respective positions. And they should be rated on how they perform relative to their own capabilities. (That is probably another discussion topic. In truth, my colleagues were always harsh on me when I came down on a good employee who would never go above and beyond.)

I also have strong opinions on setting stretch goals. Stretch should be meaningful (important and understandable) as well as achievable. Otherwise, you are not stretching the band, you are snapping it. If your target is far away, set a series of milestones and timelines to reach the milestones. As a colleague of mine put it, you eat the elephant one bite at a time.

Aubrey Daniels is obviously someone whose heart is in the right place. He is certainly spot on when he talks about Hell’s Kitchen’s Gordon Ramsay. Now there’s a cranky manager! That said, again I differ from Mr. Daniels: all the swearing, the tantrums and the abuse notwithstanding, there would be a line-up a mile long if there was an opportunity to be one of Ramsay’s protégés like Marcus Wareing or Angela Hartnett.

Anyway, do yourself a favor. Load up on Twizzlers and then download The Cranky Middle Manager Show.