[Rick Lee]

Das Boot's thread reminded me of some performance reviews, which had little to do with my actual performance. My current employer is highly regimented and almost paperless, everything is done on our intranet. Managers complete performance reviews with multiple choice answers and then some comments. I finished 2007 at 102.7% of revenue goal, which put me at #15 out of 75 sales folks. The vast majority did not reach 100% of goal. Yet, for my "meets revenue expectations" I was given a "satisfactory". Um, isn't anything above 100% of goal, by definition, "exceeds expectations"? Boss agreed with me when we discussed this, but he was unable to change it. Sorry, that's how it works with our intranet reviews.

Years ago at our previous company, the same boss (we were later acquired and changed names), gave me all "satisfactories", though I almost never less than doubled my monthly sales quota. I later learned that only one person in the company was given anything above satisfactory because they had to give her a raise to keep her from leaving. Otherwise, no one was supposed to get raises that year and so everyone was given all satisfactories.

When I worked at the RNC, our big boss told all his directors to fire anyone who got below "excellent" in any category. Of course, the directors didn't want to fire their entire crews, so everyone - I mean everyone - got "excellents" in every catgory. What re the odds that everyone there was excellent?