Morning Coffee: These are the worst teams to be on if you want to be promoted at Citigroup. Star fund manager is in tears at the unfairness of it all.
The annual review season at a big bank is a strange phenomenon – it isn’t quite the same thing as the bonus round, but nor is it completely separate. Although the biggest driver of compensation is always your market value, in the sense of what your boss thinks you might be offered elsewhere, it’s often difficult to get the really big payouts if you’re not scoring well. And if you are trying to get promoted to Director or Managing Director, you really need to be lighting up those “Exceptional” or “Significantly Exceeds Expectations” rankings to fill out your promotion case.
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Which is one of the reasons that Citi’s assessment process is, according to lots of insiders who didn’t want to be named, extremely unpopular with the employees who are subjected to it. The way the system works is based on a modified version of the old-fashioned “stack ranking” method, made famous by General Electric’s Jack Welch. Although the company’s HR team emphasises that “We have guidelines associated with ratings, which is different from a forced curve”, the fact is that everyone has to be put into one of four brackets, and managers are instructed that only 10-15% of their reports can be “exemplary” and a further 15-30% can be “exceeds expectations”.
This means that it can be a tough life being on a high-performing small team at Citi. If there are only a few of you, then even if you’re doing a great job, half the team are going to be “valued contributors”, which is the definition of being damned with faint praise. And someone might be ranked “needs improvement” simply because everyone else on the team is better than them, even though they don’t really need any improvement.
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