Mark Lennihan/Associated Press
- An ex-Amazon manager said leadership had to rate a certain number of employees as "least effective."
- He said he defended an employee who senior leaders placed in this category despite performing well.
- Shortly after, the ex-manager learned he was on Pivot, Amazon's performance-improvement program.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with a former Amazon manager. Though the former employee asked to remain anonymous, his identity is known to Insider.
At Amazon, I led a team of program managers.
I used to feel like a kid in a candy shop when I came to work. There were so many problems to solve. There were so many great things you could do for customers. I loved my team. I loved the stuff that we were doing. My manager had urged me to start working toward a promotion.
The part that ended it was politics.
Senior leaders would bump people to the lowest performance bucket so they could meet certain quotas
During the annual-review process, managers would fill out information sheets for each employee. You would go in with the hope of defending the employees who were doing well and supporting the ones who needed it.
But the senior leaders had apparently been given "unregretted attrition," or URA, numbers — how many employees Amazon wants to lose in a given year. They seemed to be tightly tied to those URA goals. You couldn't talk them out of it. And they would quickly try to force things into a stack ranking of who was high-performing, who was middle-performing, and if we could put people into the "least-effective" bucket.
The challenge would arise when you had managers all fighting for their employees and providing substantial evidence that they were performing well, and not enough people fit into the least-effective bucket. That's when you would start seeing people being put there, in a way that seemed arbitrary to me. If we had a URA goal of, say, 6%, and we were only at 4%, then each team would need to pony up one more person to go into the least-effective bucket, whether or not they deserved it.
Senior leaders would start going down a list of people who were the next rung up on the performance measurement. And they would start making cases — without knowing these people personally, by the way — for bumping them down. The manager hadn't had conversations with these people about performance problems.
But as a manager, higher-ups expect you to back up the company by manufacturing reasons and context for their performance ratings.
I provided evidence for why one of my employees didn't deserve the lowest performance score
I had an employee who was a great performer. And senior leaders seemingly arbitrarily selected them to be in the "least-effective" category.
So, I pushed back. I provided evidence. I shared their progress; I shared their accomplishments and their feedback from their peers. This doesn't happen very often, but I was able to convince senior leadership that they weren't in that category.
Within that month, my skip-level manager suddenly informed me that I was underperforming and that I needed coaching.
As I went through that process, nothing I did passed muster. And I didn't get any feedback on why it wasn't good. At one point I said to my skip-level manager, "What are you looking for? Because it doesn't seem like I'm hitting it." And he really couldn't articulate it.
At one point he got frustrated and said, "You're about to go into Pivot. You have very little chance of being successful. You need to make a decision. Are you going to go through this process and fail or are you going to move on?"
I told HR that I accepted the severance I was offered. Within an hour, my network was turned off. I couldn't even email my team. The next day, I was asked to return my laptop.
Amazon's performance-management system was unfair
URA always felt backward to me. We spent a lot of time on the hiring process attracting the right people and vetting them. Then, once they were hired, we had these numbers that we had to hit. You could have hired all high performers and have everybody performing at a high level, but 6% of them, for example, would need to be shepherded out, often by placing them in the "least-effective" bucket and putting them on a coaching plan.
That's a problem for me, morally. It makes me feel untrustworthy and disingenuous when I haven't spoken to people about these things.
It's also unfair. We hire these people because they're high performers and they're good at what they do and they have a lot of potential. But sometimes they get thrown into this bucket and that's it. You can't really do anything with them at that point.
I've asked HR and I've asked other managers: What is the business benefit to burning people? Nobody has been able to describe to me why we have unregretted attrition.
I'll never know exactly why I was managed out. Amazon has a leadership principle called "disagree and commit," but I think it's often misused and misinterpreted. Leaders don't always appreciate it when you go against them. I have a hunch that I was put under a microscope when I fought against an unfair performance-management system.
An Amazon spokesperson, responding to Insider's request for comment, said via email: "It's impossible for us to verify the details of this essay since it's from an anonymous source and, unfortunately for readers, that makes it very difficult to separate truth from fiction. While we—like most companies—have performance expectations for people on our team, most aspects of what this person describes don't reflect the intent or reality of our evaluation process."
Do you have something to share about what you're seeing in your workplace? Insider would like to hear from you. Email Rebecca Knight at rknight@insider.com with your story or to ask for her Signal number.