7s Hire 6s
It’s said that if you grade workers with 10 being the highest competency, that 10s, 9s, and 8s are competent, while 5s and below are easy to identify and therefore to either develop to be 8s, or sack.
It’s the 6s and 7s who create all the problems in your organisation.
Worse: It’s said 7s hire 6s.
7s (who all think they’re 9s or 10s) hire 6s (who, being 6s also think they’re 9s or 10s).
In the first few weeks and months after new hire 6s join your organisation it’s harder to spot their underperformance because you give them the benefit of the doubt and attribute error to them finding their feet.
The 7 boss is also both not competent to identify the 6s’ incompetence, and unwilling to do so anyway because they hired the 6 and don’t want to admit their error of judgement.
If any 8s, 9s or 10s slip past the 7s’ hiring of 6s, they spend six months feeling confused before resigning.
If they’re 10s, their skills and leadership may start to rub off on the 6s, and develop them towards 7 and 8.
The 7s realise this, and feeling threatened, flex their positional power to make life difficult for the 8s and above, deterring the 6s not to get above themselves. Most 6s are happy to lazily comply and remain mediocre. The 7s then reward the fawning 6s with ‘promotions’ and other trinkets.
The aspiring 6s, and 8s and above, eventually resign in frustration and despair.
Any 8s and above gradually leave either through natural attrition or dissatisfaction with having to manage the growing numbers of 7s and the 6s they’ve hired.
Before long, 7 becomes the new 10 for the organisation.
It becomes an employer of choice for 6s and below who are attracted to work there and be remunerated with status and high pay for being mediocre. Eventually nobody knows what Excellence looks like - much less how to strive for it
In a small to medium business, the Market responds to the incompetence, and the organisation folds.
If market forces are not in play or muted by government funding, the demise takes years or decades.
Damaging clients, customers, workers, families, communities, and sometimes societies in the process.