Totally. For a company that lives and dies by statistics in its business and technical decisions, it amazes me that they can act like employee performance on a two-pizza team is normally distributed and only about the team member.
Sometimes a poorly performing team member was just a bad hiring choice. You politely let them go and work to improve your hiring process. Sometimes the person is struggling for reasons outside work, so you try to find the right supports necessary. But most often, in my experience poor performance is about the worker's environment (culture, process, behaviors, projects), and those are all things managers are supposed to be monitoring and improving.
Totally agree with this and wanted to add this point as well: "Least Effective" designation is often political.
Amazon claims to be data driven, so it assumes that a manager can stack rank their employees and select the lowest performer. But let's all be totally honest here, it's impossible to quantitatively rank employee performances. Any real attempt to do this results in Goodhart's law.
So either managers follow some quantitatve measurement (most CRs, least revisions, most stories done, etc) and ignore things that matter and can't be measured. Or they attempt some sort of qualitative measurement that almost always turns into who YOU (the manager) is most comfortable working with.
Stack ranking and cutting is a broken system that is inhuman. But it fits right in with Bezos' transactional mindset.
Agree, 100% McNamara fallacy level thinking.
The easily measured things don't make up the full picture, and may even be completely wrong, but they are easily measured so they become the full picture.
I worked somewhere that did weird personality tests as part of the recruiting process.
I talked to my manager later and he basically explained it as - yeah, it predicts nothing. No one ever gets denied because of it.. but its something for HR to wave at you if a hire doesn't work out and say "see it was right here in the personality test".
Internal culture, process and behavior is what decides if a job is stressful.. while at Amazon I worked fewer hours outside work hours but was a lot more stressed as every one around you is busy proving their worth than looking at what needs to get done collectively.
You might be able to quantify internal culture, process and behavior, by applying some of the qualifiers from the human development index and happiness index to your company.
Sometimes a poorly performing team member was just a bad hiring choice. You politely let them go and work to improve your hiring process. Sometimes the person is struggling for reasons outside work, so you try to find the right supports necessary. But most often, in my experience poor performance is about the worker's environment (culture, process, behaviors, projects), and those are all things managers are supposed to be monitoring and improving.