I think you mean "a non-objective standard." The great virtue -- and great flaw -- of stack ranking is that it's very, very, very objective.
And, as people have pointed out, that means that it can be gamed, and can be applied very inflexibly an inappropriately. But the virtue is that it gives people relatively little opportunity to get out of engaging with it at all.
> I think you mean "a non-objective standard." The great virtue -- and great flaw -- of stack ranking is that it's very, very, very objective.
Stack ranking usually takes as it's key input management subjective evaluations of staff performance, which is why the subject units are usually small suborganizations. It's mechanistic in what it does with that input, but it absolutely is not usually based on purely or predominantly objective measures.
Organizations which spend the effort to develop meaningful objective performance measures usually also spend the effort to find better uses of them than inputs to rank-and-yank systems.
Once people realize that making other people look bad is in their interests the organization is doomed.
You need to get rid of poor performers but that should be based, as far as you can possibly manage it, on an objective standard.