Why Stack Ranking Raises Everyone’s Game
When I was in college, I took a course that was 100% based on group presentations. The goal of the class was to turn people into better team members. The idea was that if you work better in a team, your chances of success in most careers rise. But one thing they had to solve was helping people understand where they stood. Am I a good team member and just need to stay the course? Or am I a not-so-great team member who needs to make serious changes?
Their solution: stack ranking.
At the end of each project, every team member had to rate the rest of their team. The catch was that we had to order group members from best to worst. Each person submitted something that looked like this:
- Sue
- John
- Bob
- Mary
- Tim
Sue got the most points, and Tim got the fewest. After several projects, you began to see a pattern. If you were consistently ranking low, you had to look in the mirror and ask yourself why your peers were consistently giving you low ratings. Your class grade was heavily dependent on your overall ranking at the end of the semester.
That experience was eye-opening. It showed me the power of group members stack ranking each other. Getting a low rating from a teacher was different than getting one from your peers, with all your peers seeing it. The latter felt much worse, partly because it was public but mostly because it came from peers, not an authority figure. No one wants their peers to think less of them. So, what happened was that the stack ranking caused people who weren’t great team members to change their behavior and try to become better team members.
The stack ranking also fostered a competitive dynamic that elevated the effort of the entire class. There could be only one person in the top spot, so everyone dialed it up a notch, hoping to become #1. Ranking highest was a direct result of your ability to be a better team member than everyone else. If someone was ahead of you, you had to try harder. The other person would then try harder too, hoping to hang on to their position. The result was a bar that was continually being raised by group members.
I’m a fan of stack ranking and publicly displaying the results in group settings. It’s a great way to raise the quality of the group effort, and it gives members feedback that’s hard to ignore.
