there's a scene from the tv show "suits" that has always stuck with me:
the show is set in a law firm, and in this particular episode they needed to lay off some of their associates. a young, newly-promoted lawyer was tasked with drawing up a list of the associates and marking the ones who she felt should get the axe, based on their performance. so she comes up with some metrics, goes through the associates' work, and ranks them based on the resultant numbers, saying that the bottom few could be let go.
there is one employee, brian, who ends up near the bottom of the list. a more senior person takes her aside and asks why she recommended brian be laid off, so she brings out the metrics and rankings and points to him near the bottom. the senior person asks "okay, so who are the top associates in your list? can you point them out on the seating chart?". turns out, the top five associates were all brian's neighbours, and the reason was that he was really good at helping people when they were stuck with something. but of course that affected his own individual contributor numbers, and there were no metrics for "helped someone else out but didn't get credit for it".
the show is set in a law firm, and in this particular episode they needed to lay off some of their associates. a young, newly-promoted lawyer was tasked with drawing up a list of the associates and marking the ones who she felt should get the axe, based on their performance. so she comes up with some metrics, goes through the associates' work, and ranks them based on the resultant numbers, saying that the bottom few could be let go.
there is one employee, brian, who ends up near the bottom of the list. a more senior person takes her aside and asks why she recommended brian be laid off, so she brings out the metrics and rankings and points to him near the bottom. the senior person asks "okay, so who are the top associates in your list? can you point them out on the seating chart?". turns out, the top five associates were all brian's neighbours, and the reason was that he was really good at helping people when they were stuck with something. but of course that affected his own individual contributor numbers, and there were no metrics for "helped someone else out but didn't get credit for it".