As employees, our expectations for performance management come from the system of giving grades in school.
What's interesting is that school grades often doesn't follow a normal distribution, especially for easier classes. I suspect that getting an "A" was possible for 95%+ of students in my gym class and only 5-10% of the students in my organic chemistry class.
In the same way, some jobs are much easier to do well than others.
So we should expect that virtually all administrative positions will have "exceptional" performance, which is to say that they were successful at doing all of the tasks they were asked to do. But for people who's responsibility-set is more consequential, even slightly-above average performance could be 10x more meaningful to the company.
What's interesting is that school grades often doesn't follow a normal distribution, especially for easier classes. I suspect that getting an "A" was possible for 95%+ of students in my gym class and only 5-10% of the students in my organic chemistry class.
In the same way, some jobs are much easier to do well than others.
So we should expect that virtually all administrative positions will have "exceptional" performance, which is to say that they were successful at doing all of the tasks they were asked to do. But for people who's responsibility-set is more consequential, even slightly-above average performance could be 10x more meaningful to the company.