Barry-Wehmiller, a $3 billion manufacturing company with 12,000 employees, uses peer nomination to identify top performers instead of manager ratings alone. Employees write essays nominating colleagues who embody company values, a volunteer committee picks winners, and the company honors them publicly with family present. This surfaces people whose influence lifts the whole team, not just top individual contributors.
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if you want to know who your top performers are, like inside your own companies, like inside your own divisions, there's like, I love peer reviews because the way we do reviews and we define who the meritocracy is, it's either the metrics or some sort of like annual review process, which is one person deciding how good you are for the past 3 months because I've forgotten the past 8 months before that. I mean, it's just how it is. It's not a fault. It's just, you know, we just, that's how it is, right? And that's how we're determining someone's value to the company. And it has its place. Don't get me wrong. I'm not excluding all of these things. I just think these things are unbalanced. So I'm not wanting us to get rid of them. I'm wanting us to add to it. And the thing that I like that I've seen work very well in large companies is peer review, where— and the best example I've ever seen of it— a company called Barry-Wehmiller, large manufacturing, blue collar, right? Large manufacturing company, about $3 billion, 12,000 people. And they ask each group to nominate their own peers. Who best exemplifies our values? Who do you want to be more like? And it's not just an easy nomination process. They have to write essays, because you want to put small barriers. Because then you get higher quality. There's a nomination process. They have to write essays as to what makes this person the best example of who we are. A group of volunteers forms a committee that reads through all the nominations, interviews all the nominees, and then will make a decision. And they'll have an event where they will announce the person who has been chosen. The way they read— the way they give them their award is they read some of the nominations —so this person can hear how other people talk about them. They secretly fly in their family. So when their name is called out, the family is brought out because they want the parents to see the kind of child they have raised, because this is how people are talking about them. Invariably, the person who is voted for, there's always tears. No one's ever angry. When people get promoted or given bonuses, somebody is always like, they don't deserve it. I deserve it. Because you're setting up a finite competitive thing. This is infinite. This is how do we all get better. Nobody's ever angry when somebody wins this award, ever. In fact, if anything, we're inspired to be more like them, because there's something even more powerful than the approval of one person, which is the approval of the whole tribe. It's even more powerful. And everybody's striving to be a better version and live by the values. And invariably, this person is rarely the highest individual performer, right? But their existence on the team makes for a higher-performing team.
