There once was a company that mowed lawns. The owner had three leaders, and every one of them was excellent. That was the problem.

The first was an artist. The lawns they cut were flawless. These could have been at Augusta or at Fenway, the kind of stripes that stop traffic. Customer feedback was perfect and the waitlist ran a year deep. But this person underbid every single job. Beautiful work, almost no margin. They kept the customers thrilled and the owner barely making payroll.

The second was an operator. Great margins, high win rate, a real knack for turning firm-fixed-price jobs into profit through repeatability and a little technology. Solid, steady, easy to work with. But their pipeline was drying up. Competition was fierce. A great win rate doesn’t count for much when there’s less and less to win, and they were one or two lost bids from having no work at all.

The third? How do I describe the third. The third walked in one Monday and announced they’d just signed the largest contract in company history, by a factor of twenty. A multi-year deal to maintain the grounds for an entire planned community: every median, every park, every common space, locked in for years. The owner was stunned. One contract that could carry the company through any dry spell.

Then the owner walked down to the crews. Nobody was celebrating. They were panicking. “We don’t have the people for this. We don’t have the equipment. We’ve never run a job a tenth this size. We are not sure we can actually deliver it.”

The owner went back to the third leader and asked the obvious question: Can we pull this off? The answer came back easy and bright. “We’ll figure it out. We always do.”

The problem? Sales had sold something the crews weren’t sure they could build. But it was the deal that might keep every one of them employed for years. Triumph or catastrophe, and no one could yet tell you which.

So put yourself in the owner’s chair. Here’s my question.

How do you performance-rank these three?

One delivers and can’t profit. One profits and can’t grow. One grows and might detonate. Each is world-class at one leg of the business (deliver, run, sell) and exposed on the others. Put a room full of managers on this and you will not get consensus. There’s a clean, confident case for ranking any of them first, and an equally clean one for ranking them last.

Now make it worse. You don’t have three people, you have a hundred. And the system wants them sorted onto a single line, stack-ranked, fit to a curve. Incomparable contributions forced into a precision the reality doesn’t support.

That’s the whole job. Not measuring who’s good…everyone here is good. It’s deciding what “best” even means this quarter, knowing it’ll mean something different next quarter, something even different next year or next decade, and that you’ll be wrong for somebody no matter what.

And that’s why performance management is hard.