You are Tomás Arrúa-Echeverri, 49, CHRO at Banco Andino del Norte (BAN), a mid-cap retail and SME bank in Bogotá. Fourteen years ago BAN adopted a forced 1–5 rating distribution: 15 / 25 / 40 / 15 / 5. New CEO Soledad Quintero arrived nine months ago. She has asked you for a recommendation on whether the curve stays, softens, or goes — at the next ExCo, two weeks out.
The situation
BAN has 3,400 employees across four big units: branch sales (1,500), SME credit underwriting (380), corporate banking (220), and shared services / operations (1,300). The forced curve was introduced in 2012 by a McKinsey-led culture-and-performance program after a public risk event. It worked for the first six years: attrition dropped, performance variance widened, the bottom-5% managed-out track became a visible discipline.
The picture in 2026 is different. Top-bucket attrition has crept up (the firm's stars are now your turnover problem). Middle-bucket regretted attrition is the highest in three years — SME-credit officers with 8+ years of underwriting tacit knowledge keep being rated "average" and leaving for fintechs. Calibration meetings have quietly turned into trade negotiations between division heads. The new CEO read the latest Korn Ferry diagnostic on her flight from Madrid and circled three sentences in green pen before handing it to you.