I was thrilled to hear recently that Microsoft has decided to abandon its stack-ranking system of employee review, after years of having folks in the field of management and leadership development (me included) point out that its only real benefits are simplicity and standardization—and that its flaws are legion. Stack ranking systems wreak all kinds of havoc organizationally: creating mistrust and a lack of collaboration among colleagues and forcing managers to make artificial and demoralizing determinations about their employees’ performance. In case you’re not familiar with the system, here’s an explanation I offered in a post I wrote about this last year:

Here’s how it works: with stack ranking every manager is forced to rank a certain percentage of his or her employees in each of four performance categories: ‘top,’ ‘good,’ ‘average,’ and ‘poor.’ So let’s say one team has 10 people who are rock stars, and are knocking it out of the park every single day—innovating like nobody’s business. The manager has hired great people, given them the resources they need to succeed, supported and developed them consistently—it’s a superior leader and manager and a superior team. And let’s say there’s another team of 10 that’s not so hot: they’re meeting their objectives, but just. The manager is OK—not great, not terrible. On both of those teams, 1 person would get a stellar performance review, 4 would get good reviews, 4 would get mediocre reviews, and 1 would get a really negative review.

Imagine you are on the fantastic team. What impact would it have on you to know that, no matter how amazingly well your whole team did—only 1 of you would get a performance review that reflects that? Unless you are a very unusual person, it would be deeply demotivating, and it would almost certainly force your attention toward how to show that you’re better than your colleagues, and away from how you can support your colleagues and the team to succeed.

In other words, stack ranking might be a good way to assess performance if organizations were populated by robots.

So I see it as a very good sign that Microsoft has finally decided to do away with this system, especially after very many years of touting it as the state of the art in performance management. If a company like Microsoft, the kind of huge corporate behemoth we’ve come to think of as incapable of nimbleness in response to new information, can let go of their assumptions, look at the data, and make a shift like this—then there’s hope for all companies laboring under the weight of broken management practices and nonsensical processes.

What it says to me (and I know I’m often way too optimistic, but bear with me here) is that even the senior executives of giant companies are starting to understand that in order to succeed in today’s marketplace, it’s essential to create an environment where employees feel supported and rewarded to do their best work—not only individually, but together, as well.

I just spent the past three days facilitating an off-site for the senior leaders of the sales group of a very large organization. I started working with this group a couple of years ago, and I’ve watched them evolve into being more mutually supportive, more transparent, more trusting. This time, especially, I noticed the impact: what remarkable work they accomplished together over just a couple of days. They created plans to explore new ways to create revenue from the company’s products; decided how to best use the skills and expertise of the people in the room and throughout the rest of the organization; set ambitious goals for themselves and agreed together how to achieve them.

And one of the things they talked about was creating an approach to better align their financial incentives toward collaboration—they want to make it so that they and their sales folks get rewarded for working together to get great results.

There are two important reasons this is happening. First, the head of sales understands that if she hires smart, motivated people and creates an environment of high expectations and high support, she’s most likely to get great results. Second, her boss, the head of company, supports her in this effort.

At the end of the day—that’s all it takes: senior executives who understand that organizations are peopled by people; who know that good people are motivated by doing good work and being rewarded for their efforts and results. If you are one of those people: thank you. If you work for one of those people, do everything you can to help him or her succeed. If your company’s senior executives aren’t like this: try to find a job working in a company where they are.