"What's your proposal" is a response to unhelpful griping.
Performance management does have to happen. If you aren't rewarding good performers with money and growth most of them will leave. Losing them is expensive. Hiring is expensive. To reward your high performers you need to be able to identify them.
"All of these options are bad" isn't useful if you don't have a better option.
My whole point here is that "doing whatever bullshit makes you feel good" is not necessarily the better option. Either you can prove that it's worth something, in which case you will not have to ask "What's your proposal?" because people won't complain about it, or you're just doing something for the sake of doing something, and your only recourse when people show you that it's bullshit is to get defensive.
> If you aren't rewarding good performers with money and growth most of them will leave.
And if you don't identify good performers properly and don't reward them, they will leave as well.
A pragmatic approach is to reward your team, as a team. If you go with "we fire the lowest 10% every year because there have to be low performers", you're creating an adversarial situation. Wanna know what happens if you're my manager in an adversarial context? Easy: I will be an adversary. How constructive is that? Not my problem, I did not make the rules.
Performance management does have to happen. If you aren't rewarding good performers with money and growth most of them will leave. Losing them is expensive. Hiring is expensive. To reward your high performers you need to be able to identify them.
"All of these options are bad" isn't useful if you don't have a better option.