Your manager has forty seconds to defend you

The meeting has a name, and the name is calibration. It has a calendar hold, a facilitator, and a spreadsheet, and you are the subject of it without ever having been told it exists.

Let me set the scene: somewhere between six and twelve managers, a spreadsheet on the screen with names down the left and proposed ratings down the right, and someone from HR running the session whose actual job is not to make the outcome fair but to make the distribution work. There is a shape the numbers have to land in, whether or not anyone will admit on the record that there is a curve, and that shape does not stretch to accommodate the fact that your team had a good year. Your manager arrives with a number they want for you, and so does every other manager in the room, and there are thirty names to get through in ninety minutes, which comes out to roughly forty seconds each. That is the window your year gets defended in. Now let me tell you how to win in that war room. Hang in, its a long one - with a complete timeline and the three sentences that ensure your promotion.