Question 1

What is a performance calibration meeting?

Accepted Answer

A meeting in which managers **compare and adjust their proposed ratings** for their teams before those ratings are finalised — and it explains a great deal about why a review outcome can differ from what a manager said in the room.

**Why organisations do it.** Managers rate differently. Some are generous, some are harsh, and some rate to avoid difficult conversations. Without correction, an employee's rating depends substantially on **which manager they happen to have**, which is unfair and legally risky in a system driving pay and promotion. Calibration aims to apply a consistent standard.

**What actually happens.** Managers present their proposed ratings with evidence, peers challenge them, and a senior leader or HR facilitates. Ratings move, in both directions. A manager arguing for someone must be able to evidence it, which is why the **written record** matters more than the conversations nobody else heard.

**Why this matters to employees, practically:**

**Your manager may not be able to deliver what they indicated**, which is why a promised rating sometimes does not materialise — and why a manager who cannot explain a change is frequently one who lost the argument.

**Visibility beyond your manager matters.** If nobody else in the room knows your work, your manager is arguing alone, unsupported by anyone else's experience of you.

**Specific, evidenced achievements travel; general esteem does not.** Give your manager the material they need — a written summary of what you did and what resulted, before the cycle, is genuinely effective and rarely done.

**The contested part: forced distribution.** Some organisations require ratings to fit a predetermined curve. This is widely criticised — it creates artificial competition, punishes strong teams, and produces manifestly unfair outcomes where a good performer is downgraded to fit a quota. Many large employers have abandoned it, and **soft pressure towards a distribution frequently persists** even where the formal requirement has been removed.

**What good calibration looks like:** evidence-based rather than advocacy-based, explicitly checking for bias patterns across gender, ethnicity and working pattern, and **feeding back the actual reasoning** to employees rather than only the outcome.

Question 2

How do you actually prepare for a performance review?

Accepted Answer

By doing the work before the meeting — because a review is largely a negotiation over a narrative, and the person who arrives with evidence sets the narrative while the person who arrives to be told

Question 3

What is a competency framework?

Accepted Answer

A structured description of the behaviours, skills and knowledge an organisation expects at each level — used for recruitment, promotion, development and performance management, so that the same

Question 4

What happens at an assessment centre?

Accepted Answer

An assessment centre is a structured selection event, usually half a day to two days, where candidates complete several different exercises while being observed by trained assessors. It is common for

Question 5

What is a 360 review and does it work?

Accepted Answer

A 360-degree review collects feedback on someone from multiple perspectives — manager, peers, direct reports and sometimes clients — rather than from a line manager alone. The name describes the full

Question 6

How do you give difficult feedback?

Accepted Answer

Promptly, privately, and about observable behaviour and its effect — because the two things that make feedback fail are delay and vagueness, and both come from the giver's discomfort rather than from

Question 7

What is a job evaluation scheme?

Accepted Answer

A structured method for determining the relative size of jobs within an organisation, so that pay can be set on a consistent basis rather than through individual negotiation — and it is the main

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