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Teams are slotted into a continuum of four states:
Most companies seem to start with three levels and slowly add levels over time, perhaps adding one every two years. At each level, you’ll want to specify the expectations across each of your values. Crisp level boundaries reduce ambiguity when considering whether to promote an individual across levels.
If there is one component of performance management that you’re going to invest into doing well, make it the ladders: everything else builds on this foundation.
Compare against the ladder, not against others. Comparing folks against each other tends to introduce false equivalencies without adding much clarity. Focus on the ladder instead.
Instead, feedback for weak performance should be delivered immediately.
The overhead of running a cycle tends to be fairly heavy, which leads companies to do them less frequently. Conversely, the feedback from the cycle tends to be very important, and it serves as a primary input into factors that individuals care about a great deal, like compensation, so there is also countervailing pressure to do them frequently. The most important factor I’ve seen for effective performance cycles is forcing folks to practice. Providing well-structured timelines is very helpful, particularly if they’re concise, but there tend to be so many competing demands that people do the
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Many employees rely entirely on their manager to come up with a step-by-step path to high performance.
Propose a set of clear goals to your manager, and iterate together toward an explicit agreement on the expectations to hit the designation you’re aiming for.
