Week 3: Who speaks for you

The cast of a calibration meeting, the peers you nominate, and two literatures: incentive theory on subjective evaluation, and the research on impression management.

9 March 2027

Why it worksSubjective evaluation rewards influence over the evaluator, and the research says being liked moves a rating further than being impressive.

A calibration meeting has a cast. Your manager proposes your rating and defends it. Their peers, the other managers in the room, are defending their own people against the same fixed budget of “exceeds” slots, so every slot your manager wins is one they lose. The chair, usually the skip-level, keeps the room to the curve and breaks ties. HR keeps the record.

Two people with the same work can leave that room with different ratings, because the argument was about them but not by them. What decides it is how well your manager can make your case from memory, and whether the chair recognises your name when it is read out. Neither is under your control on the day. Both are under your control for the nine weeks before it.

There is a fifth part of the cast the org chart does not show: the peers who write your feedback. At most large companies you nominate them. Their paragraphs reach your manager before the rating is proposed, and a well-chosen paragraph is a sentence your manager can read out in the room. Nobody nominates the colleague they argued with in March.

The research on all of this is older than the industry. Prendergast’s 1999 survey of incentive theory says that once evaluation is subjective, the rational place to spend effort is the evaluator’s opinion, and that firms know it. Bolino and colleagues’ review of impression management says which effort pays: being liked moves a rating further than self-promotion does, and small repeated ingratiation keeps working where repeated self-promotion wears out. Read the next nine weeks against that. Most of the tricks in this course are self-promotion. This week’s is not, and it is the one the literature backs.

Outline#

• the cast: proposer, peers, chair, record
• why the budget of slots makes your manager’s peers your opponents
• what a chair does with a name they recognise
• the peers you nominate, and what their paragraphs do in the room
• Prendergast and Bolino: why influence beats impressiveness
• the skip-level relationship as a thing you build on purpose

Sources

• Prendergast, The provision of incentives in firms (Journal of Economic Literature, 1999)
• Bolino, Kacmar, Turnley and Gilstrap, A multi-level review of impression management (Journal of Management, 2008)
• Performance calibrations at tech companies (The Pragmatic Engineer)
• The how and why of performance review calibration (Lattice)