Week 1 Stand-up: Welcome to calibration

Your rating is decided in a meeting you are not invited to. This week you find out what happens in that room, what your manager carries in with them, and who the room runs out of time for.

25 February 2027

This week's trickKnow the rubric better than your manager does.

Who paysThe name read out last, because the room ran long.

The first stand-up is short, because the course starts by telling you the worst of it. Somewhere in every large company there is a meeting where a group of managers sit in a room, look at a list of names, and decide which of them were “exceeds”, which were “meets”, and which were something worse. You are not in that room. Your manager is, for about three minutes per name.

Tuesday’s lecture told you why the room exists. Left alone, a rating is mostly the rater; the room is the company’s attempt to fix that. This course is about what the fix leaves open.

Bring#

The rubric from any job, internship or group project you have been rated in. If you have never seen one, bring the marking criteria for this course, which are a rubric with the serial numbers filed off.

The trick#

Internalise the leveling framework end to end. Every accomplishment you surface should be traceable to a rubric competency, ideally by name. Your manager’s calibration narrative is built from your inputs; make those inputs rubric-shaped so that the narrative writes itself and lands on the right bucket without friction.

What happens#

In pairs, you read one another’s rubric and find the line your best piece of work would be argued under. Then you rewrite one sentence about that work so the rubric line is visible in it. Most people find their honest sentence had nothing a manager could use.

Then the room does one more thing: it times itself. Forty names at three minutes each is two hours, and the room was booked for ninety minutes. Somebody’s name is read out last, after the curve has already been agreed. That is who pays for the trick you just learned, and this course will name that person every week.

How you know it worked#

You leave with one sentence a stranger could file under a rubric line without asking you a question. That is the unit of work this course runs on.