For most of my career as an IC, I had no idea how performance and compensation decisions were actually made. Not because I didn't care. Because I didn't know those were things I could ask about. Calibration, comp bands, what a rating actually meant in practice. These existed somewhere in the organization, but they were opaque by default, and the default went unchallenged because I didn't know what I was missing. I didn't even know what questions to ask.

One manager in my career changed that. She sat down with me and walked through the whole system. Here's how calibration works. Here's where you sit in the comp band. Here's what "exceeds expectations" actually means for someone at your level. That conversation changed how I understood my own career. Not just because of the information, but because of the realization that came with it. I had been operating for years without any of this. And I hadn't known to ask.

When I became a manager, I made a decision. Nobody on my team was going to be in that position.

So a few years into managing, I sat down with each analyst individually and walked them through the same mechanics. How ratings are determined. What inputs go into the calibration conversation. Where they sat within the comp bands for their level. What "meets expectations" versus "exceeds" translates to in practice, not just on paper.

None of them had understood any of it before that conversation. And when I realized that, my first reaction wasn't pride in having finally explained it. It was something closer to discomfort. Because I hadn't been withholding this information. I just hadn't made it explicit. The opacity wasn't intentional.

Most managers treat the review as the moment to deliver clarity: to share where someone stands, give substantive feedback, explain the comp outcome. But if the review is the first time your team member is hearing any of that, the review isn't the problem. It's just when the problem becomes visible.

No one on your team should be surprised in their performance review.

Not by the rating. Not by the feedback themes. Not by the comp outcome, or what drove the decision about their trajectory, or what "exceeds expectations" actually looks like for their role. If any of that is news to them when they walk into the room, something was missing in the months before, not in the review itself. The goal isn't a better review. It's making the review a formality, a summary of what both people already know.

How the surprises accumulate

There are two ways managers create this problem, and most do both without realizing it.

The first is banked feedback. A manager observes something in March: a behavior pattern worth addressing, a strength worth naming, a moment that matters. They file it away, meaning to raise it at the right time. The right time never quite arrives, and the observation eventually surfaces in the formal review eight months later, stripped of all its context and immediacy. By then the person has been operating without that signal for the better part of a year. The feedback is technically accurate and practically useless.

The second is process opacity. Most ICs don't know how performance decisions are made. They don't know what calibration looks like, what inputs go into a rating, or what the real criteria for a promotion decision are. They can't ask about what they don't know exists, so if managers wait for their teams to bring it up, those conversations never happen. This is entirely fixable but most managers never fix it because it doesn't occur to them that it needs fixing.

I know what the failure mode looks like

I know this pattern well because I lived an earlier version of it.

In my first year of managing, I avoided hard feedback consistently. I told myself I was protecting relationships. What I was really doing was prioritizing how my team felt about me over how much they were actually growing. For a while that felt fine. And then one of my analysts started severely underperforming. I mentioned that moment in my first issue, and I'm coming back to it here because it shows something different: when that conversation arrived, I had nothing to stand on. No prior signal, no pattern of conversations either of us could point to, no shared language for what good performance even looked like on this team. Everything in that review was a surprise because everything had been avoided. That's the version of management where the review stops being a conversation and becomes a confrontation.

What it looks like to get ahead of it

Two things, practiced consistently, make the review feel like a formality by the time you get there.

The first is feedback in real time. When you see a gap, a pattern, a moment worth naming, say it while it's still connected to something real. Not in a formal sit-down, not with a big preamble. Casually, directly, specifically, while the moment is still fresh. The more normalized this becomes, the less loaded any individual piece of feedback feels. And by the time the formal review arrives, there's nothing in it that wasn't already said.

The other piece, and the one most managers skip entirely, is making the system visible. Explain how calibration actually works. What the ratings mean in practice. What "on track for promotion" means operationally, not just in the encouraging language you use in a 1:1. Most ICs have never had this conversation. It's not sensitive information. It's context they need to develop their careers well, and it doesn't happen because managers assume someone else already explained it. Nobody did.

One thing to do this week

Pick one person on your team and ask yourself this question honestly - could they tell you right now where they stand: their performance, what's working, what needs to change, and how decisions about their comp and growth actually get made? If the answer is no, or you're genuinely not sure, start there. Not with a formal performance conversation. Just a direct one with as much transparency as possible.

— Andrea

P.S. Not sure where you actually are in the transition? I built a free 5-minute assessment that shows you exactly which IC habits are still running the show — across how you execute, communicate, and delegate ownership. Nine questions. Immediate results. You can find it here.

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