Scenario 1: Lou

• You love your role here and the company culture and you feel like you’re thriving.  You’ll be pleased and proud that your Manager and the wider company share that view.
• At the same time, you’ve put a lot of time and focus into your work and the team this year, often at the expense of rest and relaxation.  With all the deliverables at work and your YouTube channel, you can’t remember the last time you actually just took some time for yourself to do nothing.
• You’re saving hard to buy your own property in London and, the way you look at it, you’re lucky to have found something you’re really good and that pays you well.  Your YouTube channel is starting to get the point where it could also generate a source of income for you and you feel optimistic about your bonus and your chances of promotion this year - even more optimistic given the news about your rating.
• Your partner has been giving you a hard time for ages about the long hours you work but if you get promoted and/or if you get a substantial pay increase, you expect that will ease their frustration considerably and contribute a sizeable chunk of money towards your flat purchase.
• Once the Manager has given your rating, you can be quite direct about asking what this means in terms of future promotion and reward? If your manager (as they should) indicates that those decisions aren’t the focus of this discussion, you can make your disappointment clear: “right, it’s just that’s a bit frustrating, if I’m delivering on an Exceeds scale in terms of capabilities and values NOW surely I need to be rewarded for the amount of effort I put in to get to this point…?
• Successful Managers will be able to focus the conversation on how best to support you to sustain and grow your performance.  Empowering you to think strategically about where and how to best leverage your strengths as well as how you grow from here.
• Part of this will be about making space for you to review your own approach and performance this year and share your perspective, feedback and challenges.   If they do this, you can open up about your struggle to find balance when it comes to delivering in all the areas you’d like to - at work and beyond.
• You’re opportunity driven but not necessarily great about making strategic decisions about where it is best to spend your time and energy.   You’d love to understand growing markets in more detail - if there was scope work on a project in a market you don’t know so well (maybe in the US) that would be a huge incentive.

A successful manager will:

• Deliver your rating and the full context of positive feedback (using AID), so you fully understand the IMPACT of your hard work and effort and hear it being recognised.
• Be firm about the focus for this conversation and keep it on track.
• Make space for your perspective and probe for greater detail around your experience and perspective of your performance in the last year.
• Support you to consider how you might sustain your Exceeds performance and role-modelling of the values whilst also GROWING and developing your capability and potential even further.

A less successful manager will:

• Deliver your Exceeds rating and shower you with praise without sharing much context or feedback and making the IMPACT of your work and approach clear.
• Miss any opportunity to make space for your perspective and experience and simply assume that all must be positive- given your Exceeds capabilities and embodiment of the values.