Advocating for Your Team's Ratings in Calibration

Calibration is where the ratings you drafted in good faith get tested against a room full of other managers doing the same for their own teams. Being right about your team's work isn't enough on its own. You also have to actually make the case, in the room, in real time, which is a different skill from writing the review itself.

The principles

These aren't steps to complete in order - they're the things worth checking yourself against, before and during the work. Read them once, then keep this page open while you go.

1. Walk in with evidence, not opinions

   A rating backed by "they've had a strong year" doesn't survive contact with a room of managers who don't know that person. A rating backed by specific outcomes usually does.

   • For every rating you plan to defend, have two or three specific, concrete examples ready.
   • Bring numbers wherever they exist - they're harder to argue with than general impressions.
   • If your evidence for a rating feels thin going into the meeting, that's worth noticing before calibration, not during it.

2. Know which ratings are actually contestable

   Spending equal energy defending every rating dilutes the ones that actually need it.

   • Identify ratings near a boundary between two levels - these are where calibration discussion tends to concentrate.
   • For ratings that are clearly and uncontroversially right, don't over-defend them; save your energy for the genuinely contested ones.
   • Think through in advance which ratings you'd hold firm on and which you'd genuinely reconsider given a good counter-argument.

3. Make the case in the room, not after

   A rating that gets quietly adjusted in the meeting, without your input, is far harder to revisit once calibration has closed.

   • Speak up when a rating you're responsible for comes under discussion, rather than waiting to be asked.
   • State your evidence plainly and specifically rather than defensively.
   • If you weren't given a chance to make the case before a rating was moved, ask for that to be revisited before the meeting closes.

4. Trade concessions deliberately, not to keep the peace

   Calibration often involves genuine trade-offs. The difference between a good and bad outcome is whether you're making them on purpose.

   • If you agree to move a rating, be clear with yourself about why - real new information, not just social pressure to agree.
   • It's fine to say you need a moment to think rather than agreeing on the spot.
   • Notice if you're consistently the one conceding across every contested rating - that's worth reflecting on afterward.

5. Protect the person who has no one else in the room

   Some people on your team are only known to the wider group through what you say about them in this meeting. That makes your advocacy for them disproportionately important.

   • Identify anyone on your team whose work is genuinely invisible to other managers in the room.
   • Make a deliberate point of bringing specific, concrete evidence for exactly this person.
   • Don't assume their rating will be treated fairly by default just because nobody objects - silence in the room isn't agreement, it's often just unfamiliarity.

6. Close the loop with your team afterward

   What happens in calibration eventually reaches your team, whether you tell them or not. Better it comes from you, clearly.

   • Be ready to explain, honestly, if a rating changed during calibration and roughly why.
   • Don't overpromise before calibration what a rating will be, given it can genuinely move in the room.
   • Use what you learned this cycle about what does and doesn't hold up in calibration to write stronger evidence next time.

That's the whole playbook

None of this replaces judgement. It is the checklist for catching the moments where judgement quietly turns into habit, or into bias.