First formal performance review next week and I have no idea what a normal rating even looks like
Eleven months in. My 1:1s have been fine, but nobody has ever told me where I sit against expectations and now there's a rating attached to it. I genuinely can't tell if "meets expectations" is a polite warning or the actual goal for someone at my level. For anyone past this, what did you wish you'd prepared, and is it weird to walk in with my own list of what I shipped?
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AnonymousAnon Meets expectations is the goal, genuinely. At most places the distribution is built so most people land there and exceeding is meant to be uncommon, otherwise the rating means nothing.
The signal actually worth reading isn't the word, it's whether the examples they cite are the ones you'd have picked yourself. If they're describing work you don't recognise as your best, that's the conversation to have in the room.
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AnonymousAnon Do you know whether yours is a curve or absolute? Ours is curved and it changes the whole thing — you can genuinely hit everything you were asked to do and still land mid because someone else had a more visible year. Worth asking your manager outright before the meeting, mine answered straight and it saved me a lot of spiralling.
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AnonymousAnon Bring the list. It isn't weird, it's the most useful thing you can do — your manager is writing a dozen of these partly from memory and yours will be the one with specifics in it. And "meets expectations" really is the target for most people most cycles; the ratings above it usually need something visible and unusual. If it were a warning, you'd have heard it before a form was involved.