Scenario 2: Max

• You’ve always been competitive, you like to work hard and play hard and you love working for Learnerbly because it feels like a culture who value growth, talent and Creating Impact.
• You’ll be blindsided by the rating.  You absolutely see your behaviour as part of Create Impact and supporting people to grow and win.  You don’t see what happened with Zee/Cal as a big deal: you apologised to Zee, she sent you some stuff to review and you ended up letting her take a stab at the work.
• Honestly, you still prefer Cal’s style and approach and you would always want them to work on your stuff before anyone else.  It wasn’t like you totally shamed Zee or anything.
• Sure, you made a mistake accidentally cc’ing her but you fired off that email late at night - everyone’s concentration lapses at some point.
• Besides, everyone that knows you knows you’re honest, direct and that you respect great work.  Your standards for everyone else are the same as your standards for yourself.  That’s what it takes to role-model “Create Impact” in your view.  Challenging people to raise their game and knowing great work when you see it.
• Deep down, it will feel like you’re being told you’ve failed and you will focus solely on the values rating and ignore your Exceeds capabilities rating entirely.
• You’ll need to be given space to talk through your approach and, if the manager mirrors your initial defensiveness you’ll completely disengage and say something like “sounds like I really should be thinking about taking my talent elsewhere, somewhere it’s valued”

A successful manager will:

• Offer you clear and specific feedback with regard to how you approach the values. They will need to focus on the IMPACT of your actions on Zee and Cal’s ability to Create Impact and Include Intentionally, as well as highlighting Learnerbly Win Together value (the “Together” is as important as the “Win”).
• Support you to connect capabilities and values - helping you understand that empowering everyone to deliver great work in a strategic (rather than overly directive/reactive way) enables people to both play to their strengths and develop their capability.
• Take time to deliver positive feedback on your performance and ensure that your Exceeds rating there is neither forgotten or over-played.
• Make space for you to process your surprise and disappointment rather than reacting defensively to justify the rating or forging ahead with their expectations for when and how you will make changes to your behaviour.
• Explore (rather than judge) your view of great performance and great company culture, so they can find alignment and build buy-in. E.g. Cal’s style is great and, in your view, nobody can match that quality; however, if you only ever rely on Cal, nobody has a chance to grow their ability to deliver detail in the way you believe is right. It’s added pressure for you and everyone else - which makes it hard for everyone to do their best work.

A less successful manager will:

• Become defensive and limit your space to process by justifying why their rating is correct, as opposed to focusing on the context for the rating and exploring how to move forward.
• Judge your intent and/or your potential to ever fully buy-in to and embody the values…
• Try to make you feel better by overly focusing on the good news of your Exceeds capabilities rating - rather than finding ways to link values and capabilities and asserting the importance of both.