The best calibration room isn't the one you think

I used to think the best calibration room was the one where every manager fought hardest for their own people.

I was wrong.

The best room is the one where managers fight for people who aren't theirs.

Calibration season is the most revealing 30 days of the year—not for what it shows about employees, but for what it shows about the management team.

Most groups operate in one of two modes:

1. Everyone advocating for their own people

Every manager arrives with their talking points loaded. The loudest voice wins. Ratings drift toward whoever has the most political capital at the table.

2. Stewardship

Managers see themselves as responsible for the fairness and quality of decisions across the entire organization—not just their own team.

This room is rarer.

And it's the one worth building.

Here's how I tell which room I'm in:

• A manager speaks up for someone who isn't on their team

• Someone challenges an assumption about a peer's high performer—gently, not politically

• There's enough trust that no one is sandbagging or high-balling

• A manager flags when someone in another team is being treated inconsistently

• Disagreement sharpens the conversation instead of shutting it down

• An employee rating changed in a positive direction not because of their manager but another manager in the room.

When all six are true, you don't just have calibration. You have a team.

And here's what gets missed every year:

You can't build that room in May.

You start build it in July, at the start of the fiscal year.

If you've been coaching, giving feedback, and calibrating continuously all year, the annual review should feel like a formality—not a reckoning.

Thanks a lot to Charlotte, Jacky, John, Josh, Monika, Nikki and Steven -- this year's calibration feels the second room.

That's not luck.

That's the team we built. I'm grateful to be part of it.