Speaker 1: Hi everyone, welcome to career talk. People desperately wait for entire one year to have that one-on-one discussion with their manager at the time of annual appraisal and they think that you know in that discussion they will say something or do something or express something which will give them a very good rating and eventually a very good salary hike or promotion but honestly even before you walk into that room for that one-on-one discussion with your manager your manager 9 out of 10 times has already figured out what rating he is going to give you. So irrespective of what discussion you have in that particular room, how boldly you put your points forward, there is already a rating in his mind or her mind even before you walk into that room for that one on one discussion and why I am saying this is because you work with this manager or with this team lead for the entire year. Right. When you work over the entire year, there are a lot of transactions that happen where you do some good work or not so good work, where you get some very good feedback or not so good feedback. So what happens is when all these things are happening, there is already a perception being made in his mind that how you are performing, whether good or whether bad or whether average. And at the time of annual appraisals, managers have to segregate their team into three categories, mostly into three. One is the really good performers, second is the average performers, and third is the not so good performers. And majority of the people fall in the average bucket. Okay, and when I say average, it is not bad, it is actually good, but they are not very good as compared to the A class people, right? So managers over a period of time, observe you when you work with them, and they have already built their thought process that okay, these are my A performers and these are my C performers. So these two categories are very clear in their mind and rest of them by default fall into the B category. This is how in my view it works in the mind of the managers and then there is something called as KRAs where you have some specific targets, some realistic number based targets where if you meet that number then you get 100% score, if you don't meet that number then you don't get any score. And then there are subjective KRS wherein a lot of it depends on subjectivity. There is no objectivity. Okay, it is all based on feedback perception and what not. So in a nutshell, what I'm trying to tell you is don't wait for the last day to have that conversation with your manager and then ask for a promotion or ask for a salary hike or prove what great work you have done or prove what potential you have or express what potential you have for the next level role etc. You have to do it constantly on an ongoing basis throughout the year. You have to find out ways and means of communicating your thought process with your manager so that they know where you are coming from and what to expect in that one-on-one discussion. In one-on-one discussion, you can't really change anything whatever you have done in the last year. So don't get into an argument mode, don't get into a mode where you will prove a lot of things. Honestly, if you are needing 30 minutes or 45 minutes at the end of the year to express what you have done, then you have really not done a good job of communicating throughout the year. Honestly, it should just take 10 to 15 minutes to actually go through the ratings and agree on a certain things where you have done a great job and a certain set of things where you need to improve. It is that simple. Because at the end of the day, you need to also understand that managers are also human beings. So they are also very much calculative, okay, when that discussion is about to happen. And whatever I'm telling you is actually applicable for people who have spent considerable time working with a particular manager or in a given project for a longer duration. If you are new to the company or if you are new to the department or the project, then there is of course no perception built, you have to prove everything, there may be feedback taken from other managers where you have worked earlier, but whatever I told you is applicable in scenarios where you have worked with somebody for a stretch, for a considerable amount of time. So as I said, because managers have a lot of experience talking to people over the years when they talk to multiple people, they really sharpen their skills about how to talk and what to expect. So they already know when you're walking in the room, what to expect, but you really don't know that they've already made up their mind. Okay, so that is the message I wanted to pass in this video today. Let me know what you think about it in comments. If you think differently, or if you have experienced something really different, please state that as well in the comment section, I'll be happy to read and respond to them. If you like this video, please share it in your network, especially in the WhatsApp network. It helps the channel to grow. Thank you so much for watching. Subscribe to the channel if you are new and I will see you in another video day after tomorrow. Till then take care. Bye for now.