Curriculum
What you learn during an engagement
A detailed look at the workshops, documents, and training sessions built into each engagement, and what your team walks away with.
Readiness criteria workshop
Department leads sit down with us to answer one deceptively hard question: what does someone at the next level actually do differently? We work level by level, track by track, translating vague seniority language into scope, decision rights, and observable output.
You leave with a written definition for each level in each track, reviewed against three to five real past promotion cases to check whether the criteria would have produced the same outcome your team already trusts.
Rubric design and bias reduction
We convert readiness criteria into a scoring rubric that asks for evidence, not impression. Each category maps to specific examples a manager must cite, which limits the influence of recency bias, likeability, and visibility.
The workshop also covers calibration: how a group of managers reviews borderline cases together so one manager's standards don't drift from another's.
Manager conversation training
A rubric is only useful if managers know how to talk through it. This session covers how to open a career conversation, how to deliver a "not yet" with specific next steps instead of vague reassurance, and how to handle pushback without becoming defensive.
Managers practice with live role-play scenarios based on situations your team has actually encountered, not generic hypotheticals.
Separating compensation from development
This module addresses a specific failure mode: growth feedback and salary discussions happening in the same meeting. We help design two distinct conversation formats, with separate scheduling and separate documentation, so an employee never has to guess which one they're in.
Managers receive guidance on how to redirect a compensation question that surfaces mid-development-conversation without dismissing it.
Communication and rollout toolkit
The final module produces the materials needed to introduce the framework company-wide: an all-hands presentation outline, a written FAQ addressing likely employee concerns, and a manager talking-points guide for one-on-one follow-up questions.
We review the language closely, because how a framework is introduced affects whether employees experience it as clarity or as new scrutiny.
What you walk away with