The best performers expect their work to be seen without having to announce it. When forced to advocate for themselves, something fundamental breaks. They realize the system rewards performance theater over actual performance.

We built performance matrices to seem fair. Instead, they systematically reward visible mediocrity over invisible... See more

Every company has these people. They work within the seams. Between the levels. Outside the performance matrix.

They don't hit your L5 requirements because they're doing L3 and L7 work simultaneously. Fixing the deploy pipeline while mentoring juniors. Answering customer emails while rebuilding core systems. They can't be ranked because they do what... See more