Hey folks, I’m Swati.
Welcome back to my weekly newsletter.
This newsletter is those conversations: what I’m seeing, thinking, and what I’d tell you if we were grabbing coffee.
This week’s edition is about appraisals.
Before we dive in, quick poll:
What's your appraisal strategy this year?
(Keep your answer in mind. We'll come back to it.)
It's that time of the year.
Appraisal conversations have started.
Every year, the same thing plays out: someone walks into a room and asks for a 25% raise, while their manager has a budget for 9%.
Both come into the meeting with two different numbers, but there is no shared context for why either one makes sense.
And when it's just numbers against numbers, the person holding the budget wins.
I keep hearing versions of this from students, alums, and recruiters.
The average salary hike in India is about 9%.
Deloitte's 2025 survey found 75% of companies planned to maintain or cut increment budgets, and about 12% of employees are expected to get promoted.
Most Indian companies still use bell curves or forced distributions.
Even companies that officially dropped them like TCS, Infosys, and Wipro still operate under fixed salary pools.
About 60% of your rating comes from your manager's perception instead of your actual work.
That means the story your manager tells about you in those calibration rooms matters more than the work itself.
And if you haven't shaped that story, someone else will.
I see two versions and both get it wrong.
The first is the person who says, "I'm here for the long term." and prioritises relationships.
They get an 8-10% raise every year and tell themselves the company will take care of them.
Five years later, they're making 30-40% less than someone who just joined.
A 2023 study ran a series of experiments with nearly 1,400 managers found that when an employee was described as “loyal,” managers were consistently more willing to assign them unpaid work and extra hours.
Lead researcher Matthew Stanley called it a “vicious cycle.”
Stanford's Jeffrey Pfeffer put it simply: "Companies make calculated decisions about whether to reward loyalty. If it doesn't benefit them, they won't."
Loyalty will earn you respect, rarely a raise.
The second version is the opposite.
Someone goes on a pressure run right before appraisals like staying late, chasing high-visibility projects and overdelivering.
But they quietly drop the unglamorous work like reviewing a teammate’s deliverable or contributing to something that won’t carry their name.
They might get one good hike, but nobody goes to bat for them in the room because nobody felt carried along the way.
You need results and relationships. One without the other caps your growth.
I'm not saying the system is fair.
Bell curves are arbitrary, and budgets are fixed.
And the people who do well at appraisals understand two things: they shape the narrative about themselves early, and they set the anchor before anyone else does.
Galinsky and Mussweiler studied what happens when a number is put on the table first in a negotiation.
It predicts the final outcome with a correlation of .85 i.e, whoever sets the number first, wins.
A Harvard Kennedy School study found that when managers could see self-evaluations, their ratings were heavily anchored by what employees wrote.
When self-evaluations were hidden, ratings dropped.
What you say about yourself shapes how you’re rated.
Most people say nothing and hope their work speaks for itself.
Gallup found that only 50% of employees in a company even know what's expected of them.
So here’s how I would approach it:
• Start with one conversation in April or May.
Sit down with your manager and say: “I want to get to this level. Tell me what that looks like.”
Then make it a quarterly habit.
This does two things: It gives you a clear target, and it makes your manager a stakeholder in your growth.
They’ve told you what good looks like, so when you deliver it, they’re partly accountable for recognising it.
• Reframe how you ask.
The 25% ask fails because it’s anchored to what you think you’re worth, rather than what the system can accommodate.
Reframing the question to “What would need to be true for me to be in the top bracket?” shifts the conversation from justification to joint problem-solving.
• Take on work that reduces your manager’s bandwidth.
You can chase high visibility projects or take on work that makes your manager’s life easier. The latter would look like leading the tedious cross-team coordination efforts, writing recurring reporting that eats up time, and stakeholder management their manager would otherwise do themselves.
When your manager walks into that calibration room, they’re more likely to fight for the person who made their quarter easier.
• Document everything on a single thread.
Keep a running doc or email thread where you log key wins, feedback received, and outcomes from your check-ins, and update it after every meaningful project.
When appraisal time comes, your manager has to fill out reports about dozens of people.
By documenting and handing them out a clean thread they can pull up and reference, you’ve made their job easier while also controlling the narrative.
Go back to the poll. If your answer was anything other than “have been setting expectations all year,” this is your sign to start.
And hit reply: what’s the best or worst appraisal conversation you’ve ever had?
I read every email.
Swati
PS: If this was useful, share it with someone heading into appraisal season.