Ok here is the brutal truth of EM performance assessment system. If you’re over CL25 and still an individual contributor with no sponsor to protect you, odds are stacked against you because you’re now ranked with a bunch of supervisors/managers…. You could be solving the world hunger, but the company still has no business needs to rank you above average. The most likely scenario is that you won’t be even given the opportunity to make “real” impact because those special, high visibility tasks are reserved for high flyers to look good and justify the fast tracking. Smart, hard working, but apolitical individual contributors are often assigned to ticking time bo--s and work that’s so challenging, backlogged for 5+ years but has be done now due to compliance reason. When you actually defuse the bo-b in an amazing way and put a bow on it, your supervisor will graciously put you in VG, pat you on the shoulder, telling you that you did a good job but the assessment is RELEVANT and it is all about PERCEPTION so try harder next year. If you fumble, now you’re the perfect candidate to sacrifice (NI/NSI) so your supervisor could trade your NSI with another golden child’s OWD.
And yes this gets progressively worse as you are approaching 50 because EM really got you with the pension.
Is this really what you want for your career?