Manager enablement after go-live: the one-hour briefing failed, the clinics did not

Voluntary clinics at 30% attendance means 70% of your managers are still guessing, and probably the ones who most need it. We made a 20-minute case exercise mandatory before a manager could submit a promotion nomination. Completion went to 96% because it was tied to something they wanted.

I'd be careful about tying it to nominations. We tried a gate like that in a software company of 2,000 and managers treated it as a compliance click-through; scores were perfect and understanding was not. The clinics, where someone has to explain a real case out loud, taught them more.

Small thing that helped us: a one-page comparison for each pair of adjacent levels, written as 'the difference you would notice in a week of work'. Managers ignored the full criteria but used those pages constantly. We have 8 levels, so only 7 pages per track.

The adjacent-level pages are a good idea and I'm going to borrow it. On mandatory versus voluntary, we have settled in the middle: clinics stay voluntary, but any manager with an appeal lodged from their team is asked to attend the next one.