A.1.4 PC expectations rubric
Summary
A Player-Coach (PC) combines craft with developing other people. They continue doing substantive work while investing in the skills, judgment, and effectiveness of people around them. This draft assesses Direction, Enablement, and Systems. A rating of 3 means fully meeting expectations: successful performance in the role. The rubric preserves the complete criteria supplied on October 2 and has not yet been adopted as policy.
Role and scope
The core question is:
Are people and systems becoming more capable because of you?
This rubric evaluates how a player-coach gives direction, develops people, and improves systems. Define the people, work, and responsibilities within the role before evaluating it.
Roles can overlap. Evaluate the roles a person actually held during the review period; IC, DRI, and PC do not form a required promotion ladder.
Expectations rubric
The three dimensions are Direction, Enablement, and Systems. Ratings describe the overall pattern of contribution and supporting evidence, rather than a checklist to maximize mechanically. A 4 or 5 represents meaningfully greater contribution, scope, or leverage than reliably fulfilling the expected role.
| Rating | Direction | Enablement | Systems |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 — Extraordinary | Creates exceptional clarity despite major ambiguity. People deeply understand goals, constraints, priorities, and success criteria and can independently make excellent tradeoffs. | People around them rapidly increase in capability, judgment, ownership, and autonomy. Gives exceptionally useful feedback and creates high standards while making disagreement, mistakes, and bad news safe to surface. | Builds operating and technical systems that materially multiply team output. Anticipates bottlenecks, redesigns systems before they fail, allocates talent exceptionally well, and makes the organization less dependent on themselves. |
| 4 — Exceeds expectations | Consistently establishes clear goals, priorities, owners, and definitions of success. Explains why priorities matter, resolves conflicts quickly, and protects focus. | Gives frequent, specific, timely feedback; delegates meaningful ownership; removes blockers; adapts support to the individual; and makes people noticeably more capable and independent over time. | Identifies recurring problems and fixes root causes. Creates useful processes without bureaucracy, matches people to work well, and continuously improves how the team operates. |
| 3 — Fully meets expectations | People generally know what they own, what matters now, why it matters, and what successful completion looks like. Conflicting priorities are resolved reasonably quickly. | Holds useful 1:1s, provides timely feedback, recognizes good work, addresses problems, gives appropriate autonomy, and helps people develop their skills and judgment. | Provides adequate tools, information, processes, and staffing. Delegates appropriately and fixes obvious recurring coordination problems. |
| 2 — Developing | Priorities or ownership are sometimes unclear. Too many things are simultaneously important, definitions of success are vague, or direction changes without enough explanation. | Feedback is irregular, vague, or late. Alternates between micromanagement and insufficient support. Solves too many problems personally and people are not clearly becoming more autonomous. | Often handles recurring problems as isolated incidents. Processes are missing, cumbersome, or inconsistent, and delegation or resource allocation creates avoidable bottlenecks. |
| 1 — Below expectations | People frequently do not know what to prioritize, who owns what, or what success means. Conflicting instructions and delayed decisions cause substantial wasted work. | Important feedback is avoided or delivered too late. People are blocked, overly controlled, or unsupported. Speaking up, disagreeing, or reporting mistakes feels risky. | The player-coach becomes a major bottleneck. Problems repeatedly recur, responsibilities are confused, resources are missing, and team effectiveness depends on constant intervention. |
Applying the draft
Share expectations before evaluating performance. Discuss observable outcomes and behavior, using examples from the review period. Hours worked, messages sent, tickets closed, lines of code, and meetings attended do not by themselves establish contribution.
Suggested weighting: 35% Direction · 35% Enablement · 30% Systems
These weights come from the supplied draft. They are a suggestion, not an adopted scoring rule. Confirm whether and how to apply them before using a combined score.
Details to confirm before adoption: the review owner and process, agreed role scope and expectations, evidence to use, assessment cadence, and how differences between assessments will be discussed. The companion staff guidance should own the common review process; this page owns this role's complete rubric.
For existing coaching practices, see Feedback and coaching. The other role rubrics are:
Further Reading
The supplied framework names From Hierarchy to Intelligence, Holacracy's organizational structure, Locke and Latham's goal-setting work, and Andy Grove's High Output Management as influences. Bibliographic details, relevant passages, and the attribution of particular claims remain unverified for the handbook. These are source-note influences awaiting citation review, not verified support or assigned reading.