How to give your employees a reality check, respectfully (and the training to do it)

Every People team has a story like it. The employee who wants a $60K bump because a salary site told them they were underpaid. The new hire who's "underperforming" at three weeks, and the manager who thinks saying "here's what I expect of you" is too boomer to try. The report who keeps relitigating the same answer, betting that the fourth ask is the one that breaks you.

We got into all of it with Hebba Youssef, Chief People Officer at Workweek and creator of "I Hate It Here," in a recent webinar session on how to give employees a reality check without losing the room. The throughline: most of these moments aren't reality-check problems, they're expectation problems. You solve them by setting the expectation before you ever need the conversation.

Here's the catch Ethena's Chief People Officer Melanie Naranjo discovered: we'd trained our managers on the hard conversations, but we'd never told employees what their managers were and weren't responsible for. So we updated our onboarding to close that gap, and we're sharing the actual deck we use here at Ethena.

When to run it

Put it in the first month of onboarding, before anyone has a chance to build the wrong assumptions. It works best after you've already aligned your managers, since the missing piece is usually on the employee side, and it lands harder once you have a comp philosophy and leveling structure to point to. Plan for about an hour, run live, and use the built-in breakouts. As Hebba put it, "expectation setting is the foundation of everything at work, from compensation to performance to relationships."

The talk track

The deck moves through four parts. Here's what to land in each, plus the pushback to expect.

Start with the performance culture. Before responsibilities, set the stakes: high performance lifts the whole team, and underperformance quietly drains it. Open with the breakout slide, think of a time a teammate started missing deadlines, how did that feel, so the "why" lands before the "what."

Define what the manager owns. This is the heart of it. In Melanie's words: "Your manager is not responsible for protecting you. Your manager is responsible for holding you accountable to high standards, and enabling you to achieve those high standards." The reframe that does the work: when a workload feels too heavy, the manager's job is to coach you through it, is this a prioritization issue, an efficiency issue, or genuinely too much, rather than to quietly take it off your plate. Pre-load the pushback here, because the first time a manager coaches instead of rescuing, it can read as "my manager doesn't support me." Name that in the room.

Hand employees their half. The deck calls it managing up, and the mindset is agency. Melanie's line: "Who is most incentivized to make sure that you grow? You." In practice, that means saying you want a promotion six months before the review, not the month of, and asking what the gap is. Or, as Hebba framed careers, "it is a two-way street. If you want something, you have to say you want something."

Make comp and levels real. End where the friction usually starts: how pay and promotions actually work. Use Melanie's candor line, "we pay top of band because we expect top of band performance," then walk through your salary bands and review cadence so "I googled my salary" has somewhere honest to land.

When expectations still go sideways

Even with the training, someone will test the line. Three moves from the session for when they do.

The broken record. When a settled decision keeps coming back, Melanie names it plainly: "We've had this conversation three times now. We're not revisiting it unless you have new information to bring, and you can tell your manager I said that."

The AI redirect. When someone opens with "I asked AI what I should make," don't argue with the chatbot. Hebba's move is "let's sit down and talk about it," then walk them through your actual leveling structure.

Comp confidentiality. When an employee asks what a coworker earns, Melanie hands the boundary back with empathy: "The same way you wouldn't want me to share your compensation, I have to be respectful and not share theirs."

Make it your own

Swap in your own comp philosophy and levels, and reinforce the message in manager 1:1s afterward, because one training doesn't stick on its own. And if building a polished, company-styled version sounds like a week you don't have, that's the kind of thing our Training Agent handles: drop in your outline and it drafts an interactive training in minutes, then you approve and adjust. Melanie built one live during the session from a single prompt. Steal this one to start:

Here's our career ownership training outline: [paste]. Turn it into an interactive training for new hires in their first month. Keep the tone direct and supportive, add a scenario where a direct report asks their manager to take work off their plate, and end each section with one reflection question.

Grab the deck

The reality check always lands easier when the expectations are clear from day one. Take the deck we actually use, run it in your next onboarding, and catch the full conversation with Hebba for the rest of the stories.

Get the Career Ownership deck

Watch the full webinar