Ranks, evaluation, and pay

Connecting the forest to evaluation — and eventually money — is where the method carries the most weight and deserves the most care. Three principles.

Anchor reviews on levels and ranks, not adjectives. "Moved three skills to confident, holds the mid-rank set" is comparable year over year, across managers, across teams. Adjective-based reviews aren't just vague — they're incomparable, which makes every calibration meeting a negotiation between writing styles. Levels give the organisation one currency of progress.

Connect ranks to bands deliberately. The tempting shortcut — pay scales with skill count — fails quickly: a raw count rarely maps cleanly to value, and it incentivises collecting cheap skills over deepening critical ones. Instead, decide which skills and ranks matter for which band, and write it down so it's consistent across managers. The forest gives you honest inputs; the compensation design is still a human decision — the method just makes it explicit instead of folklore.

Keep assessment honest under pressure. The predictable failure: once levels touch pay, they inflate — self-ratings and manager ratings alike; not from dishonesty, but because incentives lean on the scale. The counterweights from chapter 5 stop being optional at this point: peer validation (a claimed level is one colleagues confirm) and skill champions (each critical skill has a reference person who validates assessments). An organisation that ties pay to levels without standing up validation first is scheduling its own credibility crisis.

Sequencing advice hides in that last line: let the forest prove itself in reviews and development first, then connect money. A map the org already trusts can bear the weight; a brand-new one can't.