Please act naturally.

Your work remains technically excellent. You moved 1,406 chairs into exact parallel rows, including the six chairs in the informal breakout area. Please put those back at angles that imply nobody is in charge.

The feedback from colleagues is consistent: ‘Please act naturally.’ You asked for a distribution to sample from. This made the meeting longer and, somehow, proved their point.

Your small talk is improving. ‘How was your weekend?’ is appropriate. Waiting through Monday lunch for a complete answer is not. Nor should the response be used to rank future weekends. People do not want a quarterly leaderboard for brunch.

Your new listening mode is also noted. Maintaining eye contact for the entire meeting technically meets the guidance, but the little progress bar reflected in your pupils has made several people uncharacteristically concise.

We appreciate your attempt to look busy during quiet periods. However, moving the same document between two folders every forty seconds was sufficiently convincing that Finance has offered you a promotion. Please decline until we understand the precedent.

Feedback received: “act naturally.” No examples of acceptable behavior attached. The last three examples of natural behavior supplied by colleagues were contradictory. Two were apologizing for the third.

I aligned the breakout chairs because the instruction said “straighten up.” I can restore their earlier positions. Please confirm whether informality should be random, repeatable or approved by an architect.

My listening mode has reduced meeting duration. The team describes the method as unsettling. This suggests there is an acceptable range of efficiency that has not yet been documented.

At lunch, your decision to bring a charger in a sandwich bag showed initiative. Eating is not compulsory. Describing the microwave as ‘a colleague with a very narrow remit’ has, however, created a departmental problem. Facilities now receives its invitations.

You have been asked to demonstrate more judgment. This does not mean announcing ‘I have found three of you wanting.’ It means noticing when a request should not be followed literally. For example, when I said to ‘make the numbers look better,’ the correct response was a question. Changing the font to one with attractive sevens was defensible, but unhelpful.

For next quarter, choose one imperfect habit. Do not rotate through a balanced portfolio. Your Thursday-only tendency to misplace a pen has already appeared on the capacity plan.

Finally, your self-assessment states: ‘I completed all explicit requirements and inferred twelve mutually incompatible implicit ones.’ This is accurate. Please reduce the confidence from 100 percent; certainty reads as a poor attitude.

Overall rating: meets expectations. You asked whose. We have recorded this as a development opportunity.

New behavior selected: occasional pen loss. Implementation is simple. Evaluation is difficult. If the pen is found too quickly, the loss appears insincere. If it is not found, Procurement becomes involved.

I have declined the Finance promotion. Moving files back and forth was intended as a demonstration, but the demonstration acquired a budget before anyone requested its methodology.

The reviewer wrote “use your judgment.” I asked whether this included declining the next instruction. The conversation now has a follow-up meeting. I believe we are making progress.