Sometimes you’re ready for a performance review, and sometimes the growth moment happens in the review!
I felt blindsided in my performance review
I was sitting in a standard office, with my supervisor and my Director, ready for a mix of positive support and constructive criticism. What I wasn’t ready for was a discussion of something that had happened 8 months beforehand.
I was hearing for the first time, that my Director thought I had let my team down.
A pit fell in my stomach. My jaw dropped. And I screamed inside my head – “That was 8 months ago!! and you’re only telling me this now??”
Besides anger, I felt confused and embarrassed.
I thought the assignment had gone well
8 months prior, the team had finished running tests on a railway bridge, and we were waiting…. and waiting….. for rail traffic control to give the ‘all clear’. I was getting really anxious that I would miss an obligation.
I talked with the team about the choices. I could stay and call in my cancellation. Or I could leave, considering I was the junior person with little to offer if rail traffic control had an issue. My supervisor said I could leave.
The next day, I of course checked in with the team and heard that they were released an hour later, and it was fine that I wasn’t there.
So what was the problem??
So what was my Director’s problem?
It wasn’t actually about staying or leaving, or how I asked for permission.
It was about how I behaved afterwards.
Work isn’t like turning in a university assignment and immediately moving on to the next one. I needed to be more aware of how my actions can affect my colleagues. While they fully agreed with my logic, it could still have bothered them that I left. And this easily may have lingered.
I could have shown appreciation for them more often. And I could have been less in a rush to consider the whole thing ‘closed’.
Exercise for your engagement muscle
Here’s an exercise to help you strengthen your engagement muscle:
- Today, identify an assignment that you recently completed.
- Then reflect on how you managed the completion. Perhaps you submitted a document; launched a website; sent an invoice.
- Every day this week, find a new way to acknowledge the assignment’s ending. Perhaps thanking a stakeholder or celebrating a junior staffer’s contribution.
- At the end of the week, notice what was easy and what was hard, and how your feelings about the assignment may have changed.
