Don’t work harder, work smarter. Duh.
Keith’s performance review from The Office.
“Do you know what the question was?”
“Naah…”
Try justifying your “successes” when all of your projects are pre-emptive.
“Did you have a major international incident/multi-billion dollar lawsuit/burst into flames and get flung screaming into the void this year? No? Well then I’ve done my job.”
Fortunately once you realize that managers have no concept of context making up something becomes much easier.
The thing is AtomicFlea, I’m also a manager. I know all the rules and how to communicate. I have 15 years of experience doing the job. If I was a recent college hire and he wanted to help me develop decision-making skills, no problem. The guy is just a twat and has the attention-span of an ADD person on crack.
See if you can work any of these into meetings or discussions with your boss. sorry
Seriously though, that is frustrating. Sounds like he shouldn’t be your manager. You need a manager with better understanding of the technical aspects of the job. Maybe that isn’t possible given the structure of the company, economics, etc, but in any case it sucks to have a boss that doesn’t have a clue.
And anyone that says “I know the answer but I’m not telling” really doesn’t know the answer. “I want you to figure it out” is something you tell your students or children not your co-worker/employee.
ETA: “What if there were no hypothetical questions?” is one of my favorites to toss randomly into conversations.
Folks, let’s not spin cycles here. We need to be focusing on creating synergy by orchestrating end-to-end convergences for our new Marketechture.
I hated writing the dam things. When i was working for Home Depot the process was usually the store manager saying ‘Hey you in charge of x department now. Btw you have 15 reviews do next week.’ As it seemed to be a frequent occurrence I had to write reviews last minute for people I had not supervised for the whole review period, I got in the habit of sitting the person down and discussing the review and writing it with them present participating.
Writing and receiving reviews is something I will never miss and is certainly the type of corporate practice that will prevent me from ever leaving the realm of independent contracting ever again.
I honestly feel for the faculty members in my dept. who get stuck doing classroom observations/evaluations. I think it would be even worse than being evaluated.
These frequent and pesky evaluations are contractual obligations; the district wants them done a lot or else they won’t grant rehire rights to those of us who are PT (which is most of us). That’s the deal. So, every third year, I get observed. The other two years of the cycle, I write summaries of the students’ evaluations. And all new faculty must be observed during the first semester, of course.
Here are a few comments I’ve received over the past years:
She makes good use of the chalkboard.
She makes eye contact with students.
And this, verbally: “Did someone tell you to walk around while you talk to the students?”
:dubious: “I like to move around.”
(What I wanted to say was, “I don’t want to stand behind the lectern for two to four hours”—but I was afraid this particular observer might take that personally, since I’ve seen her standing still like that in her own classroom many times. No one else has said this in the past eighteen years.)
And then there are the student comments, most of which are flattering and positive. Occasionally someone gripes about not being entertained enough. Some classes give somewhat more negative evaluations overall, but then, students in that same class approach me at the end of the semester and say how much they learned and how much they enjoyed the class. Go figure.
The maddening part of this is that these evals don’t actually count towards anything besides rehire rights. They certainly don’t matter to hiring committees, from what I’ve heard and observed. And they have nothing to do with salary, which is negotiated yearly for everyone.
I’m just glad I don’t have to write them.
Be thankful you don’t receive performance reviews in the bedroom. (or do you?)
Y’know, I’m just blue-skying ideas here, but what if the OP was to proactively create integrated and transparent purposing between stakeholders, thus allowing for a paradigm shift in off-the-shelf competencies? Especially if pushing the envelope is a concern, it seems to me it would be a win-win for all concerned.
Seriously, I hate performance reviews too. The funniest I ever received was the one where I was told I needed to improve in a particular way, and a night course at a local college might be just what I needed. Unknown to the reviewer was that the course she recommended was the very same one that I taught at that college. When I told her that I taught that course, the review kind of floundered from there.
I hate mine because they always include stupid shit. Since I just last february started a new position in a new department that is a pilot project they didn’t have anything concrete to list as my objectives. When I finally got my objectives for the year, in APRIL; one of them was to make a certain number of outbound calls to our brokers per day. Until I got that as a goal what I was actually doing had nothing to do with calling anyone so I missed that objective at the midyear assessment by a wide margin.
In my assessment my manager said I needed better ‘time management’ for that objective. Time fucking management had nothing to do with it since I didn’t even know for four god damn months that it would even be expected of me.
I’m already dreading my annual review since she seems to have the view that I can’t do anything right anyway. For another quick example of that, we got an email a few weeks ago from management that if we needed any data for our self-assessment portion of the review that we should email our supervisor with a CC to the department analyst. I did just that. What does my supervisor do? Call me into her office and chastise me for CCing the analyst. Apparantly I should have just known that because the analyst hadn’t been there for very long that I should have emailed my supervisor only. Even when I do exactly as directed I still get chewed out for it.
Every member of my dev team is going into their performance review with a copy of their resignation letter in their pocket (I don’t decide on raises). I have already written glowing letters of recommendation for them, helped with resume advice, and am in contact with my contacts to make sure they have options should my boss decide to bind the mouths of the kine that tread the grain. Which I think means “be cheap”.
I REALLY hate performance reviews. I didn’t know I’d hate them more when all the reviews I did included “walks on water”, “works miracles”, “utterly indespensable”, “cannot be given enough work to do” and “sweats blood for the project, the company, and the Greater Glory of the Software Industry”.
There was a period a decade or so ago when HR people made you write your own performance review, and then they would take it away to discuss amongst themselves. (I don’t know if they still do it this way, but it was fairly common back when I was working in places that engaged in those kinds of shennanigans. )
I mean it’s not like HR staff have a lot to do anyway, but palming off this kind of task to the actual employees themselves is just unforgivable. I could never go back to that kind of a work environment, I’d rather put a bullet between my eyes.
W. Edwards Demming
seriously the man has things to say about American Business and about the performance review he has nothing nice to say at all. They consist of 99.999999% bullshit and .00001% asshatery.
he has a couple books out, “the new economics” and “out of the Crisis” I cant off the top of my head remember which has the bit on the performance review but it worth the price of both to read up and pull the info on a boss. and when you boss asks who the fuck is this Demming guy you can say hes the guy who made Japan into the American Asskicking Economic powerhouse it is today.
seriously a performance review is complete bullshit, its your boss (or worse, someone you dont even work with) pulling random thoughts together about your work, there are no notes over the year on good you have done, there is no proff you screwed up here or there.
Performance reviews are painful enough for everybody, but when some genius decides to tinker with the process, it becomes tantamount to somebody applying a blowtorch to your balls. “360 degree review” anybody? Oh, the fun! The merriment of having some shlub who is hired to do what you tell him to do review your methods! “He tells me to do stuff and then doesn’t like the way I do it.” Or having somebody who works in a building across town, and who you see maybe once a month at a meeting critique your management style. “He seems distant.” No shit?
I’m so glad I don’t work anymore.
I am due for my 90 day review here in about an hour and a half. The company has said nothing but wonderful things about me since I have been here and they go out of their way to make me comfortable in my job but I am still nervous. All the other companies I have worked for have had horrid review processes and so far this job is just about perfect so I don’t want to walk in and find out that, although in our last group meeting they took several minutes to praise my work, that I only register a 3 out of 5 or something. So far things here seem pretty good but I am still kind of freaked out about this review. crosses fingers
At my company the HR bods have decided that we’re all going to be graded on a bell curve. Super duper, except for just a few little points they seem to have missed. Firstly, ours is a very small team, so there isn’t a huge number of people who can be averaged out here. Secondly, we have been through a number of redundancy rounds over the last couple of years - the dead wood has been chopped out, those of us left are lean and mean, and, um, kind of good at our jobs. Thirdly, and my particular favourite: the bell curve approach they’ve taken means that they INSIST that some people (of the very small team, see first and second points) must be graded 1 or 2 out of 5. And what does that imply? Anyone graded 1 or 2 out of 5 is a mandatory performance management case. In other words, they are put on the shape-up-or-ship-out program which is intended to lead to formal disciplinary procedures and dismissal.
So people who have been performing perfectly adequately and happily doing their jobs are about to be put into formal performance management, just because we’re changing the appraisal structure. Again. Couple this with the fact that our director has (confidentially) decided to reserve the few allowable 5 out of 5s for his direct reports (cos, like, they MUST be the best, they’re the management team) and the whole thing stinks like last month’s socks.
This morning, I got my official performance review. I work for a defense contractor that is now foreign owned so our company is run independently of the parent company. We do have to follow their HR policies though, this includes a written review for everyone. It is a joke and our department treats it that way because the old way IS better (project based review intervals). All HR needs is piece of paper with the boss’ name, employee’s name and at least one sentence.
I had forgotten last year’s until my boss showed it to me this morning, it was: Alienhand “is not Superman.”
This year it is: Alienhand “has taken into account criticisms of the past to become Batman.”
I love my boss. 
A manager with a sense of humor? Corporate senses a disturbance in the Force…
Regards,
Shodan, who has leveraged his core competencies to address the new paradigms of an emerging marketplace more times than I like to think about
I’m an e/m designer, there are very good reasons design departments are usually keep in a separate part of the building even separated from the rest of engineering. Corporate is wise to avoid meddling with the dark side.