Have you ever been laid off or fired? I have. Twice. It can be a traumatic experience. In fact, if you let it get to you it can be a crippling experience going forward. The fear that you could be next or that you fell on the wrong side of a manager can dictate what you do, what you say and how you act on the job, even if it’s at another job or and another company, for years going forward.
You have a choice though, being laid off can also be a transformative experience that you can turn into a valuable lesson. What I can say from my past experience is that the lessons learned at different times throughout my career can help me with not only being laid off, but identifying what may lead to a layoff and addressing things beforehand. That’s why I want to talk about not layoffs but getting a bad review at work in this post.
Clear Goals
Your review starts when you first start your job. Clear communication from the get go can set the tone and avoid bumps later. For me and for most people, having clearly defined goals makes the review easy. What is expected of me and what am I expected to achieve? Are these qualitative goals or quantitative goals or both? If I achieve these, how will I be compensated? If not compensated monetarily, will I be promoted? What happens if I don’t achieve them by a little, or a lot?
In a recent review, I made most of my important goals, but I missed one. In our self evaluation, I marked myself as competent for most ratings but “needs improvement” for this particular goal. Upon my review, I was told that my stand alone grade didn’t matter but that I was only compared to other people with the same title, and how my performance was judged compared to theirs. This was news to me and was not communicated beforehand, a surprise indeed.
I was also told that the goal I missed had a direct link to my compensation, this was also news to me. My commission (or “bonus” as many people refer to it) was not clearly defined to me, ever. If I achieved my qualitative goals and revenue targets were hit, it was expected we would receive a commission but the size of that commission was never directly linked quantitatively. All that was communicated, was that if the company and division did well or didn’t do well, that would affect the bonus pool of the division, after that, individual evaluations came into play and the trickle down flowed from there. The message was, even if you had a good year, it didn’t mean you would necessarily get paid well, it had to be timed with your division and the group. This makes sense on some level, people shouldn’t receive fat bonuses if a company is struggling. On the other hand, it leaves the door open for compensation based on subjective judgement of managers and guess what happens then? They usually pay who they like.
The Way it Really Works
I once met a peer who was laid off from a large foreign bank and then found a good role at a large American one overseeing a team. I met up with him after he had settled in his new role and we pontificated on how the system works on the inside and I liked his description of how bonuses worked at the mid management level in finance. He described it like this: “Let’s be honest, there are goals and people hit those, but are those always the ones that get paid? Not really” he said. “The bonus pool gets to the manager level, they pay themselves, then they pay who they like of their employees, their friends. Then they pay everyone else.”
The lesson I have learned after many years in corporate America is not necessarily the cynical view that this pay structure always happens everywhere but that there is some truth to it. People tend to keep around the people that they like, who do people like? Usually people that they have things in common with or remind them of themselves. This is where discrimination comes from. It’s not always on the pernicious level of, “don’t hire that guy because of his skin color” or “don’t hire that woman because she is a woman” although sometimes that really does happen. More often, it’s more subtle than that, more like, “hey I like this guy, let me promote him or pay him more so he stays around because he hits his goals (making me look good) and I enjoy spending my work time with him.” Or it could even be more subtle than that from the gate, like “I like this guy so let me set him up for success so he can hit his goals.”
Hard Questions
So if you had a bad review, it’s time to start asking yourself some hard questions. Did I have the tools I needed to succeed? What could I have done differently? Would that have produced a different outcome? These are all questions that you should be able to easily answer, however they still may not push you up to the next level or get you paid more in the long term even if they had gone your way.
The questions I ask myself now when I get a bad review are more qualitative than quantitative. Am I a fit for the culture here? Are my managers leaders and not just bosses? Is management here trying to get the most out of people or get the most for themselves? Or even on a basic level, does management have a philosophy on leadership at all?
These questions can’t always be just posed to yourself. Sometimes you need an outside and objective opinion. Try to seek opinions from people that aren’t as close to your day to day but know you as a person and know your character. You will also need those people to not be “yes” people who will let you blame things on everyone else. If you don’t have these people around, this may also be a problem, you may need to widen your circle to find them so that you can assess situations like this.
I did so recently after my bad review and sought the advice of some people I trusted who were successful and knew my character. I relayed to one of my former colleagues the self doubt and feelings of failure and inadequacy that a bad review can produce. I explained that at times during the year when I felt I was slipping or falling behind in terms of my goals during it was like a negative spiral. Those times I was laid off or had bad reviews in the past came back to me and the thought came to me again “here we go again, I can’t do this, I’m going to fail…..again.”
However, I did point to the fact that I had a manager in my past who would notice when this was happening during the year. When he noticed this, he would take me aside and give me a pep talk. He would explain how the goals we set were ambitious but attainable and I could still achieve them. If I was stumbling on a particular issue, he would help me develop a plan or get past that next step that I seemed hung up on. He didn’t plan it for me but he helped point the way. These weren’t long motivational speeches but bits and pieces to help me get over the inevitable roadblocks we may find ourselves in from time to time.
“That’s because he was a leader, and you don’t have leadership where you are right now” my former colleague said. Mind blown. It took that little comment to completely change my perspective and realize that the bad reviews or my performance wasn’t the problem, it was that the environment where I was just wasn’t right for me.
Now What?
This former colleague gave me some additional specific guidance once I realized that she had a point. She suggested that now that I know I want to be somewhere where I fit better, I should create a systematic way to start going about that through talking to people and networking. she suggested I create a goal to map out the areas I want to take my path, whether they involve my experience or not and then start gathering intelligence on those areas.
I could do this by setting a goal to talk to say, 10 people a week for 4 weeks. At the end of 4 weeks I will have talked to 40 people and gained a wealth of information on companies, cultures and opportunities that I didn’t have before but I had to be systematic about the approach and attain those goals to gain the knowledge that may lead to something else.
This is probably the biggest difference between myself now and when I was younger: I am able to construct a path and break my larger goals down to smaller daily ones. I also have the discipline on a daily basis to push me towards these goals that I didn’t have when I was younger. How do I know this? Because I made a pact with myself two years ago to write in this blog consistently twice a week and not stop. Almost two years later I am still here. I was explained to one friend that my readership was flat and he said I was just writing into a void, but I realized long ago this isn’t true.
Although I don’t make any money yet from my writing, it has brought readers to me that I would have never had contact with if I didn’t write and promote my site on Instagram. It has built the confidence in me that I can consistently achieve something. This is my 228th post and I have written almost 4 books of material, if you assume the average adult book is around 90,000 words. Whether this site makes money or gets thousands of readers isn’t necessarily the point. With what I have created, I can repackage some of this material into entire books themselves, there are no rules saying how I have to use what I have written. This site has also brought me encouragement when I have wanted to stop in the past. Complete strangers who read my blog tell me not to stop and give me that little boost I have needed at those times to keep going.
So if your review has gone bad and like me, you feel where you are now isn’t a good fit, embrace the journey and the unknown that comes with it. Start laying the foundation for your next step. I now feel a sense of excitement not knowing what is next but I already feel the energy of a new challenge on the horizon.
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