Dumb Boss Strikes Again

Dumb Boss has struck again.

Today was my annual performance review.  Today is the day I realised what a total tight arse my dear old boss is.  We have an alpha-numeric performance rating system, where the letters A-C represent your behaviour, and 1-5 represent your delivery against set objectives.  I arrived at the Company on 30 April, so have 8 months of performance.  When I set my objectives, I nominated an ambitious plan – one that would take most people a full year to deliver, and DB acknowledged this.

My first priority was to take a seriously dysfunctional team and sort it out – understand the issues, move people on.  Then I had to create a vision and set of priorities, which I did – I created a 3-year plan to deliver a best practice legal team.  After that, I had to bring everyone along with the vision, get buy-in and commitment, and start delivering.  All of which I did. 

In fact, after 8 months, I was where I thought I would be after 18 months.  Not bad, especially since lawyers (as a group) are very difficult to win over and lead, as they have a tendency to pick apart absolutely everything in sight.

So, Dumb Boss agreed that I had done a brilliant job, that I was a great leader, and absolutely the right choice for the job.  That he found legal teams very hard to measure, so understanding my performance was harder than his accounting teams.  Since I had such a lot of work to do in sorting out the team, though, I hadn’t delivered as many tangible outcomes as others in his team.  And, since I hadn’t, he couldn’t rate me as highly.

HE BROUGHT ME ON TO FIX THE ISSUES IN THE LEGAL FUNCTION, AND I HADN’T DELIVERED AS MUCH AS OTHERS IN HIS TEAM BECAUSE I WAS SORTING OUT THE ISSUES IN A HIGHLY DYSFUNCTIONAL TEAM. 

Being a bit of a smarty pants, it didn’t take me long to work out that he was buttering me up for some bad news…(call me genius, I deserve it).  I invited him: “You are buttering me up for something, so out with it.”

And then he gave me a 3B.  A 3B.  333333333333.  BBBBBBBBBBB.  An A-V-E-R-A-G-E score.  3B 3B 3B 3B 3B 3B.  The score I give to people who are solid, but nothing special.

Am I average?  He said, oh no.  But the others have delivered more.  What more could I have done?  Oh, nothing, says DB.  NOTHING!  So, how could I have got a better score?  As it turns out, I couldn’t have.  He thought that, because I wasn’t there for the whole year, and didn’t get as much done as everyone else.

I explained that my bonus would automatically be pro-rated to reflect the part year in the calculation; that he was double-pro-rating me – discounting me twice for being there only part of the year.  I said that, as a 3B, I am a huge flight risk.  I made sure he knew I felt that, by taking this job, I was taking a small step backwards in my career, but I committed to the job because I was passionate about turning this team around.  That I took a hair cut on my base salary because the larger bonus was sold to me.  That, given the performance of financial markets, 2008 would be a poor profit year and, if he planned to give me a great rating for this year, it had not a single chance of translating to a decent bonus.

He said he would go and discuss this with our HR area.  Good luck.  What he doesn’t know is that, last Friday, my dream job became vacant.  My dilemma has begun: I love my team, and I am nowhere near finished.  What will I do if I get approached for it?  I guess there’s only one answer.  I have to go for it.