Yesterday I spent 2 hours talking with Tom on my mid-year review meeting. It was supposed to be TP, my direct boss, doing this, but he is in KC, so Tom was filling in for him. The first question Tom asked was that he noticed or may be just his perception that during this year, I seemed to be less enthusiastic about work.
I told him it’s not his perception, it’s true, I was not as happy with the work as I used to be. He thought I was looking for a job, as he noticed some job website on my Internet usage report. I told him I was looking for the job, but not via the job website, the kind of work I was looking for wasn’t there. The job web site was my friend’s website. I visited it for other purpose (chatting on the web board, which I didn’t tell.)
I ended up telling him that I wasn’t happy about the supervisor’s role, I didn’t like being a boss and having to make people work for me, I didn’t enjoy having to look at budget, schedule, and force people to follow that. It's hard for me to delegate work and be a manager. I didn’t feel that I did such roles very well. If I were to rate myself, I thought I did it very badly so it became a burden for me.
However, I knew that it’s impossible to be more senior in the corporation and not taking those responsibilities. There seemed to be no place at B&V that would fit what I wanted to do, so I was looking somewhere else. I wasn’t sure where I would be going to, and when it would happen. In the meantime while I haven’t figured that out, I just put up with the miserable day job, kept doing whatever given to me, but no motivation or enthusiastic about work.
He asked about my career plan and where I thought I would ultimately fit in the company, I said there was no place for me, that’s why I was looking for something else. He said there wouldn’t be many choices for me outside, at my level of experience, to find something without having to deal with those managerial roles I didn’t like. I said I was lucky, that money was not my big concern, I also didn’t care much if the job had to be engineering (though what I meant to say was that, my goal now was the job had to be non-engineering!)
He asked me whether it was better dealing with IT than engineering. I could read his game, if I said IT was better he might have dragged me to the IT supervisor role again, things going around that group and the new manager didn’t go well. She didn’t do job very, and she didn’t feel comfortable doing it either. So back to the IT manager might be something he could put me in for a while. (My side note, it seems like my company can’t find a good manager, or even a bad manger who thought they did well and enjoyed it.)
I didn’t take Tom’s bait and just insisted that it’s my personal problem, and I didn’t need his help (Would some managerial type training classes help me to be a better boss? No, because it’s not what I wanted to do and didn’t do well. I didn’t want to do it, period.) And said I would continue to do whatever I had to do (less the enthusiasm and engagement, of course) until I found my own solution, Tom just steered back to what I supposed to do. Whether I liked it or not, I still am a development leader of 3 people. I still had to review their performance, and supervised them to some extent. I said I would do my best, even though my best wouldn’t be good enough, I would do what I could.
Tom mentioned about VV, the girl under my supervision, that her performance was sub-standard and he would let her go if she didn’t improve significantly during the remaining of the year. He said she didn’t concentrate enough of the work she was given, spent too much time talking. And the other day, she planned vacation on Friday, but Thursday morning she called in sick.
I was a bit surprised to hear such comments from Tom, even though I noticed VV did those things and didn’t approve them. I thought the reason I didn’t approve her behaviours and they looked “really” bad to me because she and I didn’t get along well. I was a bit surprised to hear that other people who didn’t (or shouldn’t) have any bias against her took notes of that too. Anyhow, I tried to defend her as I thought if she were good friend with me, I would have thought those were insignificant, and would have to defend her, so I did.
I asked Tom if he still remembered years ago when I first started working, and there were times when we were slow, I just walked down to P’Ui (my friend in Accounting department). In her office, I was standing there talking regularly until he called me upon and said I wasn’t supposed to go talking to people, had to stay in my cube working, even if I didn’t have any work. I thought that was ridiculous. He said “ridiculous” was too extreme, if VV (or anyone) didn’t have enough work she should ask her supervisor, he (and Tom) had plenty of things for her to do, she may not like those assignments, but it’s better than walking around talking to people.
He said that VV had trouble concentrating to her work, getting sidetracked a lot. I said it’s not fair to judge people on how they did their work. If I got an assignment and finished it, it shouldn’t matter how I finished it, I didn’t have to spend the whole day sitting at my desk, I could just go talking to people, relaxing myself some, the job was still done. Tom said that it was OK to talk to people and relax, but VV was way too relaxing, talking too much, then distracting other people too.
I said that on the issue about taking sick day before vacation, she could have been really sick and couldn’t help it. He said he wasn’t saying she wasn’t really sick, he was saying that it looked bad when you did such thing. Finally Tom said that, whatever I had to think or say about VV, in her review, I should mention about these issues, and that if she would not change, as bonus and raise were based on performance, she might get very low raise and might not get her bonus. Tom said I had to make it clear in the mid year review meeting with her.
I wasn’t comfortable about having to tell all this and Tom did notice that (he thought I was uncomfortable because I had to be a mean person, but he didn’t know I was uncomfortable because I had to be mean to the person I didn’t like.) I thought it would be unfair and unkind to do such things. At the end of the day, not liking or not getting on well with people, doesn’t mean I have to hurt them, harm them, or be cruel to them. They could just go on with their life and make sure our path never crossed, unless necessary
So Tom offered that he could do the mid year review meeting for me, if I wanted him to. The only concern was that VV may not be able to understand and voice her opinion or explain her situation in English well enough. To me, knowing that relationship is two party, I didn’t feel good with VV so she surely wouldn’t feel good with me either, VV might have been more comfortable sitting in the review meeting in English with Tom, than that with someone she felt/knew didn’t like her.
I wasn’t sure who should do the review, and wished TP was here. He would be a perfect solution to this case. I told Tom that I should probably asked VV whether she would prefer to do the review with Tom or with me, I will let her choose.
The rest of the meeting wasn’t so much interesting. We went through my review and Tom guided me through was I suppose to include in my meeting as a supervisor. He reminded me to fix the writing in VV’s review, and let him know if he had to do the review meeting for her.
I still couldn’t decide, and not even sure if it’s appropriate to asked VV to choose. She might have thought that I asked her to choose because I didn’t like her and treated her differently from the other two. If I did ask her, it was only because I wanted to be nice to her, but she could have thought otherwise. I couldn’t control the way people think or perceive, could I?
2:11 p.m. - Saturday, Jul. 24, 2004
Recent entries:
::Thursday, Oct. 05, 2006 -
นินทาหัวหน้า
::Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2006 -
มุมมองคนอื่น
::Tuesday, Sept. 05, 2006 -
ว่าที่ฯ
::Monday, Jun. 19, 2006 -
รันทด
::Friday, Sept. 23, 2005 -
Raise
My profile
Archives
Notes
Diaryland
Random
RSS
others: