May 2, 2004
CAREER COUCH
Blindsided by the Boss in Your Annual Review
By CHERYL DAHLE

. The boss just shredded your job performance in an annual review. What's worse, the bad news was a surprise. How do you handle it?

A. First off, don't say anything you'll regret. Muzzle your anger. If you can, buy yourself some time by suggesting that because you respect the seriousness of the feedback, you prefer to respond more thoughtfully in a few days. Then consider: Is there a kernel of truth in the evaluation? Be brutally honest with yourself, says Lois P. Frankel, a psychologist, career coach and author of "Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office: 101 Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers" (Warner Books, 2004).

Remember that the "true" quality of your performance matters less in this situation than your boss's view, Ms. Frankel says. You won't get anywhere by just insisting that your boss is wrong.

"You want to show good faith and be receptive," Ms. Frankel says. "And then, having approached the situation in a positive and mature way, this is also your chance to go back and highlight some of your strengths that may have been overlooked."

Q. But what if you think your boss's perception of you is utter nonsense?

A. To some degree, that doesn't matter. What you need to get from the review are the specific factors that led your boss to this conclusion so you know how to change that thinking.

An associate at a large New York financial services company was well into her third year with a new manager before she received a performance review, and it turned out to be the worst of her career. (She does not want her name used because she still works in the same department.) The associate thought she had been handling challenges on her own. But her boss said the associate wasn't alerting her early enough when there were problems with projects, and she felt blindsided when she heard about project difficulties further down the road.

A. There is nothing to reconcile. The boss's perception is the one that matters. What the associate figured out was that her style of working independently with minimal communication - a very successful strategy in her previous job with the same company - wasn't working for this boss.

"I was hurt and angry, but I had a bigger goal. I have kids and a mortgage and I needed this job," the associate said. "I knew the problem was just a matter of learning another language - they think and do things differently here than in my last department. And I knew I could learn it."

Q. But getting your boss to make a 180-degree turn can be tough.

True. In this case, the associate pressed her boss for details on what would be acceptable. Three e-mail messages a week? Checking in every day? Weekly project summaries? She spent the next few months shadowing her boss, telling her about the tiniest developments on projects.

She worked longer hours, and when on vacation she checked her e-mail and called in. The result? Within six months, her boss was pleased enough to discuss a potential promotion with her.

Q. Shouldn't you fight to prevent comments that you don't agree with from getting into your file?

A. Writing a long, point-by-point rebuttal, seeking to refute the review, is one of the worst things you can do, Ms. Frankel says. It just makes you look like a troublesome whiner to the next potential supervisor who looks at your file.

A. Most bad performance reviews are not about technical skills but more subjective issues like communication style and personality "fit" with the company. Your differences with your boss over those less tangible issues may be too big to surmount.

Susan Trainer, 38, found herself in that situation 10 years ago when she landed a job as a public relations executive with a boutique firm in the Bay Area. Ms. Trainer, who earned her master's in industrial organizational psychology by age 20, had spent her career in corporate public relations. She had worked almost eight years at Telex Communications, a $2 billion organization with 10,000 employees, where she had reported to the chief financial officer. She had never had a bad review before. Now, the founder of the small agency she had joined found fault with everything Ms. Trainer did, even asking to see Ms. Trainer's daily "to-do" lists.

"In no time at all, she took this very confident person who was performing at the top level of a multibillion-dollar organization and turned me into someone who couldn't make a decision on the appropriate time to go to the bathroom," Ms. Trainer says.

Q. Is it ever possible to recover when your boss truly has it in for you?

A. For Ms. Trainer, it wasn't. After nine contentious months, Ms. Trainer and the founder agreed it would be best for her to resign. But several of her clients tracked down her home phone number and begged her to work with them. Ms. Trainer founded her own company, Trainer Communications, now a 10-person agency in Danville, Calif. that recently won an industry award.

As a supervisor, Ms. Trainer tries to avoid the mistakes she thinks her old boss made, namely, the that-isn't-how-I-would-do-it syndrome. "While I still don't think her specific claims were right, she was right about the fact that I wasn't a good fit," Ms. Trainer says. "Believe me, I'm much happier where I am today."