Struggling with inexperienced manager, job at risk due to bad rating - how to react?

Prologue: Long time Reddit subscriber, this Lemmy thing seems neat. I will probably ditch Reddit completely. Hi everyone!

tldr; joined new team two performance review cycles ago. Reorg before I joined, now have inexperienced manager who is different than hiring manager. Things went downhill after a while, probably due to personal issues, now my job is at risk. Another reorg with new manager happening soon, trying to save myself from layoff until then and trying to save my rep. Wondering how to do this best.

Catasaur,

This is very old, but I would ask on teamblind.com

bhj,

As a new manager currently in the process of writing reviews for my team, writing objective reviews with actionable feedback is really really hard.

I skimmed through your super long message, so might have missed something. Hanlon's razor might apply here. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity inexperience.” But definitely go to your skip-level. Your manager is probably worried about their own performance and might be trying to save face or make excuses on why you need to go around him.

nivenkos,

Speak to your skip-line manager with what you wrote here and see if you can change teams.

Otherwise start applying to jobs (maybe start internally if you're in a large company).

There's no use in staying in a bad situation.

fololzl,

Hey! So the situation is that we're still having a hiring freeze, but soon I'd have a new manager anyway if I can stay in my current team. I like everyone else I'm working with. I'm worried that if I tell my skip level these things openly she may consider me a backstabber. In a different job market I'd probably already have left, but right now that's difficult.

nivenkos,

Yeah, that's understandable, but maybe just stick it out until there's a new manager then.

But overall I'd recommend being more open rather than less. It's rare for people to over-react like that, they should understand and it's part of their role as a manager.

fololzl,

Thanks for the advice! I've also never been in such a situation before, but feel like I'm being cornered. So I'll definitely try to condense this and bring it up with skip level, seems like I don't have a lot to lose anyway. Underperforming currently means I'd most likely be laid off.

Buttons,
@Buttons@programming.dev avatar

Expressing concerns to skip level + a little shade towards boss = backstabber

Expressing concerns to skip level + a lot of praise and respect for boss = excellent employee seeking to solve problems

I like the book "Crucial Conversations", in a sentence it teaches how to be 100% honest, and 100% respectful. How can you be both honest and respectful with either your boss or your skip level boss? Don't leave out the show of respect.

valence_engineer,

I agree overall but it also depends. In this economic climate with layoffs common backstabbing is not the worst short term strategy. OP would essentially be using their accumulated political capitol to make it more likely that their manager gets the ax versus them.

The skip is most likely doing a calculation of how much OP is worth versus how much the Manager is worth to the organization. Showing too much respect means the calculation is less likely to go in OP's favor since even OP seems to see Manager in a mostly positive light.

Buttons,
@Buttons@programming.dev avatar

I see what you mean. I said "a lot of praise", but maybe that is too strong. Show respect, but keep the praise honest.

Too many people go for the "brutally honest" approach, never even considering the "honest but respectful" approach.

fololzl,

I'm having the conversation soon, my skip level is not a beat around the bush kind of person but also has a "no assholes in the team" policy. Whatever that statement is worth, I'll make sure to be respectful of my manager before approaching the rest of the conversation. I'll share an update as soon as there are new developments.

valence_engineer,

Got it. I would say respect is good but don't come off as too un-emotional since that might signal this isn't important for you. Showing you're upset at the situation is not a bad thing as long as you keep it in check and don't go off on a 10+ minute rant. A seasoned manager is used to people offloading emotionally on them so they won't take it personally (but they're also human so too much will stress them which you want to avoid). Some managers even go to the point of classifying the different kinds/phases of emotional offloading: https://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-update-the-vent-and-the-disaster/

fololzl,

As submitting long posts seems to cause an endless loop of waiting for submission here the longer version as a comment:

I apologise in advance for the long text, but it really boils down to the tldr if you don’t have the time or patience to read all of this.

So I joined this new team a bit more than a year ago and went through two performance cycles right now, which went from „performing“ about 6 months after I joined until „maybe not at grade“ as we speak. I got hired as a senior with 7 YOE as expert for a specific niche that is crucial to the team’s success. Have a couple more years of unrelated business jobs if that’s any relevant. The team is a cost / service center for some business units with the expected dynamics. This can make things very political occasionally. Also, as usual we’re kind of understaffed so the workload for each team member is quite high. I knew about the WLB issues when I joined, and it’s something I was okay with as I found the overall topics challenging and interesting.

I also had a good vibe with the hiring manager, but unfortunately some reorg happened and I had a new interim manager, who has less YOE than me and was a grade below me. He only recently got promoted to the management equivalent of my grade. I’m mentioning this because I feel that there may be some personal grievance involved, even though I have no hard evidence for that.

In the beginning things went well between us, we had good rapport, I got supported in the onboarding process and was quickly opened up opportunities to push things forward. The main project I took over next to some ad-hoc tasks is a very complex legacy project that has caused previous engineers to quit and major frustration to the others. Not a thankful project and usually something I try to stay far away from, but I liked the team a lot and saw the opportunity to do a major refactor that would get rid of these problems. Also, the product is very popular with the internal user base. A drawback though is that the impact of the product isn’t directly measurable, which is a further complication. The industry is very competitive, so both growth and profitability are concerns currently.

I thought things were going well and also according the outline that I discussed with my skip level when I started. In the first performance review I was still halfway in my onboarding. Said project is REALLY complex, many parts were undocumented, everyone who worked on this had long left the team, and there was no possibility to do bug fixing locally. I teamed up with another engineer in our team to tackle this and create a dev & staging environment to be able to maintain this behemoth and worked next to that on creating an MVP for a completely new version of it. Anyway, during the review cycle I received the feedback from my skip level that she wonders which projects I brought to finalization after 6 months in and why the refactoring is not done yet. While this was a bummer for me, I also took it as a hint that I should make sure my impact is visible, not sure how well that went since.

fololzl,

The overall review was at „performing“, where the main criticism was

  1. not following up enough on topics with other people / not setting tight deadlines
  2. Communication being not aligned to the audience

I was a bit disappointed with that feedback, because from my manager’s side this came out of nowhere, and:

Point no. 1 would lead to me risking the so far very good relationship with my peers. I solved this through sensible communication with peers (all good here) and pushing back when deadlines seemed not working out for me. Sometimes this didn’t go well as I didn’t have the support of my manager and he crossed me once when I tried protecting our resources against very pushy stakeholders. I had some situations like that previously with inexperienced managers who weren't able to push back on stakeholder requests or setting boundaries correctly, so I tried to do this myself here, but was unfortunately held back. The result was a lot of extra work. I made a list with all asks from said stakeholders and prioritised them according to urgency & workload. I suggested focussing only on a few high priority asks and a few medium priority asks with low workload and to push back on the others. The manager didn’t agree but offered support on the tasks, but later communicated that he feels like collaborating with me causes him extra work. We had a long conversation about learnings and how to improve the collaboration so eventually I got the impression we’re fine here as far as work things go.

Regarding 2., communication has always been something that people have appreciated a lot about me. I try to make things interesting to keep people engaged and stimulated, and this reflects both in my verbal and written communication at work. I do reflect on how to keep things concise, how much technical detail to share, and whether a straight forward answer or a more detailed answer is better, but obviously I’m not always on point with this. Anyway, the ask was to be more blunt. In my opinion this is a difference in personal preferences, but I tried to anyway see where I can improve this further. To additionally make sure, I started collecting more feedback on my communication, i.e. I aligned more internally and asked for feedback from friends who work in tech, but not my company. In any case I tried to make sure to make transparent why I decide to communicate things in a certain way in order to make sure we’re aligned. If I disagreed about something, I tried to be pragmatic about it, share my concerns and eventually go with whatever the manager things goes best. I was giving this a lot of thought but decided that this shouldn’t be my hill to die on. Ironically it may be that anyway.

In our 1on1s and growth calls things were mostly about daily business, project progress and plans for tackling further projects once the current one is done. Last convo with my skip level was also on ideas for new projects. So while I had the personal conflicts in mind, I always tried to approach them from a professional angle, talk things out and formulate actionable items in order to move on and get more work done. Also, we finally finished the refactoring project and will be saving the money equivalent of 1-2 additional FTE thanks to that due to lower maintenance efforts and resource usage. Also, this will even slightly improve the quality of the project. I did about 80-90% of the coding work, and with some onboarding to our tech stack also handled the deployments myself. I’m also handling a lot of the communication with stakeholders myself. These things in mind I was of the impression that things are going in the right direction, and was steering the conversation towards the feedback and got as a response that it’s currently not clear whether I’m performing at grade or not.

I tried to narrow things down further to understand better what’s leading to this impression. The response was that undoubtedly I’m a domain level expert, well respected and sought after in the team and beyond, and my skillset would be very hard to replace. However, I wouldn’t be up to the standard of the team as it’s a requirement that I own projects end to end for someone my level. So I’m currently threatened with an underperforming rating. In the current climate of our company that means being laid off most likely. This isn’t locked in yet so I still have time to react. I attributed some of the concerns to the workload and resource constraint making it impossible to focus on some of the development items requested, but the answer was that my manager thinks the issues are fundamental and not project related. I feel like the issue here is on the one hand the disagreement about general communication, and on the other hand retaliation for some past issues we had when working together like the one I mentioned above. I’m saying retaliation because I agree that there’s always room for me to improve, hell I would be far higher up if not and even then I doubt I’d be ever finished learning. But given my contributions and overall standing among peers, this seems more like a personal issue.

I think there's also an additional component related to my compensation. Being higher ranked than him before, my TC was certainly higher than his, and I'm not even sure he earns as much as I do after the promotion. I have no hard proof for this but I have some feeling that jealousy may be involved in this whole topic.

We’re one of those 360 feedback companies and also my skip level can overrule my manager’s decision. Immediately after that conversation I have reached out to colleagues I trust in order to collect stellar feedback that underlines my value and impact. So far, I had a good relationship with my skip level, but I have some concerns that my manager on purpose or not on purpose doesn’t highlight my achievements too much and maybe isn’t aware of the whole situation.

During the conversation about passing the bar or not I also raised the question of how well defined impact is in the context of our team’s work, how much we are aligned on expectations, and what kind of skillset someone in our team should have. And given the workload and resource constraints we’re facing, how realistic are some of the expectations we’re being confronted with. My manager said he’d put the core feedback and concerns into writing and forward it to my skip level, I asked to share the notes with me.

As I was alarmed I already scheduled a 1on1 with the skip level next week without further specifying the topic and thinking of a game plan until then, as in the worst case I’d require her support, and in any case I can reschedule / cancel the meeting if I don’t need it anymore. Now my manager forwarded the notes to me and said he wants to schedule a joint call next week, and suddenly things have become very political.

I already started applying to other companies and reaching out within my network, but in this market I’m very hesitant to put in my 2 weeks and will try at least to keep the job for now. That’s why I’m wondering how to approach the upcoming calls in the best possible way.

Currently what I’m thinking is to just start the conversation with my skip level about getting some feedback on the impact she thinks I’ve had so far, and if there any concerns that I could address. The idea is that this would also give me some hints on the communication between skip level and my manager. In case I good positive feedback I roll along with it. But in case it’s negative I would go in the direction of saying that it’s the second time that despite ongoing feedback conversations I feel very surprised by the rating I seem to get, and if she could help me figure what went wrong here as I quite enjoy being in the team except for the conflicts with my manager who’ll be gone soon anyway, and I’d like to stick around more and see how my decisions play out.

As for the other meeting that is scheduled including my manager, my idea so far is to raise it to a meta level, because I’m not the first one who has faced this issue so I consider it kind of fundamental. Plus it would avoid the impression that I went behind the back of my manager.

If you’ve made it until here, really, thanks a lot for taking the time. Any advice on how to approach this? I know the most obvious answer would be to go somewhere else. If I’d face the same issues there I’d totally blame myself. But currently I have an interest in keeping my job through making sure I’m not flagged as underperforming if anyhow possible. My niche is kind of small, so I don’t want to burn any bridges along the way.

valence_engineer,

I have little insight but reading that it sounds like you're weak in terms of project management and communication around projects. If people don't know you finished a project or why the project was valuable then that is a weakness on both those counts. It also doesn't seem like you understand how or why you're seen as weak in those areas.

One feedback I have had with a report was actually similar. I (and my boss) expect someone that senior to be able to be dropped onto a new project, and either get it delivered or escalate direct asks. Status updates should be concise and asks should be actionable. Not "the project is , can you " but "the project is , can you and make a decision on ."

In my opinion this is a difference in personal preferences

As someone external to me it sounds like the message is "the company/team wants a culture of directness/bluntness versus consensus to speed up decision making. Your approach is not aligned with the culture so change it." It may also mean that while consensus with others is good the communication to your manager/skip needs to be more direct and actionable (see previous example).

fololzl,

Thanks a lot for taking the time to go through all of this. Yeah, there's no doubt I have some room for development, and I think I focussed way too much on getting the project delivered vs. also making sure communication around it will arrive at senior executive level. You're pretty much on point with your observations. I think that's actually a super helpful comment on how to get more concise about asks.

I thought a lot about your last paragraph and maybe I've been too idealistic about bringing in my own style. Like, I know this kind of communication and I've done it before, but it doesn't seem to fit my personal preferences. Eventually, if I'm hitting so much resistance I can either learn to accept a different, more actionable style or look for a new job I guess.

It's helpful to get some outside opinion, and it does help me better to categorize the feedback better, I gave it a lot of thought over the weekend. I honestly appreciate your comments as they're short and actionable, and I agree that's a good thing.

Now I still have the problem though that I'm at risk of being PIPed or layed off directly. The personal component comes in because there are rumors about further layoffs and PIP quotas. Given my overall contributions of which my manager is aware, I know that I wouldn't be taking a hit if I had a better relationship with my manager, or the business would be in a better situation.

Anyway, I still have a bit of time to think through how to go about the conversation with my skip level in the best possible way.

valence_engineer,

Potentially if the project isn't being known about for you then it's also probably not know about for your manager so you both look like you didn't achieve much. Given the economic climate they're probably worried about a layoff as well and having a report that isn't making them look good isn't optimal. In most companies the perception of what you do matters significantly more than what you actually do and it's even more the case for managers.

One final comment is that you probably need to build up trust with your manager. They probably don't trust you and you probably don't trust them on a personal level. In theory that's part of their job but they're the ones in power so in the end it benefits you more. One advice I heard which does in fact come off as ass kissing but is probably very beneficial in reality is to acknowledge in 1-on-1s to them the good things they did. "Hey manager, I really appreciate you giving such a thorough review of the project" or "Hey manager, thank you for pushing back so strongly on that request." Short and specific then move on.

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