Scenario 3: Sydney
- You love your job, you love your team and you love the culture at Learnerbly. You are under no illusions that you are Exceeds in your role yet - you know you have a lot to learn. Still, you think you’re doing pretty well and are confident in your strengths as a researcher, especially given your relatively recent promotion.
- You would never presume to describe yourself as Exceeds when it comes to values - you have so many role-models in the company and you would never think of yourself as embodying the Learnerbly values in the way that they do.
- You will be completely devastated by your Meets Most performance rating but you won’t argue back. You’ll apologise and try to hide how upset you are. You’ll seek to offer your Manager assurance that you’ll improve “give me a month and I’ll be back on track”.
- You’re an insightful researcher but, since your promotion, you’ve been feeling the pressure. You absolutely hate presenting your ideas to any kind of audience, with more than 2 people, you start to get nervous and your words don’t flow. You know you don’t do a good job of inspiring others with your solutions and recommendations.
- It feels like people look to you to do that more since you’ve been promoted and you know you’re falling short. At the same time, Learnerbly is such a collaborative culture, “Win Together is a core value, so you feel it’s ok to defer to others and ask them their point of view and recommendation. Especially when they’re as talented and great as the people you’re honoured to work with.
- You’ve also been so keen to prove you’re worthy of your new role that you’ve often felt a bit paralysed when it comes to making decisive choices and recommendations about how best to move forward.
- You’re constantly revising and improving your work sometimes at the expense of timely delivery or paying attention to finer details (correcting typos or small errors in formatting and analysis).
- In the instance of the new feature development, you wanted to make sure it was going to make real impact…you spent all your time looking at competitor sites and developing small improvements but you know that you constantly shifting time-lines and gaps in your ability to communicate your vision meant that it was very nearly a disaster. You learned valuable lessons but you also feel like you let everyone down - especially your Manager.
A successful manager will:
- Be clear and candid in their feedback on your performance and share responsibility for supporting you to close the gap.
- Ensure you hear and understand the importance of your Exceeds values rating and how highly you’re regarded within the culture of Learnerbly.
- Listen and learn extensively. Making space to explore your experiences and the root cause of your inconsistency (your perfectionism and lack of belief in your own ideas), rather than just identifying the problem
- Put other’s feedback into context with their own - rather than making it seem like everyone is talking about you behind your back.
- Collaborate to build a solution - you’d love some support with Presentation Skills and Structuring your ideas in a more impactful way.
A less successful manager will:
- Simply list all of the things that have “gone wrong” without making this a dialogue. Leading you to apologise repeatedly rather than reflect on and share your perspective…