Maneuvering for a Better Appraisal

If the previous two unrelated statements are taken together, then we can assume a distinct possibility of your working under a manager or supervisor who would love to express his/her bias against you by cleverly sabotaging your performance appraisal report. And that means you will be topping the charts meant for the next company firing squad.

You need to be, and act, clever enough to counteract such strategies that are designed to show you up in negative or poor light. Just dedicated and honest work will not guarantee your survival in such conditions unless you consciously guard your stakes. And to do that, you too need to understand the situation properly, and act to create favorable reactions.

Remember that in spite of hundreds of books and research documents on fairness at workspace, unfairness remains, and is the reason why, in the first place, those books and researches were written. Whatever be their dictionary meaning, in reality, employee performance appraisals continue to be reflections of the personally biased opinions of superiors in respect of particular employees. Thus, the obviously prudent thing to do is to try to harness those personal opinions in one’s favor. If doing so means giving up cherished values, then one should play act convincingly for the time one requires to score an achievement, and leave the company on good terms and with good recommendations.

Like spreading Latin love, an employee should always try to leave good impressions at workplaces and strategize to leave before workplace relationships turn sour and stale, if such possibilities present themselves. Chances are that you can always return to the employer once the problematic superior is gone, but if you try to slug it out with a superior suffering from an inferiority complex, the situation can mess up so badly that future doors to the same workplace may become permanently closed, as well as causing you to lose many future opportunities. This is something you can hardly allow to happen if you respect your career and your responsibilities.

While techniques and strategies employed to achieve a good performance appraisal may vary from workplace to workplace, the inherent policy does not. And the policy, to draw from the first sentence in this article, is that if you succeed in making your superior feel powerful and in control, then he/she will not feel the urge to abuse his/her authority. This is the only policy besides, of course, honest work that you need to deliver. Sometimes, if you succeed in carrying off your part well, you can also get away without doing honest work, though that would not be recommendable as it would result in loss of personal skills and time.

To get good performance appraisals from superiors suffering from massive egos and inferiority complexes, you have to take the approach you would take to handle a biter dog – good doggy, nice doggy, (grr) be calm, nothing to be afraid of, here’s your biscuit, keep pissing, it’s your territory not mine.