You Ought to Know that Career is a Marathon not a Sprint Race

You have been working the whole year like there’s no tomorrow. You sacrificed a lot of things including your loved ones for the sake of work explaining to them that it is for their future. You were a very good soldier diligently following your manager and putting up through all his shortcomings and mistakes.
The end of the fiscal year or calendar year has come and it is the time for performance appraisals and ratings where you felt good about it knowing you’ll get very good results.
Kaboom! That’s not what happened; instead as your manager went through your ratings, you can’t help but feel crap about what he’s saying. You realized he saw things differently and gave you a rating exactly the opposite of what you expected.

What do you do during this situation?
1. Ask for clarification about the rating and what went wrong.
2. Try to explain your side and defend whatever misconceptions you have.
3. The truth is, you’re rating is most likely to stay as his instinct will make him defend his actions and save himself from any negative misconception by the higher management.
How to prevent this from happening again?
1. Before any project starts, always seek out an expectations meeting with your superior to know what the things are he finds positive and negative. You will have to use the expectations meeting to determine what kind of management style he has.
2. Seek out constant feedbacks especially on long-term projects. It’s good if you’re superior is able to give you feedback right away, but if not, seek out every quarter or as you feel is appropriate.
Sometimes it’s just full of crap?
There are times that you just get to be handled by impossible managers, where you become a victim of their impression on you and try to cover up and save their mistakes by pinning down their incapability to your management or leadership performance. You can’t do anything about this and just hope it won’t last forever.
In large corporations where the nature of work is moving and changing every one or two years, situations like this die out naturally. You will have to be positive and think that your career is not a sprint race where you get promoted and get all the bonuses in a year’s time; but rather, it is a marathon race where sometimes you lead the pack or fall behind.
However, in small companies where it seems you will work forever with your single manager, it’s best that you find another company if things can’t be worked out anymore.
I have been in both situations working in a large corporation and in a small company. In the large corporation I worked with, it’s good I have been mentored by senior managers about the marathon race we are going through that they themselves have experience this kind of management and leadership crap. In the small company I worked for, which I feel is the biggest mistake I did to my career on accepting an offer from their company, I moved on and was extremely happy and relieved.
Always keep in mind that career is a marathon race not a sprint race, learn to run the low and highs of your career.
[tags]Career, Manager[/tags]