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.