It was that time of the year and everyone got an annual review whether they liked it or not. Vladimir felt this was not going to be time productively spent as Finley who may be a nice guy really didn’t understand IT and that can be a problem if you are leading an IT group.
There had been a number of misunderstandings and downright blunders on Finley’s part but today he was focusing on Vlad. Of all his goals for the following year two stood out. The first was that the team morale had been very low since Finley joined the group and so he wanted Vlad to improve it. The other interesting goal was for Vladimir to hand over his role of leading the interface group to another colleague. This goal wouldn’t be so ridiculous except that the recipient of the task will be taking paternity leave for three months, followed by extended paternity leave for another six months.
All of this was going to to take place in about 5 weeks so by definition this was a goal that either could not be done or could only be done in the most superficial way possible. The final goal was the improvement of Vlad’s communication skills. Finley wanted to give him a zero points on a scale of 1 of 5, but had to change to one point as that was all that the HR form would support.
In addition there was one more task that he wanted to be achieved by the end of the year. As previously mentioned, the team morale was quite low and so Finley wanted that one of Vladimir’s goals for the year would be to improve the team morale.
Finley’s ideas of what a successful review looked like was very different from Vlad’s, the rest of the team and the company standard. In the end, Vlad gathered some feedback from other managers and vendors and it was brought up to the workers council. The workers council were quite aware of Finley’s reputation due to previous run in’s with him and company policies. Thus due to this particular review a new page was added to Finley’s company file.