Thank God for a Bad Performance Review

I had a review with someone who is now my ex-boss a couple of months ago and after the review I was very upset because I felt it was a biased and unfair review. Even though she stressed several times throughout the review that it wasn't personal I believed that it was. She gave me a very basic rating in skills that my past employers, my family and friends know as my core competencies and strengths. She particularly riled the hell out of me when she gave me a less than basic rating in writing, which is absurd considering that I wrote and published my first story when I was 12 and got paid $50 for it in addition to the fact that I still write part time. It was clear from the review that she had no knowledge of my capabilities or me and had based it mostly on an incident I’m professional enough not to mention on this blog page.

I was really mad after the review and my first action was to set about gathering evidence for a rebuttal. While in the process, I went over the review again and analysed it step by step. What I did, I broke what I knew she was right on to one side, what I felt she was unfair on to one side and what I felt was just plain absurd to the third side. Just for the hell of it, I decided to seek professional analysis and recommendations on each one to bolster home my point that she had no idea what she was doing. Thus began a set of courses on the Internet. Half way through the courses, I unearthed extraordinary competencies that even I did not know I have in addition to building up on the other skills that I do know I have. Taking the courses woke me up to the fact that I am actually undervaluing myself in my present role in addition to not being able to maximise my potential. I’m still going ahead with the rebuttal because I can’t let such a farce end up in my personnel file but I am now searching for a role where I can utilise all my strengths, work on my weaknesses and maximise my potential to my benefit as well as the company’s. If she hadn't given me that bad review I would never have done research and assessed myself to the point of realising that even though I love what I'm doing, I am actually not being all that I can be at it by staying at my present job.

Wherever you are, dear ex-boss, thank you for the biased and bad review.