Snow day and appraisals

So it's wonderfully snowy outside. A day for hot apple cider, snowmen and snowball fights and laughing as the cats leap through the snow wondering what the hell it is.

Instead, I am in the office, and have been for over an hour. The others are just starting to arrive and then head to the canteen for breakfast. (Starting at 9:00 means arriving around then, and then spending half an hour upstairs over a cuppa and breakfast for most people...)

On Wednesday before I headed home after a 9 hour day (with a cold and a bit of jet lag), I wrote up my appraisal. My boss told me to justify and quantify everything that I have achieved this year. For me, this is nigh on impossible. I help other people reach decisions, by giving them the data, analysis and insight that helps them make the best informed decisions that they can. I can make recommendations from time to time, but bottom line - they decide what they want to use from what I provide them with, and they decide what to do. Prime example, I spent 2 days putting together a business case to support one of our new brands in a particular retailer. It was a piece of work I was really proud of as I'd had to be quite creative in my thinking, and the arguments I had put together were well constructed and fully supported the brand for the retailer.

The person who made the final presentation to the retailer used just 2 of my slides. 2. And not even 2 that particularly sold the brand well, but were more informative.

So I can never say "Project X that I did delivered £000's to our business", or "Project Y that I did saved the business £000's", because it just doesn't work like that.

Anyway, I thought I'd done a good job on the right up, I felt that I had met and exceeded all of my objectives for the year (which had been sufficiently generic that I could interpret them and reason them any way I wanted), and that I had only "Met" on the behavioural competencies (this was the impression I got from my boss in the session where we had discussed all of this).

I come back in this morning (I was off sick yesterday, still trying to shake this cold), to an email which I really don't understand what she is asking of me...

"I can see that you have changed all competencies to M, and left all objectives as ME. Although our conversation focused on the 'how' tasks/work are delivered that often makes the difference, I am still keen to discuss the variations between what (and how) different objectives have been delivered and variations in competencies - there are obvious strengths you should draw out vs. development areas want to focus on"

I am left wondering if she actually read it through, because I thought I had pulled out the competency areas that I still need to develop...

I HATE appraisals. They make me feel generally crap about myself because I go in thinking I've been doing a good job all year, and leave feeling like there's so much more that I need to do.

My job kind of falls into 2 parts. The first part is the simple stuff, running data, populating charts, and supporting my immediate team. I am very good at this stuff because I have the technical expertise and I am fast. My team love me for this.

The second part is generating projects that analyse trends in the market, help identify risks and opportunities to our customers and us, interesting pieces of analysis that help inform our trading and shopper marketing teams. These are the projects that are so far down on my stakeholder's priorities though, that they never get read. I get asked to come along and present at team meetings, and then I get bumped from the agenda as they have more important things to discuss. This is the part that is my "legacy" to the business, the part that is going to get me noticed around the business, and will earn me accolades. Unfortunately, I can't seem to get feedback from anyone on any of these projects. And neither can my boss - she emailed 5 of my main stakeholders to ask for feedback, and not one of them replied.

You can see why I feel so appreciated and respected, can't you?

Meanwhile I shall sit here and churn out data and eat Milk Duds.