Post-Script

Employee appraisals were due on January 17. Meaning, each manager submits his/her appraisals of their own employees to their second line manager at this time. Second line managers have until January 31 to review and approve, or reject and send back for more comments or even changes if they feel the scores aren't fair.

[Note: even though Il Duce had been moved to another part of the company and I no longer worked for him, he was still supposed to write the appraisals for his staff from the previous year (e.g., me), therefore, I wasn't completely rid of him, yet.]

I had spoken to Tiberius twice during the fall and said I was worried about my upcoming appraisal. I told him that Il Duce had trashed me on the previous one, at mid-year, and I wasn't going to take another one like that very well. Tiberius assured me (both times) that he wouldn't let that happen. He explained: "I have second-line approval over whatever [Il Duce] writes, and I will reject anything that isn't fair." I trusted him, perhaps blindly.

I wrote my own comments and submitted them to Il Duce, as per usual, early in January. I wrote volumes about all of the work I'd done over the year, knowing they would be largely, if not completely, ignored. I didn't comment on the troubles between the two of us. I felt those were personal issues that didn't have any place in my review.

Then I wrote all of my own employee appraisals and submitted them to Il Duce for his second-line review.

I trusted that Tiberius was keeping an eye on all of this, as he said he would.

A few days before the end of the month, Il Duce rejected a few of the reviews I'd written, namely those that I'd written for Bob's Your Uncle and Judas. He added his own comments into mine (yes, you can do that apparently) and said I was a bad manager for not realizing how valuable both of these two were, criticized me for not lavishing them both with high praise, and he wanted to me to remove any negative comments and raise both of their scores.

My "negative comments" were in fact constructive criticism in Judas' appraisal, mixed in with quite a lot of actual praise for the good work he did last year (magnanimous of me, I feel, in the face of Judas' betrayal). In Bob's Your Uncle's review, my comments were the best I could do to respond to the rambling that he (Bob) himself wrote about how bad a manager I was and how he (Bob) had suffered because Il Duce and I weren't getting along.

I was already giving Judas an above average score. Bob rated average because I felt that his technical work, which was good, balanced out his poor management skills. So to wit: neither was getting a negative (i.e., bad) score at all, yet Il Duce rejected them because they weren't good enough.

I showed Il Duce's rejections and comments to Tiberius, who suggested that I make a few minor changes that wouldn't affect the overall scores to appease Il Duce and call it good. So I did.

At about this time, I took a look in the appraisal system to see where my own review was. I wanted to know if Il Duce was still working on it or if he'd submitted it to Tiberius for a second-line review. What I found was that Il Duce had gotten it routed to someone else, the guy he was working for now (we'll call this guy Lord British), in a clear violation of policy. Somebody in charge wasn't paying attention when that happened, and Tiberius has been taken out of the equation altogether.

I found Tiberius and let him know what Il Duce had done. I reminded him again (for the third time, now) that I wasn't going to be happy with whatever Il Duce had presumably written, and I needed him to fix this. He promised to look into it, but I was duly nervous because he had promised to take care of this twice already.

Here's the complication. Lord British is our Chief Technology Officer, several levels about Tiberius. (How and why they decided that Il Duce would report to someone at this level is both beyond me and a gross misplacement of reason and logic.*) So Tiberius had to go to this guy with only a few days left in the review cycle and figure out a way to fix this.

And apparently he did. Within a day, my review had been moved in the system over to Tiberius who had an opportunity to make some changes. Apparently, though, the original manager's comments (Il Duce's) were locked. Tiberius could only add his own.

As best as I can tell, Il Duce tried to give me a 1.8 out 5. Tiberius upgraded that to a 2.8 out of 5. The lowest score I've ever gotten during my 10 years at this company. He said there was a limit to how much he could change, and that increasing my score above one full point would require HR interaction.

I said, "Sounds fine to me. Let's get HR in here. I've got plenty to say."

Tiberius said he didn't think that would be a good idea. He explained that he couldn't give me higher than a rounded-three anyway (all of our scores ultimately round to the nearest whole number when it comes to determining bonuses and raises) and I effectively got the same as a 3.49.

"Not really," I told him. "It still implies that I'm working below expectations. Is that what you're saying?"

He said, no.

"Then it's not the score I deserve."

But at that point, it was already finalized. Nothing to be done about it.

When Tiberius he showed me the written comments on my appraisal, he cautioned me that Il Duce's wouldn't make me very happy and said he would try to find a way to get them expunged after the review cycle was over. He asked that I just focus on his own comments.

I told him that I thought it would be a good idea of I didn't read Il Duce's comments at all. And to date, I haven't.


* May 2008 update: Apparently it was only a temporary assignment because he is now working for someone lower quite lower in the food chain.