#36 “…it was the first time in my career that I realized what type of leader I do not wish to become.”

“This happened about 5 years in my career, at which time I felt it was unfair but did not really take any action towards the matter. 7 years later I wish I have stood up for myself more.

The was a project which was scheduled to be delivered to customer team (an internal team) in 8 month time frame. 6 months have passed before I was pulled into the project. Two months before the delivery date the management team decided to pull me in. The project delivery required a solution of an automated system that was able to navigate in 3-axis while performing certain tasks. When I was handed the project, the system was unable to navigate to a fixed point, nor it had the ability to perform the required tasks.

With two month left in the project time, I worked with the customer team to work out the minimum requirements for the deliverables and worked within the constraints of the existing hardware design. I mapped out the project into several smaller pieces and demonstrated and explained along the way to the customer team; I then incorporated feedbacks from our internal customer team in the final product. I ended up using less than 20% of the initial software that was rewritten for it from the previous project owner. In the end I delivered a solution that was appreciated by the customer team and was put into use right away.Lit

Yet I received the worst performance review score to date during that review period throughout my entire career! While the feedback I got from the customer team was great, the person who was the previous owner of the project, who I later realized claimed to be the project lead gave me unfair feedback that ‘i was not thoughtful enough in designing the feature’ (i had to work with the time constraint), ‘was in a hurry to show the customer the product before it was complete’ (what I did was to invite everyone on the team including this person to the demo instead of doing a demo to this person before hand and get their approval first), ‘not organized to keep notes’ (I had already incorporated the feedback and updated the corresponding SW before this person had a chance to send out the meeting notes). I came to realize later that review period this person who used to my peer and previous owned the project had been promoted.

I burst into tears receiving that review score, yet it was the first time in my career that I realized what type of leader I do not wish to become. It was at that time when I first thought about leaving the group.“