"Larry, I need to talk to you in private for a few minutes."
"Ok, The GM is out, lets go in his office."
Great, the last time I was in here they yelled at me, and I yelled back.
Deja Vue..
He wasn't even curious. It felt like he knew what I wanted already.

"What's on your mind AC?"
"There's something going on with Brad. Every time I have any contact with Brad, he goes out of his way to make comments about my numbers, but you're my boss, and he isn't. What's going on here? What aren't you telling me? I know something is up and I'm tired of not hearing it from anyone directly!"

"Your numbers stink! They are always lower than the others! We're not happy with that. I know you know what sort of numbers everyone else is doing and you just don't seem to care. You need to take more trades at a time, and take more calls."

There it was. All of my suspicions, all of my paranoia, proven true. I had spent the last year trying to convince myself that I had nothing to worry about and that they would tell me if they did not like my numbers, then in 1 minute, I found out how wrong I had been about them. No reviews, no warnings, no goals, no leadership, I just "should have known". What a cop-out! What a coward! Even worse than that, they all judged me as a slacker that didn't care based on assuming I knew what they were thinking, when they didn't have the guts to lay it out, I had to ask for real criticism.

"First off, You have me doing extra research for those mutual funds that the others don't do, you even added to it lately by having me check out some of their bond preferences. Then, I'm not passing off every call to the customer service temps like your top performers, I take every call that comes. Lastly, do you want me to start filling in only half the fields and not obeying your policies about confirming trades, market change pre-authorizations, and notifications? All these top players don't do that even half the time. Do you want me to do a worse job for more numbers?"

"....Uhh...Well..No, you should keep following policy..Look, you need to stop taking the customer service calls, I don't want you to take them. We still need to see more numbers from you."

"I still have not got a review. You still haven't answered the question of the extra research I do. I always thought you were straight with me about things, I thought you would tell me straight if you weren't happy with my work. If you don't like my work, maybe you need to tell me to leave..."

I don't know what made me say the last part, it wasn't the smartest thing I had ever done, but the look in his eyes and his tone changed immediately....

More later...

Thanks for reading,

AC


Click below to read the other parts of this series
Part III
Part I