The more I talk to people, especially those who have been at their careers for a number of years, or decades, the more there seems to be a disconnect between what they feel is their actual performance, the value they produce, and what their management tends to see. And this seems to be more than a pattern with merely noticeable statistical consistency, but is actually quite ubiquitous. In recent years, I have seen a number of articles in business magazines about companies that are eliminating the entire annual review process, and I’m starting to understand why. It’s kind of a farce, at least to some degree. I don’t know if there’s any management school fix for something like this, a newly developed methodology of sorts, since the greater the expertise of the person being reviewed, the greater the chance that large parts of it are going to fly over their manager’s head, just as many pieces of the manager’s job would elude the understanding of those who report to her . I’ve begun to call this disconnect the Peter Parker Syndrome.
As a kid I read reams of Spider-man comic books, and I know there are different versions of the story, a TV show some decades ago, more than one animated series, and a more recent film and sequel, but it’s the Tobey Maguire Spider-man I’m thinking of, or perhaps his Spider-man II.
Peter Parker looks ridiculous on his moped in midtown Manhattan traffic, trying to get a stack of pizzas delivered on time. Suddenly something happens, there’s some crisis, and he’s off in Spider-man mode, swinging on webs, saving lives, getting the bad guys, you name it, finally snatching a slice before someone on a balcony, where his pies have landed, bites into it. He makes his delivery almost in time, but he’s minutes late, and oops, it turns into free pizza day for the customer, and because of that he loses his job.
Out of desperation Peter brings photos of Spider-man to one of the biggest city papers. The editor, J. Jonah Jameson, is like a younger, American version of Rupert Murdoch. He doesn’t care about real news, per se, but in selling papers. He’s really rather incompetent at understanding what’s really going on in the world, what real news is, and distorts everything to conform with his personal ideology and a narrative that will drive paper sales. Where his competence lies is in marketing.
Parker sells photos to him at a pittance, though he is providing a tremendous value to the paper, not only because of the exclusivity of the images, but by actually being the content of the news that is driving sales. Jameson is not only an incompetent news editor, he is completely at a loss as to this value Peter Parker is providing him and his business. Even more absurd, he is making our hero into an outlaw, the cause of the crimes and crises he’s been alleviating, representing him even as a terrorist.
Okay, the Spider-man analogy is a bit of an exaggeration, but people I’ve been talking to have come out of their annual reviews feeling sort of the same way. And this is nothing new, as I remember my father complaining about the same thing back in the 1970s and 80s, although it’s more than likely that with the explosion in technology, our jobs are more various and bewilderingly complex than they were during the later decades of the twentieth century.
At the same time, there’s more than likely an equal opportunity to be over-appreciated, rather than under-appreciated, to take credit for producing more value than we are personally responsible for, taking credit for things that occur due to happenstance, or even value that belongs to others. There are plenty of people whom I’ve known who have a talent for that sort of thing, although they have tended to vanish into thin air, after a while, seemingly without a trace. You hear stories of people who make their entire careers out of skipping from job to job, continuously, like a stone on the surface of a pond, until they eventually go plop, down to the bottom, and you never hear from them again. Maybe they’ve gone off to sell vacation shares in the Caribbean, or wall-coverings at Walmart. Who knows? But what a waste of a Wharton education…
Don’t go that route. You have the perfect right to be who you are, to be misunderstood and under-appreciated, and to provide massive value, in spite of whatever you think it’s doing to your career. The thing is, over time you’re going to accrete more experience producing excellence, doing good stuff, and it’s going to pay returns on what you are going to be able to do as you live into the future. If at some point you have to solve some ridiculously difficult problem, or perform some other absurd miracle, and you accomplish it, with perhaps a limited amount of fallout, then you have acquired the experience of performing those miracles, and nothing of that complexity will ever be as difficult again. And if you feel you are still unappreciated, take comfort in the hole you’ll leave whenever it is leave, for whatever reason.
But it’s your own integrity you’re building all the while. No matter what your manager does or says, as long as you know what you are worth, and remain the primary judge of your performance and value, you will be rewarded. If you cheat, there is something inside of you that will cheapen. If you produce gold, you’re filling yourself with gold. Feel it. It’s really up to you.
At some point, Peter Parker gives up on being Spider-man because he’s frustrated about what it’s brought into his life. He just wants to be a normal person, with normative rewards. He doesn’t want his life to be so hard. But he realizes it doesn’t work for him. It won’t work for you either. Believe me, I’ve been at this longer than you think.
Go get’m tiger.