The Management Likes Me While My Colleagues Did Not

Recently I was talked that my KPI result is not as good as others and it is also far from theirs. My leaders gave me some possibilities and told me not to be too worried about that because the management likes me. However, this still made me unpleasant.

To start, the result was generated from colleagues’ ratings of me, which is somehow similar to OKR in Google previously. In this case, the result showed how my colleague saw me. But I am not a snob, and we have a good relationship (at least on the surface), so I was thinking what the possibilities are.

Except for the bad reasons that my leader told, there are two possibilities. One is that they ranked everyone in a group while I did it based on their individual performance without ranking, another is that they did not know what I have done because I only showed it to my leader and management. Considering the statistics, I think the latter is more possible.

This leads to a common discussion in the workspace — should you be a “good” person for colleagues?

I am a doer. Sometimes I asked the same question for multiple times simply because I am a new joiner in this sector. I need to practice to understand and memorize in my heart. But from their point of view, I am careless.

From my personal perspective, I join in a company to work. Hence, Client, company, and supervisor are the top 3 persons to serve. First, clients are the source of income of our companies and personal incomes, so giving them the best experience is our priority; second, companies are where we can realize our personal value and make fortunes, so serving them well is learning things for our future, especially when we want to start our own business; third, supervisors are our closest person in the office who supports us in any aspects, so making them constantly aware of our ongoing projects and working status will in return maximize our benefits, in terms of income or growth. Many stories in history tell me that following the correct person and doing the correct things is the correct way to work in any workspace. Given these in the bottom of my heart, I do not closely communicate my work with my colleagues but work very close with my leaders. As a result, all my former and current leaders and management hold that I am super responsible, so they always rated me high in my annual performance.

Seven years ago, I wrote a post in the internal forum in my former employer to criticize how inappropriate to simply copy OKR in the company to replace KPI, earning applauses from the whole company, because there were a lot of trades under the table and not each one we picked knew fully our performance, which was just a way to democratize in order for democratization.

In summary, although this incident created some troubles for me, I will be still stick to my working attitude and style consistently because devoting 80% of my efforts to the most important 20% of my work can I be successful at work.

Hey dear friends, I wonder your idea or culture on such a similar situation. Please share with me if you would like to. Thanks!