No. 8 · The first review

Eight months after I watched those towers fall, I graduated.

April 2002. A degree in Aerospace Engineering, and a feeling of incredible pride.

Then reality. My classmates and I were all chasing the same few jobs.

One of them was in Winnipeg. Not the most sought after posting, so "only" twelve of us competed for it.

I got it.

I felt like I had won. An offer letter. Thirty five thousand dollars a year. My first real salary.

There was just one problem. My car was dying. An old Honda Accord I drove with smoke quite literally rising from under the hood.

So I did something gloriously foolish.

I walked into a Honda dealership with my offer letter in one hand and a credit card in the other. I put the down payment on the credit card and drove a brand new 2002 Civic off the lot that same day.

They gave me five hundred dollars for the smoking Accord.

I drove back to campus feeling like the coolest man alive. Definitely not the wisest financial decision of my life. I regret nothing.

Then I made the trek. More than two thousand kilometres, alone, to Winnipeg, near the very centre of the country.

I started at a small, family owned and run engineering consulting company.

Which makes me smile now. All these years later, I am still in engineering services. Sometimes you go all the way around and end up exactly where you began.

The company itself was unremarkable. The culture, forgettable. The leaders, uninspiring. But it was a job, and I did not know any better yet.

Then came the lesson that has stayed with me for more than twenty years.

A year in, I sat down for my first annual performance review. My boss told me I had not done well enough to earn the raise I had expected. Not only that he clearly articulated areas where I did not measure up.

Here is the thing.

It wasn't that I disagreed with him. It was just that it was the first time I heard it.

And, here the other thing...

My boss sat in the cubicle next to mine. All year. Almost every single day.

Not once, in twelve months, had he told me.

That was the day I learned exactly the kind of leader I never wanted to be. It wasn't really his fault though, his boss was worse, so he didn't really have a great example to learn from either.

The lesson:

Feedback you save for the annual review is not feedback. If you can see someone falling short, tell them while they can still do something about it.

To be continued…

WAYPOINTS · No. 8

A series of inflection points on a journey still being written.