Your last four weeks have been fine. Nothing broke, the work went out, your manager has said almost nothing to you beyond logistics. And somewhere in that quiet a thought sets up: something is wrong, they have gone off me, this is what it looks like before a conversation.
Consider how comment actually gets distributed at work. People remark on the exception. Something failed, or something was unusually good, or a customer said your name. Ordinary competence produces no event, so it produces no sentence. The default state of a busy manager is silence, and that silence covers most of the good weeks of your career.
The trouble is that a mind with no information does not sit still. It writes something, and it never writes the flattering version. Then you start reading evidence into things that carry none. A short reply. Not being asked into a meeting you would not have contributed to. Somebody else getting the interesting ticket, which was probably about who had capacity on Tuesday.
You can end this cheaply, and not by scanning harder for accidental signals. Go and get one deliberate one.
Ask a question narrow enough to be answerable. How am I doing produces fine, yeah, good, because it is too large to answer in a corridor. Is there anything about my work at the moment that you would want different works much better, and so does if you had to pick one thing for me to improve this quarter, what would it be. You will usually get something small, specific and unalarming, and occasionally something genuinely useful that would have taken another eight months to surface.
Then believe the answer and stop auditing for a quarter. Checking every fortnight does not make you better informed, it makes you exhausting.
In the meantime, keep your own record, because you are allowed to have an opinion about your own work. What went out. What got easier because you were there. Who asked for you by name.
And notice the asymmetry you are running on. You read their silence as a verdict. They read yours as nothing at all, which is almost certainly how they intended theirs.
Monday: ask one narrow question about your own work, and then leave it alone until the new year.
– Asael Shinder
