The Ascent from Promotion to Resignation

I was recently promoted. 37 notifications on Slack (a messaging app). All with the same message, “Congratulations!” except for one, my boss. He said, “Congratulations Khavi! …now you can share the news with your family and friends.” I replied with a thanks followed by a smiley.

During the rest of the day, work, colleagues, and lunch with them, all of it was same as the day before. Nothing felt different. It was the first promotion of my life and I couldn’t tell why it felt so empty. Was it because I was promised but denied the promotion last year since office policy had suddenly changed (as per my boss only)? Or, was it because a dozen other colleagues were also promoted?

Days went by and I found the one thing that had visibly changed in my life. It was the number of expectations my boss had in terms of work delivered. But that didn’t feel like a cause for celebration.

Let me give you a little behind-the-scenes tour. There was a policy to evaluate performance of employees every 6 months. I had to create a document (much like this article you are reading) and provide evidences for all the great work I had done in the last 6 months, and then submit it to my boss. It was called ‘self-review.’ There was a ‘downward-review’ as well, which my boss had to create. Here, he would describe his perception of my work over the last 6 months. In the end, we used to sit together and discuss the two reviews, and send the finalized review to the upper management.

The process was very effective. After the reviews, if the employee was found lagging behind, the boss would flag it and someone from HR would send the study materials to the employee over email. There was no way one couldn’t grow.

After the promotion, three such cycles of 6 months had passed and at the end of each cycle, HR would always send me something. Every time, something was missing from my work. There were good things too. My boss had mentioned them in the ‘downward-review.’ But I had to work upon the missing stuff for the next 6 months, then I had to work upon fixing something else for another 6 months, and it kept going on. The growth was inevitable. But the question was, “to what end?”

The boss and the office culture seemed nurturing. And yet my colleagues had long face almost every day. The environment supported growth in theory but how would you trust it when your boss lives 3 states away and connect over a video call for 10 mins once a quarter to check up on the progress, not the person? So, I put in my resignation one day and left the place. I wasn’t sure why I did that except for a feeling of the lack of trust, and later I was proven right.

Our work was appreciated through salaries and lousy “thank you” messages. Please note that it was our work that was appreciated, and not us, the people producing the work. And this is probably why I neither liked nor hated my boss, or any other colleagues for that matter. Perhaps, they felt the same toward me!

It was only after I resigned that I learned my boss’s indifference, that my gut feel was not just a hunch but it was actually true.

When I submitted the online resignation form, the first remark made by the boss was that I should have informed him before doing so, and the reason, in his words, was this – “otherwise, it looked like we had a fight and that’d create problems for him.” What I’d do next with my life was none of his concerns! And that’s the boss I had worked with for 5 years, the indifferent boss who cared for neither his employee’s promotion nor his resignation.

Walking away from a toxic environment that doesn’t even look toxic on the surface was a much-delayed decision of my life but in the 2 years since, I have never regretted that decision as it was only after that bold move that I found more clarity, more self-awareness, right growth, right people, and a sense of purpose that no MNC could provide with their salaries and perks.

In the end, I would like you to stop and question your current state of career, your current state of life and the people surrounding you. Question how they make you feel throughout the day. Question if the growth in your life is actually making ‘you’ grow or not.

And never forget to listen to your gut feel. Because not every tall building means progress, not every promotion means growth, and not every boss has truly earned to be a boss.

...

Thanks for reading,

from Khavi Darpan.