I took over tasks in the area A for the market for which I am working. There are about 20+ markets in total. It's possible to objectively access how good you perform tasks in the area. There's one KPI that's always used.

We had a meeting to assess how well markets did this month with the task.

Although I did it for the first time, my result in terms of the KPI was twice, trice as good as the result of most other markets. My result was a clear (positive) outlier. The participants told me they were totally impressed.

And then... I told them I had an easier task than other markets because (input an objective reason here). One of the participants confirmed that if the reason was correct, my task was much easier then. The thing is, I thought about it and the reason doesn't seem to hold. The complexity seems similar for everybody.

Is there a way for me to point to that? Should I just attend the meetings in the future and in case the situation repeats tell them "Hey! My task doesn't seem easier after all"? How to do that in order not to sound boastful?

  • Who were these participants? What's your work relationship with them? What's your goal of correcting their "wrong" perception? Are you somehow concerned that their perception would be tied to your appraisal, or something along those lines? Would it be sufficient to let your manager know? I'm not dismissing your issue or asking rhetorical questions, by the way. I want to understand your situation better so that I can (try to) offer a useful solution. – Masked Man Jul 28 '18 at 9:35
  • Hi @MaskedMan, these aren't my direct supervisors, but superiors, people a few steps above me, whose opinion about me is important since 1) they communicate with my boss 2) I frequently need to convince them to do things they don't want to do - one reason why they don't want to do these things is probably that our team has a very bad reputation of being incompetent and disorganised. – BigMadAndy Jul 28 '18 at 10:31

What are you trying to achieve here?

I mean - does pointing that out change the situation somehow for you? In my opinion, there is no real value in trying to correct your own words in similar meetings.

Look at this from the other side: could it be, that you said it because you didn't want others to feel bad? If you have one or two special persons that are important to impress, and you really want to stress it - mention that while discussing other matters in private: "Between you and me - you know that argument is not valid, I just didn't want to make Alice and Bob feel bad".

However, I still don't think it is a good idea. Based on this experience I would just make a better call next time and stay quiet.

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