I will focus on the clear negative in my situation. I was fired about 2 weeks after approaching the HR department expressing concerns about honesty issues with management, impossible job expectations, and overall unfair treatment. I am told that there is potential for a wrongful termination lawsuit here, based on whistleblowing of a protected activity but I won't discuss that here.
Management on my team tended to have the type of personality where putting others down was the key to building one's-self up. Simple questions were typically treated as having suspect motive. This was evident in nitpicky findings and written warnings I'd received. Written warnings consisted of things like "98% accuracy not satisfied due to 1 out of 10 write ups containing 1 typo" or "stepped away from morning meeting to use the restroom without permission", or "scheduled outlook meeting during a time I was busy". We are talking, 99% pet peeve violations. Common themes are that one time accidents would be held against you on your permanent record, small insignificant mistakes such typos can lead to written warnings. When you try to voice concerns directly, it makes matters worse in that you are perceived as someone trying to justify that mistakes are ok. I felt that my concerns were always written off. I always felt as though I was being pushed out of the job.
Some facts about me: I came to First Tech's commercial lending department with 8 years of commercial banking experience. My strengths are that I am very detail oriented, work at a quick pace, and am highly "moldable" (accept criticism well). These skills have served me very well in my career. During my employ at First Tech, I was the key player in bringing a backlog of past due write-ups current (I put in a good amount of overtime to achieve this) annual audits were smooth, and other servicing items were up to date. I consider these huge accomplishments given the amount of work required and the amount of resources available. For those that may not know, the single strongest indicator of solid performance for this type of position is a good clean audit as it pertains to your duties.
My last "con" is that in my performance review my manager appeared to have "worked backwards" by first selecting a number 1-5 ranking in multiple categories before any of the descriptions were filled in (usually the description is what leads to a number). A straight 2 out of 5 was selected for each of our institution's 4 core values (things like honesty, being genuine, culture, etc). To me these scores should at least be different, and with a positive attitude such as mine at least a couple satisfsactory 3's? In summary, a person like me who is detail oriented, has great peer rapport, willing to put in the overtime, amend working habits as needed to meet work demands, who was borderline overqualified for the position, was considered a bad job match. This begs the question well what was the real underlying issue? I would tell you two things: lower management needs to step up and accept responsibility for mistakes from time to time (versus never seeing one's self in the wrong and passing blame on to others), and deciding what "really" is a risk to the department and therefore needing to be changed and what types of things should just be let go (a sort of "pick your battles" type of thing).
