California Dreamin'

Just booked a work trip to California in January.  Not particularly happy about doing so, this is not going to be a fun trip.  Which is the main reason I’m not going to stay the weekend to take in San Francisco – I’m going to be in no mood to do so.  Basically, it is because my manager wants to have a face-to-face meeting to discuss my performance review.  Well I definitely haven’t got a promotion, otherwise I would have found out by now.  That is disappointing but no surprise – to get a promotion I need to have shown that I can successfully lead the statistical programming deliverables for a study (which I haven’t had the opportunity to do so for a very long time) or show a willingness to take on direct reports (something I don’t want to have to do).  And I suspect that for the second year in a row, the performance rating I gave myself (2 out of 5 – where 1 is very good, and 2 is very bad) will be downgraded by her to a 3 (or, god forbid, worse).  This is undoubtedly going to piss me off, no matter how much I know it’s coming, so then the question comes how do I deal with that.  At the moment I’m thinking that I have to flat out tell her that I’m unhappy with how I’m currently being used, I’m unhappy with her as my manager and that it simply isn’t working out between her and me.  This is not going to go down well – but if I want to continue working here (which I kind of do, though I still plan to apply for any suitable positions I find in SoCal next year) then something has to change, and that means a change in manager and a change in the programming group I currently work in so that I, hopefully, don’t feel as undervalued, underappreciated and underused as I currently do.  I hope I can articulate that well, but in the heat of the moment I don’t know whether I will.  I hate her management style (micro-managing every little thing; lots of stupid, pointless and time-consuming meetings; doing so many things to undermine my position, my responsibilities and the way I like to work) – but as much as I’d like to, I can’t really tell that to her face.  I might see if I can schedule a 1-1 with her manager whilst I’m there – I’ve heard jack sh*t from him since I let him know some of my concerns and unhappiness earlier this year, so I need to follow-up on that (though I expect he will continue to do nothing to help my situation – I get the strong impression he is useless).  Otherwise I will continue to be stuck and unhappy in a job going nowhere with a manager who doesn’t respect me.  That’s not good.