Winning Back Your Boss After a Lousy Performance Review

Good managers should always keep employees in the loop about whether there are issues with job performance, but sometimes problems don’t get addressed until evaluation time. If your year-end performance review wasn’t a glowing heap of praise, you’ve got about three months to turn things around and make your mid-year assessment stronger. After you’ve vented and fumed—hopefully to a friend or five outside of work—you should be a little more clear-eyed and ready to come up with a strategy. Here are some tips.

1. Stay humble. Tell yourself that the feedback is constructive, not negative, says Rue Dooley, an HR Knowledge Advisor with the Society for Human Resource Management, which has 300,000 members. “Maybe your boss doesn’t like you, and there’s nothing you can do about it—that happens,” he says. “Assume there’s something that can be learned here, even if you disagree with the feedback.”