Advice for ‘Junior talent’ on how to perform while still having fun at my job

I am a recent graduate (<2 years) that started working at the local ‘dream’ company for my field. The company is quite corporate but still quite deep in technology as well. I myself have a rare role in R&D that I enjoy but I am struggling with balancing the different stakeholders and my own enjoyment.

In the management structure there is quite some tension between people managers and technical managers to achieve different objectives for their own performance evaluation.

The people managers are focused on your ‘performance’ but that performance is only little related to what and how you achieve technical deliverables. It's really mostly about corporate objectives and forcing you to help work on improvement of processes that are not related to your own function or expertise. So in short ‘visibility’ for both me but especially for my manager.

On the other hand you have the technical managers whose job it is to ‘just’ deliver high quality work on time. I very much enjoy this part of the work and am also quite good at it. so good in fact that within a year I already have some patents and it was already suggested by my people manager to start thinking about becoming a junior technical manager myself.

The problem now lies in that these worlds are so far apart that I can not do them both to the degree of quality that I would like. I also have so low regard of the work asked by the people manager that it is very hard to motivate myself for it, its typical project work that gets done and then discarded. As I discuss it with my people manager during 1-1’s I get reminded that I have to take that work seriously ‘or else’ it will impact my performance review. And in typical corpo fashion I imagine that one bad performance review is already enough to reduce my chances of a promotion significantly.

Due to the above situation I have become a bit cynical of the situation and it is impacting my enjoyment of the work and relation with my people manager. Do any of you have recommendations on how to approach this situation to change it? Or is this a case of accepting the situation and looking for another place to work?

Thanks.