🤬 Bad Feedback | Management
Before
One Sunday after missing my Cowboys beat up on their rival Eagles, I was up late burning the last of my midnight oil. With each passing moment my resolve weakened and my error rate increased. Mistakes happen, and it sucks to make mistakes. It especially sucks at the end of a long weekend when you’ve put in an extra 20 hours to keep the train moving.
When I went into work the next day I was bleary-eyed, having slept little and poorly. I would already spend my days dreading the sound of my ringing phone. It’s as if it were a direct red hotline to my Bond villain boss in his office with him lurking just on the other side of the phone ready to alert me to my latest problem. And, on this Monday as I sat at my desk willing myself awake, it rang.
Now
These days I’m a people manager and I try to keep a pulse of how my people are doing. I’m not staring at charts that abstract my team into numbers. I am proactively checking in on Adam when I know he had a tough week or following up with Brenda since that last status call I sat in on sounded a little tense. The “Numbers” certainly are important, but I find that being the complex beings that we are, the Numbers never tell the whole story and often distract my team from doing their best work.
“Charlie, your Numbers were off 10% last week” undermines the ultimate goal of functioning together more effectively as a team.
I stay plugged in with my team directly or indirectly (such as through their managers, my reports) through regular feedback loops. I can recognize my teammates when they do something well and I can be specific about it. Specific praise always lands better than a generic “Good Job”. Being familiar with my team also makes me more approachable. It makes me more human. It makes me less scary when I pull them aside or share constructive feedback in our 1:1s.
The In-Between
What I didn’t expect when I transitioned into People Management, was how uncomfortable it can be to deliver negative feedback.
- A) Who am I to tell this person what they’re doing well?
- B) I want to be liked. If I give this person negative feedback, they won’t like me.
I know this isn’t something everyone struggles with, but I really struggled with it. Lots of personality inventories confirmed this (though they gave me no practical advice in addressing it 🤔).
The answer is not to avoid delivering this type of feedback. Hard feedback is necessary sometimes, but this doesn’t give you permission to be an asshole.
As this person’s mentor you owe it to them to help them get better at their job and through feedback accumulated over time you can help them to chip away everything that’s not David. Skipping hard feedback in the short term compromises them in the long term. Then, if they fail you have to live with that, your guilt and the consequences.
So, if we’re all a bunch of impostors who just desire to be liked, is there a way to give this feedback? Of course. That doesn’t mean it’s easy or ever entirely comfortable, but after you get used to it it’s much less scary.
Short term niceness helps them sleep better today, but limits their tomorrows. Real kindness is helping this person smooth over their rough edges by acknowledging their growth areas and helping them to overcome them.
1st — Acknowledge that you have the experience and they do not. You’re in this position because you’ve seen some things. You’re guiding them around the pitfalls you stumbled in before.
2nd — Be gentle. Acknowledge to yourself and them that you’re providing this feedback because you want them to succeed. The best way for someone to improve is to receive timely, specific feedback. In the absence of feedback loops people develop much more slowly.
3rd — People do not like micromanagers. They do not like managers who start small or provide non-specific feedback. Managing for compliance is the quickest way to alienate someone. Set clear expectations early in their role and leave it up to them to decide how they want to meet them.
“Don’t start negatively, and don’t start small. People will often focus on little details as a way of masking a lack of any clear, coherent, big thoughts. If you start petty, you seem petty.” — Bob Iger
4th — You don’t have to be their friend (but it’s not the end of the world if you are). You do however want to build a relationship with them. You want to be vulnerable so they feel comfortable around you. When you provide them feedback, you want to provide them an opportunity to provide feedback to you.
5th — Protect dissent. If they in turn provide feedback to you that’s hard to take, take it in stride. The last thing you want to do is reprimand them for it or to get defensive. This will discourage them from opening up to you and damage the relationship.
People know that you can’t always give them what they want and they know that they won’t always do things perfectly. If you enter into your conversations with that in mind, you’ll be able to weather these conversations. They may not always like you in the moment, but they will respect you for it.
6th— Once they hear the feedback, move on. There’s no need to play it on repeat. Be clear & concise. If they want to expand on it, let them initiate.
Then you’re done.
And, next time it will be a little easier.
Thanks for reading. ✌️ & ❤️.
Michael
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