Don’t give more feedback, ask more questions!

This post (and many more) is available here on my personal blog.

If there’s one thing managers should do more of it’s give feedback!

At least that’s the conventional wisdom. Leafing through the Internet, we find no end of advice to us managers about how we should be waltzing around telling everyone what we think of them and their workplace performance, providing forensic evidence to explain observed behaviours and the impact of said behaviours, in a constructive and caring way that is lovely and motivational for the grateful recipient.

So simple!

Except it’s not that simple.

There are lots of reasons why it’s hard to give constructive feedback, the biggest one being that we rarely have a complete and evidenced picture of objective behaviours for us to give our brilliant feedback on.

This is partly because managers are people too.

We only have their partial subjective perception of the world, just like everyone else. It turns out that promotion to a higher job grade doesn’t make you any better at observing objective reality: it doesn’t make our perception of the world any more correct than anyone else’s.

So unless the feedback is on a simple black and white issue (e.g. someone is perpetually late, or there is a pattern of customer complaints, we have observed aggressive or bullying behaviour etc.), it’s very hard to give it in a way that doesn’t end up either in an argument or being annoying and de-motivational for the poor soul on the receiving end.

It’s also stressful for managers.

How are we supposed to know everything that’s going on? How am I, as a busy manager with my own creaking inbox, expected to observe my entire team’s output, and its impact, especially when half of them work remotely?

The problem is that is this approach to feedback based on a bunch of assumptions that are flawed:

1. Behaviour and its impact can be observed objectively and completely (omniscience and omnipresence being basic job requirements for the effective manager)
2. The manager has a full understanding of the context and the motivation of the job holder
3. The manager is more right than the job holder (and if not, power always trumps facts, right?)

None of the above points are true, and it’s a whole load of pressure on the manager to expect them to live up to this.

There is a simple way around this: unless you have that objective evidence of observed behaviour and a good grasp of the context, then don’t make statements, ask questions!

For example, if someone you manage appears to be a bit demotivated or disengaged and you think their performance isn’t as good as it was, but it’s quite hard to put your finger on any specifics, what do you do?

This is tricky to address using the conventional feedback models because you’re going to need to dig out some objective evidence to make your point. If you ask a question instead, it becomes much easier to have a conversation about it:

“Is everything okay, it looks to me like your motivation is a bit lower than usual, is that right?”

If you have a good relationship of trust, this should open the door to a genuinely constructive conversation that feels more like two professionals working together to get the best outcome, not a hierarchical overlord dictating what’s true and what’s not.

Even if they say “no, I’m fine”, the conversation can flow, “I thought I’d seen you a bit more distracted, like the other day in the meeting, am I misreading this?”

This is a genuine exploration of something you think you’ve seen, it’s not a manipulation technique to force your view of the world on another. This means that If they persist seeing it differently, we have to accept that we are sometimes wrong.

This is based on a set of different assumptions:

1. None of us have a full objective picture, we’ve only got our subjective partial perceptions (no one person has a more-true view of reality than any other)
2. The manager and job holder are social equals, they might have different jobs, but as human beings, they are of equal value and deserve equal levels of respect
3. It’s a professional partnership, not the feudal system!

This approach is a more respectful way to approach feedback, and takes a lot of pressure off the manager, whilst also allowing the job holder equal billing to decide what’s true and have a constructive conversation.

This post (and many more) is available here on my personal blog.