Giving Feedback; How To Be Honest Without Being Hurtful

Original article published on November 25, 2021 in Authority Magazine

As a part of our series about “How To Give Honest Feedback without Being Hurtful”, I had the pleasure of interviewing?Michael Timms.

Michael Timms is a leadership development consultant, author, and speaker specializing in succession planning and creating accountable cultures. His latest book is How Leaders Can Inspire Accountability.

Thank you so much for joining us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I studied Human Resources in university because I wanted to help people become better leaders. However, when I began working in HR I quickly realized my job was mostly hiring, firing, compensation and benefits — not leadership. Throughout my career as the head of HR for several companies, my bosses got progressively worse. My last boss was the ultimate micromanager and destroyed my self-confidence. I was miserable. I didn’t want anyone else to feel the way my boss made me feel. That is when I decided to start my own leadership development company, Avail Leadership, to help organizations create a culture that fosters real leadership. That was about seven years ago.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

I quickly found a niche in succession planning because few organizations do it well. The first step in leadership development is to identify the few leadership behaviors that have the greatest impact on people and results and then make those behaviors the criteria for promotion to leadership positions. For each client organization, I facilitate employee focus groups to reverse engineer their organization’s success stories and isolate the leadership behaviors that led to them.

After doing this for several years, I noticed that one leadership competency was mentioned virtually every time: accountability. Since making this discovery, I identified the specific leadership behaviors that create a culture of accountability and have been sharing this framework with anyone who wants to improve their leadership impact.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?

This may not be the most interesting story, but the most impactful story to me personally is that as I began researching and teaching the principles of accountability to others, I naturally began experimenting on my family. I discovered that the principles of creating a culture of accountability at work also apply at home. My children now get their chores done and get out the door on time without me nagging or getting angry at them. They also have far greater confidence in their abilities and our home is a lot more peaceful than it used to be. Not only do the principles of accountability make you a better leader, they also make you a better parent.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

I don’t think this qualifies as a funny mistake, but I can certainly smile about it now. The first time I spoke to a group of CEOs, I was terrified. So terrified, in fact, that I couldn’t sleep a wink the night before. My heart was racing all night long. The next morning, I shared my message and did a good job. I ended up getting a large client from it and I was referred to speak at other CEO groups. CEO peer groups became my number one prospecting and revenue source.

That experience, and many others like it, have reinforced one very important life lesson: if you don’t regularly do things outside your comfort zone, you’re not growing.

What advice would you give to other CEOs and business leaders to help their employees to thrive and avoid burnout?

The number one thing any manager can do to help their employees thrive and avoid burnout is to meet one-on-one with each direct report every week or two, and make sure to include a wellness check-in about once a month as part of your regular one-on-one meeting. One-on-ones should be regarded as sacred time for employees to get what they need from their manager to be successful. I say sacred because they are critical to creating a culture of accountability and to employee wellness, and because they should only be canceled or rescheduled for a true emergency or illness.

A wellness check-in is where the manager asks about their employee’s life challenges and interests. The purpose is to a) stay in touch with your team members’ whole self, not just their work self, b) to demonstrate that you care about them, and c) to allow you to help relieve stressors in their lives before they escalate into crises that blindside you. Take time to ensure your people are happy, engaged, and healthy, or nothing else you discuss will matter much.

How do you define “Leadership”? Can you explain what you mean or give an example?

My definition of leadership is Leaders elevate others to achieve a common goal.

This simple definition highlights the two most important purposes of leadership: 1) help those you lead achieve success, 2) deliver results.

Most people in leadership are so focused on the second purpose of leadership that they end up grinding their people to achieve results. That is not leadership, and it is not sustainable.

This definition of leadership also puts a leader’s two most important deliverables in their proper sequence. Employees will not come up with innovative solutions or engage customers unless they are engaged. It is a natural sequence of events that we are reminded of every time we hear the safety demonstration on flights. The flight attendants instruct us to put our own oxygen mask on before attempting to assist others. Employees needs must be met first before a leader has any hope of executing their strategy.

Here is an example of what I mean. A manager at a client organization who we’ll call Olivia was coordinating a team that had just been given a new service offering they were supposed to provide to their clients. They were overwhelmed and concerned with the news, so Olivia spent most of the meeting presenting all sorts of ways to solve their concerns. She could tell they left the meeting frustrated. Upon reflection, Olivia realized that she prescribed the solutions before she gave them enough opportunity to discuss their feelings and concerns. So she called another team meeting and started off by acknowledging that she screwed up and then apologized to them. After they got over the initial shock of a manager admitting a mistake, Olivia gave them time to express their concerns without jumping in to solve them. Not only did they leave that meeting in a much better frame of mind than they had the previous meeting, they delivered the new service offering far better than they would have had Olivia not demonstrated true leadership and called the second team meeting.

Ok, now let’s jump to the core of our interview. Can you briefly tell our readers about your experience with managing a team and giving feedback?

I have had people reporting to me most of my career. However, unlike my experience in industry, now the people who report to me in my consulting business are remote workers.

This might seem intuitive but it will be constructive to spell it out. Can you share with us a few reasons why giving honest and direct feedback is essential to being an effective leader?

First, it is critically important to provide a steady stream of what I call “reaffirming feedback.” This means managers must tell employees what they are doing well every single day. This is because?behavior that gets praised gets repeated. We are all addicted to the chemical dopamine that is released in our brain when we are praised. We repeat behaviors that we have been praised for because we instinctively want another dopamine hit. Furthermore, you never want your employees to wonder what it takes to please you.

It is also critically important to provide improvement feedback because?you get the behavior you tolerate. This is as true at home as it is in the office. If you don’t address a problematic behavior, you should expect it to continue and get worse. Unaddressed poor behavior tends to get worse because employees take their manager’s silence as tacit approval.

One of the trickiest parts of managing a team is giving honest feedback, in a way that doesn’t come across as too harsh. Can you please share with us five suggestions about how to best give constructive criticism to a remote employee? Kindly share a story or example for each.

1. Ask for Feedback Before Giving It. Improvement feedback is sure to land badly if the person giving it never asks for feedback themselves. Leaders must demonstrate that feedback is a gift or everyone else will question your motives and associate it with punishment.

2. Give Improvement Feedback Via Video Conference, Not Email. Providing feedback by phone is less preferable, but can work if necessary. Research has shown that email has a low social presence, which means the sender and receiver feel less real to each other. This can lower inhibitions making it more likely that you may write things in email that you would never say to someone’s face. Furthermore, employees are more likely to perceive emails more negatively when they come from their manager.

3. Begin With A Question, Not A Statement. Managers are rated four times more effective at providing feedback if the manager listens to the other person’s views before providing it. You might say something like “Can you tell me about the process you followed when you did this?” Asking about the situation in question allows the other person to share important facts you may not know about.

4. Share Your Observation, Not A Conclusion. Most feedback methods encourage the feedback provider to prepare a monologue. This is the number one reason why feedback fails. Feedback is a dialogue. You do not have a monopoly on the truth. All you have is a perspective, so make sure to state it as such. You might say something like “At the last team meeting, it appeared to me that you were dismissive of others’ suggestions which seemed to shut down the discussion prematurely.” A clearly stated observation includes the a) context, b) specific behavior, and c) impact.

5. Ask For Clarification. Your perspective may not be 100% correct. After stating what you are observing, ask them for their perspective to get all the facts on the table. You might say something like “Did you intend to shut down other people’s comments or was there something else going on?” If you give others the opportunity to share additional facts with you before you make a conclusion, you might learn something that changes your perspective. You’ll also avoid looking like you are jumping to a conclusion.

Can you address how to give constructive feedback over email? If someone is in front of you much of the nuance can be picked up in facial expressions and body language. But not when someone is remote. How do you prevent the email from sounding too critical or harsh?

Small issues can be dealt with over email such as “Can you please give me a heads-up next time before you book me for a same day meeting.” Managers can also provide improvement feedback over email when an employee has submitted a document for their review. It works because the employee is expecting critical feedback. Of course, the manager’s response should always begin with what they like about it, otherwise the employee will think their manager hates every word of it.

Important feedback, however, should be given by video conference or phone.

Effective leaders hold regularly scheduled one-on-one meetings with each of their reports (via video conference for remote employees) to review assignments and ask their employees what they need. This is a perfect opportunity to point out what went well the previous week and to provide improvement feedback.

In your experience, is there a best time to give feedback or critique? Should it be immediately after an incident? Should it be at a different time? Should it be at set intervals? Can you explain what you mean?

Improvement feedback should usually be provided as soon as possible. Otherwise, the facts get fuzzy and debatable and the person receiving the feedback will likely question your motives. “Why didn’t you tell me this two weeks ago?” they may wonder. They may conclude that you’ve been holding a grudge against them for weeks.

As stated earlier, the soonest advisable time to provide improvement feedback is the next time you speak to them on the phone or via video conference.

How would you define what it is to “be a great boss”? Can you share a story?

Great bosses show up in support of their employees, not in judgement of them. This means that they give their employees the benefit of the doubt and give them a chance to explain themselves before coming to conclusions.

Earlier in my career, I was in a meeting with my boss and another manager where we listened to an employee explain how she was wronged by another employee. After we heard her story, the other manager and I were ready to pull the other employee in and fire him on the spot. My boss urged us not to come to any conclusions until we heard the other employee’s story. We begrudgingly agreed to hear that out. When we listened to his story, he shared some information that the complainant conveniently left out of her story. Although we found that the male employee was more culpable than the complainant, he kept his job and reformed. Firing him would have been a mistake.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I am trying to inspire a movement right now to encourage everyone to increase their level of personal accountability. Not only will doing so make you a better leader, a better person, and will improve your outcomes, but your example will also motivate others to take more accountability themselves.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.”

― Colin Powell

This quote reminds me that failure is our best teacher. If you don’t acknowledge your failures, you can never learn from them.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

I write articles for my blog on availleadership.com/blog. I also share articles I’ve written for other media outlets on my blog as well. I encourage you to sign up and give it a try to see if these articles help you to improve your leadership influence.

Thank you for these great insights! We really appreciate the time you spent with this.