A tactic to make feedback feel less awkward

Jacob here. Welcome back to Working Better with Charter, a weekly newsletter featuring our best advice for managing yourself and your team.?

Here are six things to try this week:

Agree on a signal for initiating feedback conversations. There’s no way around the fact that giving feedback can be awkward. Consider a recent pilot study featured in a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology where only 2.6% of participants told a researcher who had lipstick on her face about the blemish. And it’s not just trivial things like lipstick on a coworker’s face or broccoli in their teeth—many people are reluctant to give feedback to others even when it would help with their development. But constructive feedback doesn’t have to be uncomfortable if you establish norms around when to give and receive it. At Charter, for instance, someone recently floated the idea of saying “broccoli” before you give someone feedback (alluding to the broccoli-in-your-teeth example). In this scenario, if someone has feedback to give you, they can ask, “broccoli?” As the would-be recipient of that feedback, you can either respond with a declaratory “broccoli,” indicating that you’re in the right headspace to receive it, or decline if it’s not a good time.

• Managers: Create team norms or codewords that remove some of the friction involved in giving coworkers feedback.
• Employees: Collaborate with your coworkers to build a culture of continuous feedback. If you’re nervous about giving someone feedback, put yourself in their shoes. The study’s authors found that a big reason people fail to give helpful feedback to others is that they underestimate how much others want constructive feedback.

Ask employees “power questions” to help advance their careers and retain them. Last week at Work/23: The Big Shift—a virtual summit from MIT Sloan Management Review, covered by Charter—Tony Gigliotti, the senior director of talent management and organizational development at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), said that his organization asks employees “power questions” during performance reviews to “catalyze a career conversation between the employee and their leader.” Some examples Gigliotti gave at the summit:

• Where do you want to go in your career, and what’s your target role at UPMC? (“So, we're not encouraging them to look outside. We were very specific about saying ‘at UPMC,’” says Gigliotti)
• What tools and resources, knowledge, and skills do you need to get there?
• How can your manager assist you?

“Having that information can result in a pretty powerful career conversation between the manager and the employees,” says Gigliotti. It can also improve retention by showing employees that they can continue to grow and develop within your organization.

Become a better Zoom conversationalist with non-verbal cues. People rated as good conversationalists nodded affirmatively and shook their heads negatively more often, according to a new study from BetterUp that analyzed hundreds of hours of video calls. Good conversationalists also tended to speak louder and faster during their calls.

Create opportunities for “digital lingering.” Next time you facilitate a virtual meeting, make space for more introverted attendees to ask questions or give input by offering to stay on for an optional 10-minute debrief after the official meeting time has ended.

Train younger workers in foundational professional skills. The UK offices of Deloitte and PwC are providing their newest hires extra training in communication and teamwork after finding that members of this cohort, whose college years coincided with pandemic lockdowns, have struggled to adapt to the workplace more than their older peers.

Use uncertainty to frame your ideas. Saying “This is the problem I’m trying to solve” and asking for input will yield more fruitful responses than “Here’s how I see it,” which can have the unintended effect of cutting off dissent.

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