What are you wishing for?

"Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true!

-Aesop's Fables"

As a manager in my current company there was almost no feedback.?Lots of discussions about career progression and feedback to the individual contributors or the tech leads, but not to managers.

I'd asked my boss, my colleagues, my direct reports as well as PeopleOps for feedback both written and verbal, and I'd asked via anonymous surveys.?We even use Peakon in the company and still got very little actionable advice.?I wanted more!

It was time to pull out all the stops and try something a little crazy...

I invited my tech lead direct reports to a 30 minute meeting.

I asked one of them to create a Google docs document that I didn’t have rights to.?I asked them to take notes of:

• Things I’m not getting quite right
• Things I can definitely improve
• Things they are happy with in the organisation, but we could do more of
• Things we’re not yet doing, but would make their lives better

I left the call.?The intention was for them to gather all the feedback by 20 minutes into the meeting.

They pinged me on Slack, and asked me to rejoin.

A single spokesperson walked me through the comments, supporting anonymity.?I could ask questions, and other people could contribute, but the comments were taken at face value.?This was hugely more valuable than an anonymous Google Form or a Peakon comment that I could misconstrue.

We couldn't go too far afield on each comment as there was only 10 minutes left of the meeting.?I count this as a good thing because it kept us from getting bogged down on a single point. I had to do my reflection after the meeting had ended.

I found this hugely valuable, and we came up with 4 very specific actionable items for me that I've started implementing immediately.?I feel closer to my team, and that this will build trust as they see me putting the actions in place.

Now, keep in mind it was a sympathetic crowd.?These direct reports had my well-being at heart in their comments and were quite good at influencing up in a non-confrontational way. They knew that I was doing this in order to better serve them. I was thrilled that they felt they had the psychological safety to be honest, and explain their comments.

This process can have thorns, and it takes a brave manager to approach this thoroughly committed to being a better manager, while at the same time providing the psychological safety so that the participants can speak their minds.

If you're not quite ready, or your people aren't quite brave enough, you might want to involve a PeopleOps representative to help guide the comments in a positive way, and to help the person receiving this feedback to stay in a receptive, open frame of mind.

I’m planning on implementing this meeting once per quarter with my direct reports.?Obviously, if something is really distressing they can come to me in the moment...but other than crises we wanted to leave time for the action items to be implemented and assessed.

YMMV. For me, this was exactly what I'd been wishing for. It came true!?I feel trust has been built up, good ideas were raised, and the people on my teams will benefit.

If you give it a try, I'd love to hear how it works out for you!