Tough Feedback is Key

It’s hard to be really objective about what you are good at and what your flaws are. It is also hard to give clear and honest feedback even when we like to think of ourselves as clear and honest communicators. Everyone needs feedback to know where to focus their efforts, and it is the job of a manager to help the employee to have a clear picture of what their developmental challenges are.

One thing that has really jumped out at me is that when I coach a senior executive as an outside advisor, I give them very different feedback than I would if they were reporting to me. This was an eye opener for me — so I needed to think about in what way the feedback is different and why.

In a nutshell, when I am coaching someone, it is clear that I need to get someone to improve in the execution of some aspect of their leadership abilities, and we need to really see results in a defined period of time. As a result, I am way more direct — and have even found my feedback to sometimes be brutal. Honesty, it seems, can be tough- but necessary. Getting “wake-up-call” feedback is often really helpful, even for excellent performers.

Contrast this with being a boss, where you are thinking about your relationship with your employee as something that is ongoing, and although you want to help them course correct or improve, there is not a defined time horizon to do it. In addition, as I reflect on my many years in managing people, there is a desire to not burn bridges and to develop a positive relationship, so the feedback is softer. This can be to the detriment of the recipient.

So even though I would like to think that I have tried to be honest in giving feedback to my employees I can see that the manner in which I have delivered it sometimes lacked the clarity it should have. As I now review managers and how they give feedback, I see that this is a pretty universal problem. A manager may call me to coach one of their employees, and they unload on me all the issues they want fixed. When I ask how they have communicated this to the employee, sometimes the answer is a blank stare. Other times they show me that it appears as a footnote buried in a back page of some annual review, surrounded by a bunch of glowing accolades. Not that the good stuff isn’t true, but the constructive feedback isn’t heard the way it should be.

My suggestion to managers is to:

a) write out your honest feedback for your direct reports, initially only for your eyes. Be brutally honest. Ask yourself what is holding you back from sharing this with your employee as written?

b) When you give feedback to your employee, consider having two sessions — one to talk about what they are doing well, and the second to talk about what needs to be worked on. That way one doesn’t cloud the other and they both get the air time they deserve.

c) if you do a 360 review for your employees, deliver it to then in writing and unedited (but without attribution to who said what so people will be honest)- so they can see the unfiltered truth about how they are perceived.

d) Have a plan for working with your employee to develop the areas that need shoring up. If you don’t know how to do that- and if you value the employee- get them a coach who can help.

The reality is that people quit their manager more than their job. People have job dissatisfaction with their manager more than their pay. The first step in managing someone well is to have an open and honest discussion about their performance — and a plan to take them to the next level. If you as a manager are not invested in your employee, they won’t be invested in their job.