As a line manager over many years, this is a familiar topic. Yet there is always much to learn if you care to look. I have recently been in a couple of situations where I was essentially an observer to feedback being given, and could see how ineffective the feedback was, even though the one giving the feedback followed most of the good practices I know. So, I thought, why?
There are many well known tips for giving feedback, whole books in fact. Since context and example are so critical, I always like the idea of giving feedback in the moment, in other words small doses often and using immediate incidents rather than waiting for a formal session. However, like many such tips, it is easier said than done. You have to be able to find a quiet moment. It has to be private. And it still has to be carefully formulated, with enough time for the other party to explore, often to go through some denial and rejection before taking the learning on board. Creating these conditions can be nigh on impossible.
One reason it is so hard is that initiating the giving of feedback is often like sitting in a dentist’s chair. You know it is wise, even necessary. Yet you don’t know exactly what is coming, except that it is likely to be unpleasant. It might be worse than a bit of pain, you also might learn something unpleasant about yourself. You rarely receive any reward. No wonder many of us need to psyche ourselves up a bit before embarking on the journey.
The pain can be intense. Most of my toughest times at work, days with tears and nights when I couldn’t sleep, were around when I had to deliver tough feedback. Because we shirk it, when we finally get around to it the receiving party is often surprised and unready. Of course that is one of the hallmarks of a good line manager – that their staff are rarely surprised by your feedback since you have been so good at feedback in the moment. In our dreams! I especially remember the regular task of relaying to staff their annual ranking position. One or two faces usually fell, and they looked at me as some sort of traitor. I knew then that I had failed yet again. My only comfort was a belief that I was not alone in this failure, and most line managers shared that experience.
Often, when you and your predecessors had shirked for a long time on a difficult case, the resulting sessions could last months, with hour after hour of patience required to pierce the denial. During this process, I was often tempted to sugar the pill and duck out from the most direct messages. Partly this was out of self doubt. If this person denied my feedback so vehemently, maybe he was right and I was wrong? Partly I also wondered if the therapy caused more suffering than the original delusion. There was always the possibility of shipping the problem to the next line manager of this poor soul.
Another fundamental issue for me was the potential mismatch of goals between growing confidence and giving complete feedback. Confidence is critical to performance. Just look at sports for proof. Building the confidence of the team is for me the surest way as a line manager to improve performance. At times that caused me to give developmental feedback in an overly careful way, especially with a relatively new team member. I am sure the masters of this art would see no conflict here, but I can vouch that it bothered me time and again.
Many of us have suffered with this, on both sides of the table. There are many good techniques to improve how we give and receive feedback. When using an example, first explain the behaviour exhibited, then the intent and how you witnessed it. Then posit an alternative behaviour and explore how this might have worked differently. It is worth reading up on this model.
My recent experience has highlighted two insights which were at least partially new to me. The first one is part of context, and that is the criticality of the relationship quality between you and the person you are trying to give feedback to. Your relationship can vary between hero, mate, stranger or enemy. Your level of ambition and your approach to giving feedback has to reflect that reality.
If you are lucky enough to have reached the status of some sort of role model, you can really use it to the benefit of the other party, as they will imbibe your every word. This is a privilege, so use it. You can use the technique of sharing your own experiences when giving examples. You can make sessions as long as needed, since both of you will enjoy them. You just have to keep pointing out that you might be wrong and they must seek evidence from others too.
To a mate, you can also take some risks. Only a mate can blur the boundaries between professional and private, for example by pointing out a damaging mannerism or hygiene deficiency. Do it - your friend needs this feedback! With a mate, you just have to be careful in keeping some discipline and structure to your relationship.
With a relative stranger, recognise the limitations. You have some early advantages you can use. For example, you can take a risk by sharing an early impression, with the caveat that your evidence is limited. You never know, you might hit the jackpot. But avoid deep soul searching stuff, as it is most unlikely to work. Keep to the basics.
Finally, there will be people where there is some sort of conflict. They may not respect you, or might blame you for something about their circumstances. If you believe you are part of the problem (maybe they just have a problem with everyone, in which case you have to try to penetrate or no one will) then act accordingly. Using personal examples will fail every time. Subtle feedback is dead in the water, messages must be simple, repeated, and evidence based. You can find a third party you both trust to help you. At all costs, avoid the temptation to be cruel and punish.
There is a 4-box model here, perhaps with depth of relationship on one axis, shared respect on the other. For most of your relationships, they will lie somewhere near the middle, but you can still modify your approach to best fit the situation.
My second tip is about shared understanding of purpose. The biggest misconnects with feedback come when the two sides don’t agree on goals. This is more common than you might think, and lay behind what I witnessed recently. As an example, the line manager might value customer satisfaction, the subordinate technical quality. If the subordinate considered themselves technically superior to the line manager, this will only intensify the mismatch.
The solution is an extension to the conflict situation above, since it is a type of conflict, albeit one of goals rather than relationship. In a way, the line manager has already failed by not communicating clearly the expectations. This has to be a bedrock of any relationship, and has to be fixed before any feedback is offered. If this proves impossible, revert to the conflict plan. Repeated, simple messages, lots of evidence, clarity of consequence, discipline of documentation. Looking back, my very worst line manager experience had precisely that disconnect, and I failed to address it correctly. My recent observations show I was not alone in that.
I’m off on holiday for two weeks now. If I find time, I’ll see if I can develop that four box model for line manager relationships. Or maybe I’ll just relax, sing, share some joy and have fun.
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