Delivering Effective Feedback is probably in the top three skills any manager has to be great at. Delivering praise, and mixing it with developmental feedback is probably the most crucial part of this. It depends on so many factors – your own personal style, the situation, company culture, the employee’s personality, and so on.
However, one of the primary pieces of feedback/advice I’ve had for especially new managers, is to own the message. It’s tempting when you’re trying to fit into a new role to think of ways to deflect onto external things, especially when delivering difficult feedback. Rather than passing someone’s performance through the lens of your own opinion, it’s very tempting to try to point out the place in the rule-book that means it’s safe to say the person you’re managing can do better.
In the absence of catch-all advice for every situation you’re going to run into, I use a “starter phrase” or mnemonic in my own management, and when I’m advising other managers. That phrase is “I’m not happy”.
That is, of course, not to say you should actually say the phrase! – but it’s a starting point. To break it down to its parts:
I
Probably the most important part. If you’re offering developmental feedback, it comes from you. Own the message. Parse it through your own values. Never deliver developmental feedback you don’t agree with. If someone approaches you with feedback for one of your team members, always come away from that conversation at least prepared to deliver that feedback as coming from you. If you disagree with the feedback, or if you agree but feel it’s not appropriate to bring it up as a whole thing, say so. Coming to someone with “X says you could have done better at Y” style feedback completely undermines the effectiveness of the message, and your own credibility. By all means mention that the feedback is reinforced by X saying so, but the primary message comes from you.
When I was at Google, we spent a lot of time each performance cycle talking about people’s performance in calibration sessions. One of the most explicitly ‘forbidden’ practices for managers was to ever deliver the feedback of “the calibration session came up with this rating” or suchlike. By the time calibration was finished, you had to be prepared to own the message, or escalate until you got a resolution.
Not
Especially for new managers, it’s easy to try to soften the outcome of the feedback through your use of language and rhetoric. You can go into a 1:1 or other feedback session with someone expecting to deliver feedback, and end up having what you say parsed as something else entirely. Even in the meeting, seeing someone’s reaction to developmental feedback can tempt you to dial back the message to spare someone’s feelings entirely, when your goal is to make sure someone understands and internalises where they can improve, where they might have a blind spot, or something they can keep an eye on.
So, in our internal monologue, we say ’not’, rather than ‘might not’ or ‘is possibly not’ (assuming you’ve done your homework and are sure). You set out to make sure someone understands where they can improve – follow through. Otherwise you run the risk of the message being lost, or someone parsing the feedback as praise, or even parsing it as “a weird conversation I had with Dave” (to give a real-life example).
Happy
Happy is subjective. You should by all means point out where attention should be paid, and be specific and objective about that part. If there’s a technical outcome, be as specific as you can about why you’re not happy. If there are interpersonal outcomes you would have liked to have seen, by all means call that out.
However, the end goal is that someone internalises the need to engage with the feedback, and find a way to either correct the outcome, or avoid further outcomes like that. It’s possible that at this point, someone will put their hand up and say “Understood, let’s talk about how I can do better”. Great! You can then talk about specific advice or actions in future.
However, it can be tempting to get too far down into the weeds on whether a given outcomes was okay or not. It can be subjective – I’ve had many, many conversations where there’s a mismatch on the standard I’m looking for, versus what the person I’m talking to is looking for. I’m sure you have, too!
However, the real tie-breaker is your opinion. This is one of the few areas where I end up advocating a little bit of “pulling rank”, where needed. You’re on the hook for the objectives for your team, and it’s up to you to set a standard for the various outcomes related to that. It’s more than fine to have robust conversations about this with team members, but at the end of the day, you have to stand over the outcome.
“I’m not happy” is the key phrase; break it down into its constituent parts, and make sure that’s what comes across. It may in some cases make for an uneasy or unpleasant conversation, but these are the investments you make in your own credibility, and in the development of your team. Developmental feedback is one of the hard parts of management; I’ve found that even the best managers dislike delivering it as much as their team members dislike recieving it. However, the only thing worse than developmental feedback is no feedback; your own skill in delivering these messages will be a huge part of your toolkit as a manager and leader.