1) I think fast, direct, and consistently timed feedback is crucial to developing myself professionally. Rather than waiting until the semi-annual performance review where everything can come at once and possibly surprise me (either in a good way or bad,) I'd rather have regular measurements and course corrections as necessary.
2) I also really appreciate 1x1's with mentors to learn about how to get to the next level and/or understand broader context with an outside perspective vs. my direct manager or reports.
3) I can understand your point on saying the "wrong thing" -- certain cultures might be a bit more politically charged than others. I try to find mentors or other "work friends" that allow me to have free-roam discussions without concerns of judgement. Some might say this should be your significant other / non-work friends, but I think someone with context of your company/industry would provide better feedback and challenge you a bit -- rather than just provide positive validation that what you're saying is always right.
I'm sorry you feel the way you do. You must have been burned in the past, or known people who were. That's too bad, and I hope you voted with your feet and found a better manager to work with.
If I was scared to vent to my manager I would be looking for a new job.
That said, yes, the notion of "hey, I could get fired for this" did sometimes enter my head afterwards, but I never feared it, because I knew I had options.
- Only 30% of employees are engaged
- 50% of employees have left a job to get away from a manager
- 25% of Millennials plan to quit their job in the next year.
Unfortunately, HR is who watches over these issues and are totally disconnected from the root problem (bad management issues). They focus on compliance, lawsuits, and stability. Usually their org is small too, so they have no idea what it's like to have 10 direct reports and constant pressure to ship.
Every place I've ever worked at groans at the expense of people, and will use every means available to reduce that cost.
Most of the places I've worked I have never felt like I needed to bite my tongue, and the couple places where I did, I burned out of quickly because they were such toxic environments.
I'm secure with my manager because the culture of the workplace isn't toxic, and we have aligned goals, and so the 1-on-1 meetings are a good place to discuss issues. We all want to ship product, and so bringing up things that might compromise that shared goal is important.
That said, I have a particular bit of privilege - I have no children or family to support. My finances are excellent and I can support a very long period of unemployment if needed, and I work in a niche that is in-demand where I'd be able to have a new job in the order of hours or days if I were unceremoniously fired. I also keep my professional networks up to date and I interview well.
All of these combine such that I'm basically never stressed about getting fired. If they fire me, shrug. They will likely have a rougher time finding my replacement than I will finding a new job.
Even if you're just bitching about some thing/person/policy that gets on your nerves- if what you're saying isn't slanderous and is true, why should you fear repercussion?
If being candid with your boss means you have to worry about your job, you would probably be happier elsewhere.
https://getlighthouse.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Ga...
(Source: Gallup State of the American summary: https://getlighthouse.com/blog/gallup-employee-engagement-su...)
As an employee, I will say I actually really enjoy one on ones! In fact I think I enjoy them much more than my manager does. I feel like it's a time when I, even as a low level employee, can let the manager know about things that he/she isn't able to see because he/she isn't in the trenches anymore.
Frankly I'm very lucky because I really like my manager; he's the main reason I joined this company. I feel like if I have personal issues that may interfere with work I can talk to him and he'd understand.
Personally I find getting and providing direct feedback is much better than constantly living in fear you're doing something wrong. Plus, sometimes having one on ones can be motivating when your manager tells you about how someone else in the company appreciated your work.
However, while recognizing some flaws that are basically inherent in contemporary corporate structure, I believe 1:1s are extremely important. I think one of the single biggest problems organizations have is that they don't regularly check-in and explicitly solicit feedback. You get so much valuable intelligence this way, even if you're aware of the atmosphere and the incentives that loom over these meetings. The isolation and lack of data really hurt managerial efforts.
This is compounded as you go up the chain. I think that upper management should perform 1:1s all the way down every 3-6 months. This is basically checking middle management's work, something which rarely happens, and it provides the essential pieces of data that get obscured as information travels up the ladder.
I think this is probably never gonna happen in my company. Top-level managers do not want to have an honest conversation with an employee, because they fear what they might hear and have to respond to. They prefer to do Q&A - speak out prepared answers to pre-reviewed questions. On the other hand, the fact the upper management does not talk to most employees probably helps the product department people enjoy lots of freedom and have a sense of a flat, class-less workplace.
A long time ago I royally effed up on a project I was working on. It was a Sharepoint project, a deployment went sideways, and I frankly wasn't very good with Sharepoint yet. It lead to some temporary data loss and downtime but I was able to rollback and restore. Anyway, the problems were my fault but my good habits prevented it from being a complete disaster. It was a highly visible fuck up though.
I came in to my one on one, for the first time ever, scared that I was at least going to get an ass chewing. My boss took the time straight out of the gate to praise my good habits for saving the day, and trying to figure out how we could've avoided the issues I caused. The way he approached the meeting completely re-sold me on him as a manager and the company I was working for.
Instead, the manager made a political calculation: he a) wanted to maintain a good reputation with you, his report, because that makes his job a lot easier, improves his advancement opportunities, etc.; and b) valued your skillset sufficiently that he didn't intend to risk it by dwelling on a failure that he understood you were probably already aware of. His response to you was absolutely political in nature, and not an expression of his honest feelings. The fact that such responses occur is the reason that trepidation is apropos for such meetings.
I understand the trepidation that can come from employees having to meet with their boss, but I am adamant that a culture of mutual respect that fosters a sense of open communications is possible and if you're doing it right, your employees shouldn't have to worry about what they say in a personal meeting could cost them their job.
Everyone is different, and it takes me a while to figure out how to encourage some people to say whatever is on their minds, but I know that I have done all I could to try and encourage it everywhere I've been.
The possible difference that may ingratiate me more with my teams has been that I've never been completely out of the fray. Even at a Director level I would still be playing Software Architect or even just pitching in as a developer and taking instruction from the Dev lead in the project. Having never left the trenches, it may have helped with the feeling that we're all equal and in it together rather than coming in from the ivory tower to dictate stuff and leave again.
One of the best way to weed out bad managers once a company reaches a certain scale is a simple two part system: 1) Make it easier to get an internal hiring req than an external one, and oversubscribe the total headcount budget by a few percent purely with internal hiring reqs. (Guarantee hole flow.) 2) Establish an immutable policy that a losing manager can never block a transfer, ever, for more than a couple of weeks of clean-up/hand-off. Bad managers are then easy to spot by the vacuum that surrounds them.
Simple truth is a lot of people don't like them, they induce stress for a number of reasons (such as employees' natural instinct to want to "look good" in front of their bosses), and bad 1-1s are often just another annoyance at work -- not a disaster, just not too useful.
But it can also be that they're a shitty employee. The chance of "saying the wrong thing" is much bigger if you are in fact the wrong person for the job and/or team.
I'm worried that 1-1s are becoming the next Agile - just another process used to increase control under the guise of empowerment
Coincidentally, this is why I started a company, GetLighthouse.com to tackle this and the general problem of bad people management practices. It's amazing what a little structure, best practices, and automating can do to improve things for a manager and their team.
"feedback, coaching, fixing problems, growth and development" are the kinds of things that I definitely don't trust with 90% of companies, so if it becomes standard, we're all be worse off