Don't soften feedback
larahogan.me
larahogan.me
An alternative point that perhaps a lot of managers have trouble considering – it's perfectly okay to not have any critical or negative feedback if things are going well. If things are fine, just go ahead and say that. Negative feedback or criticism should be relatively rare.
I have noticed a pattern where managers, especially new managers, tend to take articles like this and others at face value, and nerdily try to maintain some kind of weird ratio in their feedback. They feel like they have to say something critical every time they give feedback to their reports. This leads to situations where there is no actual problem but they are spinning minor things into critical feedback just so they have something to say in that "column", which quickly becomes off-putting. It causes individual contributors to think, "I would rather get off this constant criticism treadmill, and work for someone more peaceful".
Story time: I watched a new manager tear apart an otherwise great team like this once; six months after they took charge, 3 out of their 5 engineers had left for new jobs and higher salaries because the manager kept telling them "Weeeeell, you could have improved upon <inconsequential minor point>" every week, when actually they were doing a stellar job under time pressure and hitting all their targets. The appropriate response should have been "Great job, thank you, and please let me write you this large bonus check for year end".
It seems like a farce, really. I also had quarters in which I got glowing peer reviews where folks declined to fill in the development piece, and my very off hands manager came up with some made up generic negative feedback for me that did not come up before.
I hate this so much! The company has decided that my colleagues deserve negative feedback for their work (why? no reason at all, just to remind them of their place I guess), but I am the one who is told to make up some and deliver it to them. Fuck no! How about you play your crazy mind games yourself. Next time, will you also ask me to spit in their faces?
So my "negative feedback" is usually of the type: works too hard, or cares about the project too much.
The real reason for this forced negative feedback is probably to give managers some material to quote when your colleague will ask for a raise, so they don't even have to bother making up the reason for rejection themselves. As a bonus, if the colleague knows that you wrote the part they quoted, it makes you the bad guy, not the company.
Are these new trends in company management modelled after abusive relatioships? Or is this just the natural behavior of people who are born to be bosses?
Those in power abusing the people under them has been a human flaw since the beginning of history.
"While you are well-known as an excellent worker, sometimes those who are not engaged on the same workflows will, notwithstanding their own excellent and well-known communication skills, find it still time-consuming, if not time-inefficient, to reconfigure your updates into modes that are more familiar within their own teams' communications styles, thus necessitating an extra step of interpretation, that many, if not most, would be unwilling, or unable, to provide, at least within the timeframe that would accommodate both their own project and yours, as well as the percentages of their own workdays, and yours, that they can usefully devote, on a regular basis, to a teasing out, or a finessing, for a fuller understanding, such as you and they can both agree, as to what the final product, or product at any given stage of a deliverable, might contribute, both to the end-goals of their team and yours, balanced against the novel, or at least additional, requirements that would be entailed, or at least implied, if they were to adopt, or afford options for integrating with, the...
On the other hand, as an individual contributor, especially if I'm new on the job, I often have imposter syndrome, and keep worrying I'm not doing a good job. (I'm sure I'm not alone in this.) And when my manager doesn't say anything about my performance I start thinking that maybe I'm doing badly. So I feel the need to ask, which is not as nice as them just telling me.
So I guess I'm not disagreeing, as long as if things are fine, the manager does "just go ahead and say that".
You can thank people for minor thigs too. It harms nothing.
> Maybe they work hard under pressure and deliver results as you say, but they are never going to step up in job title because they cant communicate well with the wider office or are poor with estimating deadlines.
Practically, people who work very hard while being under pressure tend to communicate badly, because they are stressed and overworked. This wont change no matter how much you complain about them not communicate properly. Proper communication requires time.
> A good manager will thank them appropriately and also give career guidance appropriately and try to help them move forward.
Good manager will step up and manage their workload. Consistently overworked people under pressure are mostly result of organizational and managerial decision making.
> Most staff will thank you for that.
That is where the issue starts. If we all work hard under pressure, you dont thank people for that and just start complaining they are not nice while being stressed, they wont improve. They will get resentful and feel unappreciated.
Please don't, just don't. At least not as my manager.
There's very little that I find as bad on the job as hearing thank you's for things that come naturally on the job. It's just part and parcel of my job.
I find there is little that devalues genuine thanks for a job well done as quickly as being praised for every proverbial fart.
> because they are stressed and overworked.
That wasn't what I read from OP. I know the difference of being stressed out or just working under pressure. I can feel stressed out while a relatively low workload. And I can have a great bunch of problems to solve and still feel great about it. It isn't black or white.
> They will get resentful and feel unappreciated.
I know the feeling - but at least in my case this had nothing to do with workload when I was in that state of mind/situation on the job. It was a lack of control, a lack of overall recognition and respect. Not the work load per se.
For any such mentor, you can say "forget about the bad, focus on highlighting what the person did right". This will almost always dramatically increase the mentee's rate of progress.
This is because for any given task there are a million ways to get things wrong, but only one/very few ways to get things right. So people learn almost nothing from "don't". You can eliminate negative feedback altogether and lose almost nothing.
Of course, it can be useful in very specific situations, and these are generally not cases you need to sugarcoat because they are very technical (e.g. "don't spike the ball when leading by more than 14 points", "don't close the issue when a manager has commented on it", etc).
> Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Same as a computer system has one way that works, but many things which can go wrong.
It's why entropy is a thing; there's only a few ways to build a stable structure, but zillions upon zillions of ways to build a crumbling pile of dust. Almost any change from wind/pressure/radiation will move it towards a less structured state.
It's related to why the Pyramids are so stable, they are shaped like the aftermath of a fallen building, a pile of stone can't easily collapse any further.
The issue with managers giving negative feedback is that they are either flat out not equipped to do so or they expect that their feedback can just be given without being involved with solving problems themselves.
What technical workers need from managers is that they explain problems _as is_. Then problems can be solved _together_, meaning behavior has to be changed up the chain as well.
For example it's completely useless and counterproductive to say "you're not on time" - yeah we know that. We don't decide not to be on time. Actually useful feedback is more nuanced and honest like "our customer wants to cancel that service they want to get rid of by end of the month, so they need time to enter this data by then. They only have two people working on that part time." - Now we're talking. We can talk about deploying a simplified, stripped down feature so we can take our time with the polished/richer version. One of us can schedule a video call with them to get them up to speed.
It's involving the _actual workers_ end-to-end that solves these kind of problems. Strip away the bullshit and the artificial metrics. Look at what needs to be done, what the actual problems are. Bring _that_ to us. Coordinate the right people (workers). Trust them to make sensible decisions and listen to their problems. That's useful _actionable_ feedback.
> This is because for any given task there are a million ways to get things wrong, but only one/very few ways to get things right.
Okay, but if someone doesn't get things right, how do you help them if you can't tell them what they shouldn't have done, and what they should have done instead?
- does it matter if they don’t improve fast enough in this dimension?
- they will improve by themselves over time. Encouragements are better than finding issues with someone.
Improving fast is better than improving slow. This question presumes that improving (or the feedback that leads to the improvement) is somehow bad.
> Encouragements are better than finding issues with someone.
This is a false dichotomy, you don't have to do either one or the other. Also, "finding issues" sounds like you're assuming I'm trying to make up issues where none exist.
What's wrong with telling people where they could improve?
See, I completely disagree with that statement. I think there is nothing wrong with being slow. Unless, again, it's fucking up with other people and you need to change your behavior.
> you don't have to do either one or the other
I would argue that yes you do. It's part of many company's manager training: you need to praise your employees. And it's also part of all the lists on burning out: not feeling valued.
> What's wrong with telling people where they could improve?
some people are not into self-improvement, or the never-ending quest of improving themselves. They just want to do their job, cash their paycheck, and go back to their loved ones.
Cynic warning. Why wouldn't they instead choose to work with something they enjoy doing? Is that just a euphemism for some people being so bad at what they do in general that no one would pay them for doing the things they enjoy, while they just pass the bar in some things (which they dislike), just enough for them to get paid? Because that would explain it.
And the original question wasn't even about that, it was about receiving tips/pointers about improving. It doesn't have to be a "never-ending quest" (although isn't life supposed to be just that?). If you're doing some work, and someone points out how you can do it better, he's either wrong, or you refuse to improve... why?
One "why" is simply because people don't actually like doing what they do. They've simply accept it as a worthy tradeoff for the money they get/need. But they're certainly not willing to do any more than the bare minimum.
Do you have other "why's" that I don't see?
I mean sure, if you like chopping wood with a small axe between your toes and someone tells you that holding it properly with your hands would yield a better result then you're fine telling him that you prefer it your way (because you enjoy it), but if you work in a company where you're expected to perform up to a certain level then you can't really use that argument. Feel free to start a competing foot-chopping company!
> since my default is to just keep doing what I'm doing anyway, I don't need to be specifically told that
I had reviews that were something along these lines in the past:
Q1 review: * "You need to work on your communication and keeping stakeholders in the loop."
[I move all design discussions from DMs to non-private Slack channels, post regular updates on Slack, and set up biweekly status update meetings on Zoom.]
Q2 review: * "Posting updates on Slack is nice, but not solving the issue." <-- Good to know, but less valuable information than: * "Using Slack channels + the biweekly Zoom updates have adequately addressed the issue."
TL;DR: If you've changed nothing, then positive feedback is useless. If you're experimenting with various solutions, positive feedback when one works is critical ['cause I'd drop Zoom meetings in a heartbeat if they proved useless].
I would say, rather, that any "don't" should be paired with an "instead, do X when attempting to do <thing they were trying to accomplish>". "Don't do this one narrow thing" does very little to shrink their search space, while a concrete alternative does a lot, and is actionable.
(And yes, I've followed my own advice by saying "don't say 'don't', do it this other way instead"!)
Ultimately it comes down to receptivity of the audience. Some people cannot listen, a cognitive impairment, such as Dunning-Kruger. In this case it doesn’t matter what you say because they hear: I’m awesome. Don’t waste your time.
Be direct and be deliberately honest. Do not soften the blow. If the product is complete shit then start with that. Then find the merits, opportunities for improvements, and provide guidance for the path forward.
For some reason, contrary to all expectations, this is so much easier and effective with children than adults. Children seem more inclined to learning and a willingness to accept productive feedback while adults are more inclined to filter commentary and simply stop listening.
To an adult, failure is a reason why could be fired, or something that loses them the respect of their peers, or proof that their imposter syndrome was right all along.
When we start to think of ourselves as someone with a certain status we get much less receptive to criticism from those we perceive as the same or lower social status.
This can be consciously corrected for but takes some effort and practice.
I really think this is a poor phrasing as it has negative connotations. Same with “brutal honesty” which is often used as an excuse to throw out empathy.
Treating people well is not at odds with being honest and clear. If anything, it’s kinder to bring up issues early, no matter how painful it might be.
My observation had been many people who become managers lack the necessary social skills to do a good job. They do not have the context to understand what not “sugarcoating” actually means. Instead they take the easy half the advice and implement it badly.
Same applies to code reviews.
I've found it better to have more criticism at the start and then reduce it over time, but that's getting into Machiavellian territory.
If my manager cannot tell me what to focus on next,where my long term gaps are,I feel they are not doing they job (not paying attention to me / not caring enough). My sister has even changed jobs over a manager who failed to provide any actionable feedback over a year (she's very ambitious and thus expects direction / support for improvement from her leadership & support structure).
I want to improve and advance and do better; "nice job" is nice to hear (no sarcasm; we all need it in our lives:) but doesn't alone help me move the needle. I personally strive for a "great job! here's what to focus on next / even better if..." from a good manager or mentor.
(I may not be a majority and I recognize that. I'm comfy in absolute metrics - I hate being told "awesome job!" all the time in a meaningless attempt at validation. I'm happy to hear I'm a 3 out of 100 on some specific axis I'm new at, as long as you help me reach 3.5 tomorrow and 4 next week).
Even if my immediate manager was such a superstar in my field that I would otherwise love to have them as my coach if they weren’t my manager, I’d still be reluctant to treat them as such because of all the conflict of interest. What’s best for me, my growth, my career isn’t necessarily what’s best for the company, team, or them.
First, I 100% agree that one should seek coaches and mentors outside of their boss, team, and even department/organization/practice. Somebody to provide broad, long-term perspective and awareness; open up eyes beyond the immediate.
However, in practical terms, your team lead / boss / manager should have the most immediate awareness and visibility of what you're doing and how, and would be able to provide most granular and tactical feedback. Some of it may be technical-skillset oriented, but a lot of it would be around business priorities and how to best achieved them - focus and prioritization. If they are unable or unwilling to provide that mentorship and guidance effectively, I hold it against them and I feel they are not performing their duties to the fullest - that is the gist of my original point.
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That does bring us to our point of likely disagreement though: There is a very vocal sentiment on HN that individuals and teams/companies inherently do not align, and we as employees should not stay long / invest in the teams and companies, and treat them as very temporary allies at best, if not passive permanent antagonists. Come in, take / learn what we need, depart. I will put forward that an organization where employees, teams, and business pervasively do not align in their interest and goals, is at best dynamically unstable and more realistically inherently dysfunctional. While company may survive some percentage of prima donas, writ large, if every employee had distinct differing goals from the team and business, that is pure Brownian motion - moving fast but going nowhere.
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Beyond organizational, down to personal - much of it may come to individuals and personalities. Some people (hopefully many!) may agree with business goals, like their teams, and want to support them long term, grow something together. I've been in the same company for almost two decades, love many (not all! :) of the people I've been surrounded on many & various teams in that time, and have sought leaders/managers/bosses I respect, appreciate and want to learn from (our personal agency and ability to choose/move does not only exist between jobs & companies; a little attention and initiative will enable a lot of agency and self-guided direction within a company). I've partnered with my bosses and managers wherever I went, tried to understand their perspective and goals even when our styles didn't match, and looked to learn something from them all even if I would've done it differently (at least once, that was a formidable challenge:). My sister and her husband on the other hand have changed jobs every 18-24 months, and have complained, moaned and grown frustrated/stressed with every.single.one of them; and have never seen something big to completion. At some point one asks - is it everybody else, or is it you (and your attitude? :). And contrary to common wisdom , my salary has tended to keep ahead of theirs - a person with skills and initiative may be able to grow within a company as much as by skipping.
My 100 Croatian Lipa, as always :). This is not to say that my way is the only way, it empathically is not - but I also think treating your team lead / boss / manager with deep-rooted suspicion and antagonism, with reluctance to find a way to learn from them and ally with them, seek knowledge and mentorship anywhere but the leader closest to you, is also not the universally best / happiest path either. I think we should expect, encourage, and demand more of our team leads and managers.
Of course I do expect some negative feedback when there's a real problem.
That wasn't particularly motivating but I did appreciate the honesty.
If they aren't on course to be fired, or worse are doing well, you don't need to find feedback.
Any manager who objects to that should think how they'd feel if they turned around and started nitpicking THEIR management style.
https://www.amazon.com/Human-Element-Productivity-Self-Estee...
to nail the fundamentals. There's too many HN posts on human dynamics that float above the fundamentals leaving the whole issue in a fog. It will make clear there are three interrelated issues in sharing feedback:
- behavior of openness
- self-esteem on TL and mentee's parts, which depends on self-awareness
- both of which run on concurrent with potential conflicts around control, openness, and inclusion.
As the book explains openness in the context of human organizations is one of the last things to be well-resolved. Why that's the case is very important to understand. Seen in the context of the book, the OP's write-up makes some good points, however, without the deep principles advanced in the book the solution space will remain in a fog. And to the extent it's foggy, no real progress can take place.
- if they cannot get better because you don't provide the environment, tools, time, resources (even if you think you do), they will read your negative feedback as you having unrealistic expectations or no clue of the real world
- if you are the cause of the things you are critizising (e.g. you are the one creating chaos, taking time away from their actual tasks etc), giving negative feedback is like critizising the person who held the door open for you: extremely rude and shitty, says more about you than them.
- if you always give negative feedback, because you believe there must be always something to improve, they will start to ignore negative feedback, because it doesn't indicate whether they did good or not
- if you fail to get them on board with actually getting better. In some jobs the salary and the involvement they expect from you doesn't align. You cannot expect someone to tear out their leg for a job where they feel like they are doing you an favour. The solution is to help them getting better at something where they feel they are giving themselves a favour.
If you tick any (or god forbid multiple!) of those boxes, you are better of with not giving negative feedback and telling them on how you plan to improve those points.
Manager: "you need to spend less time helping you colleagues and more time getting work done"
Me, most experienced developer on a team of 75% newbies, without a lead or even official senior developer: "Wat?"
The leader aspect tends to be harder to pin down because it amplifies team output at the expense of immediate individual output.
Leader in this context also means helping the team avoid wasting effort on ineffective solution.
Even in an environment of trust, people still instinctively take feedback personally, as if saying "what you did doesn't work and you need to improve it" meant "you're a terrible worker and what you did just made you a step closer to getting fired". Even emotionally intelligent people do it without noticing. I've found that for my feedback to be effective, I have to make sure that what the person hears is what I mean to say, which by no means is "softening" the feedback.
- make sure your facts are right. Ideally, make sure they are right well before you give feedback.
You can end up in awkward situations where a manager says "you promised to deliver this in a month but it's taken the whole quarter" but the one month timeline was the PM's idea, and you told everyone it would take 4 months.
When you told them $x in the first line of an email you sent to them 2 times.
I have never once been bothered by how soft or blunt the feedback I received was. I have never had my feelings hurt. I have, however, been consistently frustrated by receiving feedback which is effectively meaningless. I want to improve in my career so I get promoted, so I can gain the political capital in the organization necessary to be effective, and so I can succeed and improve my social standing, all very human and very normal desires. If your feedback doesn't help me to actionably reach those goals, and you as a manager who help determined promotion outcomes aren't leading me to a promotion by following your feedback, then you are doing me a disservice and I will likely eventually quit and move on out of frustration.
It's pretty much that simple. Don't soften it, don't be an asshole, just provide feedback that is actually actionable and useful. If you have no actionable feedback, say nothing.
1) The feedback is not actionable because the manager is themselves not clear in their head or is skirting around the real issue on their mind.
2) The feedback cannot be actionable because the manager only has partial information and can say there is an issue, not diagnose it and recommend corrective action. They are relying on their report to introspect and diagnose themselves.
3) The feedback is actionable, but the person wants the action plan itself to come from the manager. Not always possible.
In my experience the answer to all three is to develop the action plan together. Any blind spots and vagueness on both sides get cleared by this forcing function. Helps set expectations too.
It has somehow numbed me down to the point that I think: why should I care? What’s the thing with this obsession to become better and better all the f-ing time?
But actually though, why _should_ I give a shit. Just leave me alone for a while, it'll be fine.
If there is e.g. someone in your team that feels they are doing you a favour, giving them casual negative feedback is a very weird thing to do. The won't be able to receive it, because they already believe they are better than you deserve.
If you don't provide the time or resources (room, tools, education, ...) for your people to do their work properly negative feedback can be down right destructive. Because they will rightfully say to themselves: "Why on earth should I try to do a better job if my boss isn't willing to create an environment that makes it possible?"
Another good one is when your manager is the person creating all the chaos and they end up giving you negative feedback on something they caused, because they didn't follow the usual procedure because $importantcustomer stressed them out so much they went directly to the shelve and took $inventarizedproduct without using the inventary system, which them makes shipping a custom job, which then makes returning the item a custom job, which then makes shelving the item back a custom job — a custom job all shifts have to know.
Then there is good feedback. It is when a manager provides you all the resources, makes sure you and them have the same goals, they understand what you are doing and they provide feedback that helps you to get better at the things you care about.
The challenge I see with feedback is it's team and situation dependent. Have a manager who is an "idea person" and they'll tell their reports to "stop getting mired in details". Then those same people work on the same thing with someone who is methodical and organized and that area for development quickly becomes a "strength". Those reports end up just chasing their tail for an ideal that doesn't exist.
Far better to: 1) address work issues early, 2) be flexible in how to fix them [it's not just them, might be you!], 3) accept that some people might not just be a good fit for this particular project with this particular team.
The absolutely best feedback I've gotten is from a boss who was new and terrible. Everyone else criticized her a the lunch table, but when she asked me at a 1-on-1 what feedback I had, I gave her 3 specific areas that were driving me nuts. From that point on the bullshit curtain dropped. If she did something that annoyed me, I told her. She did the same.
I guess that's what the "psychological safe space" flavor-of-the-month is now.
I wish this caught on more. Unfortunately, it's all tied up in what HR departments use to justify their existence. I wish that HR execs just f-ing read them and realized it's a huge waste of time and the vast majority of these reviews are people just going through the motions and writing down whatever they can come up with in 20 minutes.
The further along I get in my career the more I realize it doesn’t really matter. Do what you think is right. Take feedback but don’t treat it too seriously unless it impacts team performance.
If I take a step back it seems to me most companies are a thousand monkeys banging at a thousand typewriters.
If you can produce something from that chaos, that’s what matters, not some HR form.
These attempts at introspection somehow weaponize feedback into another tool of dominance and oppression.
Woe be to the persons of good faith who speak honestly.
It's just management's way of saying: we're the adults here (with unquestioned 360 perspective on all matters of "performance" and "team fit"), you mere employees are the children permanently in need of our guidance and approval, etc. etc.
That, and of course legal CYA when it comes to firing people.
You don’t need to sugar-coat your feedback as often if you provide context and ground your feedback in facts. That’s a big chunk of NVC right there. If you don’t have a good strategy for giving people honest feedback, then what you do is you stumble around trying different strategies to sugar-coat feedback and end up doing more harm than good.
We humans, very naturally, are just trying to feel good most of the time and we want people to like us. That’s why we don’t like giving people feedback. We try all sorts of different ways of giving feedback so we can keep feeling good and make people like us, and it's easy to end up falling into the trap of being brutish (delivering feedback with careless disregard for other people) or into the trap of being manipulative (distorting feedback because we value people’s feelings more than our stated goals).
By the way, any programmer accepts direct feedback, otherwise you can't work with a compiler. Feedback should be direct, quick and fair. I see no reason to do anything else, and if someone feels uncomfortable with that you can just train them to get used to it, everyone who programs can get used to it quickly. However you can't train your manager to accept direct feedback as he will just fire you if he can't already handle it.
You work with an unforgiving compiler for a couple of years? You know something about feedback. (Personal favorite F#)
Also final point, BS managers are dime a dozen. As a manager you should welcome getting feedback as it gets you to be like Juggernaut from Marvel.
I dunno, tech management always striked me as pretty bad.
On the other hand ... a lot of feedback feels more like ocaml. Something's wrong. It's probably on this line. Maybe. Does "int * int * int" mean anything to you? Look maybe go put some parens on some of your match statements or something. Good luck fixing it.
Of the significant critical feedbacks that I've gotten (in tech) only one of them was like a Rust compiler feedback. The others were much more like working with ocaml. And pragmatically they didn't even seem to be valid (a lot of subjective-ness was involved, so I can't say they were objectively wrong ... but when followed bad things happened).
There are people who wouldn’t accept honest feedback, they wouldn’t even accept honest PR reviews. There are teams which were formed by someone else and cannot meet your standards, so how many times should you give negative feedback to people used to work in different mentality? You give up and try to be motivational instead. There are also managers who don’t give feedback only when they want to fire someone and give the harshest out-of-the-blue feedback they can give. And then there are company- or country- cultural issues, where some employees would take harsh feedback as a warning that they will get fired and their job security will go into garbage. And so many more cases and examples.
It is just that you don't give honest feedback to people with who you don't have a relation.
Before someone can give/take feedback there has to be relation of trust.
It is more of emotion management that simply telling someone do start doing things differently.
i'm not a fan of this cultural backlash in management writing. we had a period of was was essentially "stop being a dick, your reports are humans" and now we have a push in the opposite direction.
i appreciate the pushback as reconciling it will cause innovation (probably) but i stand firmly on the side of dont be a dick.
there will be many opportunities to offer feedback. you only get one relationship with a person and people largely quit jobs because of managers
Presenting feedback overconfidently can provoke defensiveness that humility would have avoided.
You don't have to know all the facts, and you don't have to come across as overconfident. You should present the facts as you understand them. This gives the other person the ability to contextualise the feedback you're trying to give them, but also the necessary context to contradict you if they think the feedback is wrong. Likewise, putting it in terms of business outcomes means that they can counter your argument with what their intended outcome was, where appropriate (which is an especially important conversation with senior/high skilled people).
All the caveats you're describing are pretty damn important, but they're all pretty much part of what the author means by "be kind".
I think maybe role playing would help. Like taking improv classes.
I had this notion while reading Voss' "Never Split the Difference". It's about using the latest hostage negotiation techniques in normal life. Like when asking for a salary increase. Entering a negotiation cold (no practice) is doomed to fail.
Expecting someone (eg yourself) to be good at giving constructive feedback without training and practice is kinda silly.
Back when I had to do a lot of public speaking, I hired people to help me. Stuff like stump speeches, practice debates, endorsement interviews. They recorded grilling me and then we'd review the tape. Hard but helpful. I wasn't ever very good, but they helped me be not terrible.
It took me years to have the confidence to, after a ramble like that, directly ask what the suggestion was.
There's only so much definitely maybe thinking about possible good ideas I can do.
She calls softening feedback in a misguided attempt to avoid hurting someone's feelings "ruinous empathy". Early on in my career I fell into this trap far more often than I like to admit and this book really gave me a mental model for improving that.
Edit: fixed the name of the book
The author dances around English vocabulary definitions in this article: soften, kind, nice, actionable, rude, useful, direct, bottom line. It'd be much clearer to title the blog: how to give useful feedback.
I seem to dislike many chosen titles of blog authors. They're incentivized to have great titles regardless of the bottom line of the article. This article doesn't take its own advice, which is to get to the bottom line. There's so little about "soften" in here, why is it in the title?
Soft-pedaling our criticisms if each other is deeply ingrained in many/most people. From a very young age, we're taught to not "rock the boat", and we fear (often rightly) that other people will retaliate if we criticize them.
If you want to turn this into actionable advice, I would recommend mandatory, short staff courses in some kind of Non-Violent Communication (NVC)... I liked Crucial Conversations a lot, but I know there are plenty of others... NVC has become a touchstone in a lot of therapists' offices, 12-step meetings, etc. It really works, and it's easy to teach.
The method requires a substantial amount of effort (time) to learn and apply, and assumes a certain level of education.
Not that I know or could tell that the critics are right, but is it really just that easy to teach and learn?
I feel like there's always something odd about some of these taught communication techniques, where I feel like there's a reason these communication styles don't come naturally to us, and there is a bit of a manipulative aspect to them.
So I created a three-step process that may be similar to NVC but with just three steps and only requiring one person, I find it pretty easy to remember and have seen people learn (the basics of) it quickly.
Step 1) truth
Step 2) fair play
Step 3) love
1) tell the truth about how you actually feel: most of us don't do this and when we do, other people will often better trust what we say.
2) tell the other person how you imagine they might be feeling: let's them know you're considering how they feel, with an emphasis on not knowing for sure.
3) say one thing to connect with love: I'm sorry, I hope you have a good day, etc.
I've found this to work very well in my life, and have had people use it successfully with very little training. At the same time, i feel confident it will take a lifetime to master :-)
Anyway, I hope that helps and you find it relevant to your repsonse.
I had no idea that NVC would be such a polarizing discussion. I'm wondering if maybe some other folks had some bad experiences with it?
I assume that a lot of the negative reaction to it is how others seem to force people into doing NVC because, as I mentioned, it often seems like a two-player game. So, if I learn NVC and you don't, then I can sometimes try to force you to speak the NVC language so that we're playing the same game.
But, again, I'm not quite sure. Although now I'm more curious to dive into the reviews of it to learn why people feel attracted to or repelled from it.
This is a really good point, and it's an angle I didn't honestly consider. NVC is a goddamn superpower for dealing with people who are being difficult... I guess it makes sense that there are people who have been on the receiving end, and couldn't get their own needs met.
I'm really glad we both participated in this discussion... Really nice to get an eye-opener like this.
I've run into similar challenges with those three steps I talked about. I haven't been deeply steeped in NVC so I may have it wrong—my impression is that it doesn't do step 2 very well, or articulating how I imagine the other person is feeling. Often it seems to leave that part to a question, requesting the other person answer what they need and often, people can't answer it or don't want to. While basic questions, I find they challenge me and many others: how do I feel, what do I want, what do I need? So with NVC, I think it almost requires the other person to answer that and get into a dialogue about what both people need and if the one person doesn't know or doesn't want to, it can almost become a standstill and then lead to more frustation..."I'm saying what I need, I need you to say what you need. What do you need???"
I hear the criticism that stuff like NVC is “manipulative” and I think I get where the feeling comes from, but I also feel that systems like NVC are generally, on the balance, very helpful. The baseline for communication skills is shockingly low in most offices I’ve worked in. I like NVC because it focuses on things like communicating facts, communicating your personal feelings, and sharing your goals. A lot of people tend to skip out on basic stuff like communicating facts or sharing goals with people they work with, and what it ends up doing is sabotaging the ability of other people to give you what you want, or it moves too fast and puts people on the defensive.
> …where I feel like there's a reason these communication styles don't come naturally to us, and there is a bit of a manipulative aspect to them.
IMO people are naturally manipulative and it takes conscious effort to be honest with people. I don’t necessarily mean that we are consciously trying to manipulate people, just that we try different communication strategies and tend to keep using manipulative communication strategies if those strategies get us what we want. We send our children to school and church, we discipline them and tell them about right and wrong, all in the hope that they will grow up to be good people. Kids will lie their little mouths off from the day that they learn how to lie (usually around age 4-6) and then we have to teach them not to lie, which can be difficult.
The “natural” communication strategies include things like crying until you get what you want, or telling lies when you get caught doing things. Again, not trying to say human nature is evil, but that honesty is something you have to learn.
This definitely can be true, but in practice these techniques shape your understanding of people. Motivational Interviewing and NVC both draw upon an attitude of acceptance—that is, treating the person you are talking to with accurate empathy for their perspective, support for their autonomy, affirmation of their strengths and efforts, and the belief that they have intrinsic worth.
Someone who is comfortable thinking of themselves as a manipulator could pretend to believe such things for the sake of coming up with the right thing to say, and if they're a skilled liar then they would likely get away with using the technique manipulatively at least some of the time, but if you interpret your interactions as if you are accepting of the people in your life then it is far more natural to genuinely think of them with an attitude of acceptance, which is fundamentally at odds with manipulative behavior.
That is, I would argue, the primary benefit of learning these conversational styles for a layperson: the language you use shapes the way that you think, and intentional non-violent communication begets non-violent thought until non-violent communication becomes natural.
I don't really think there is any answer. I agree that some people communicate poorly with subordinates, I think that often people who are criticised for being too critical are just bad at communicating what they expect/want other people to do.
But I would also say that criticism doesn't work with some people. The other part of knowing how to be critical is knowing when to be critical. Some people do better when they learn it for themselves. Some people do better when they don't have someone looking over their shoulder all day. It isn't just about people being sensitive (although there is that too, and it is perfectly legitimate to be sensitive...if you grow up and a parent is on your case all the time and you grow up afraid of criticism, that doesn't mean you can't get a job and can't be managed).
Sports is probably the best example of this: some coaches don't understand this and put everyone on blast, it doesn't work, it actually makes people perform worse, nothing is going to change that (team competitive online games are also very good, I didn't play these as a kid, I did play a lot of sports, and when I started playing these in my mid-20s I was surprised that team communication was way more important than any sport I had played...I suspect most self-styled communication experts would wither under the pressure of a ranked Overwatch game).
1. It’s often given as part of performance review, and as such is shared with others (not just for you) and can negatively affect your career / promotions. Also, due to that, people game the feedback system and it becomes more of a reflection of how many allies you made.
2. In the US, with employment at will, feedback can be seen as a gateway to getting fired
3. It supports a culture of “you always have to improve yourself”, which rubs me wrong.
I do believe that feedback does improve people though, but I wish there was a system in place where feedback was 1:1 and not part of a broader performance review process.
I find it to be a bit of a crutch. I prefer instead to make the constructive feedback itself palatable and not "shit". If it's an opportunity for growth then I frame it as that. If it's just factual feedback without any harmful consequences for the person's career or employment, I make that clear. In those situations we should be able to give harsh feedback without making it unpalatable.
If it does have harmful consequences for the person, then it should be made clear and we should provide help to them (and frame it as just that, as help rather than as an accusation). If the consequences are immediate, then it isn't just feedback and should be dealt with appropriately.
Someone wise said something like: "the primary feeling in any interaction should be love", and, "never let a problem to be solved become more important than a person to be loved". It takes practice, and probably a supporting belief system. They didn't mean romantic love, but a sense of really caring about the person and their well-being, as more important than any putting them down or $ or whatever.
I think I said that better at my web site (in profile), under something like "Other / Life Lessons learned" / maturity models / social / ...."
Edit: another way to look at it is to be sure to say what you are NOT saying: "First of all, thanks for your efforts. One thing that happened is X did not actually help with Y, but it might in the future if it were more Z. (smile) I am definitely not saying you are are a bad person or something, or should be fired [if you can say so honestly]. We all have room to improve, I know I do, and I hope you will tell me so when you see ways I can improve. And I appreciate your efforts, and you have really good potential. Let's go forward together on this project from here." (Everyone does have good potential, in some context, I believe, and maybe it is almost always good to say "I think we can go forward on ___ with ___. I can be wrong, and thanks for listening!! That is kind of you. I will try to do the same." [then do so, asking questions, you can always say "interesting, I should probably give that some thought"... in a pinch.)
There are many good ideas out there. Asking questions and listening and observing, among them.
(some edits.., including correcting navigation notes about my web site)
A commitment to positive regard and support from your side is fine, but the way you expressed it in your examples feels manipulative and will lead to future compliments and interactions feeling inauthentic.
I've preferred to call it a "feedback sandwich" in the past but that feels like cop out management from Office Space, like firing someone on a Friday to minimize backlash.
If we're talking about a place of work then I might sandwich it by implying their skill is needed and, hopefully in a skillful way, that I like having them around. If these are the issues needing to be addressed then that's what makes it a "shit sandwich".
At the end of the day, I am responsible for only my own emotions. I can truthfully express what our relationship means to me and thereby provide some contextual buffering that they can rely on, if they want, but I don't want to push a desired reaction down their throat. That's a problem with an appeal to their kindness.
The reason for the whole prioritization of kindness generally is this: I have learned for myself that God is real, and our choices really do matter in this life and beyond, and the way I learned it means many other things follow as a result: the need to love God with our all, and our fellow humans as ourselves; and the importance of service to others, in the growth process we are all experiencing.
I also appreciate your point that you are only responsible for your own emotions. Sometimes remembering that helps me too -- especially if I consider those emotions to be a choice, or something that the person can choose, if they choose to act in that regard, rather than just being acted upon. Somehow balanced with the importance of serving/helping others appropriately when possible. There are a variety of situations of course, as you imply.
And just a quick aside as it occurs to me: I found from experience that if the only feedback is negative, the recipient will likely eventually quit listening or quit participating, or become destructive in some way. I think we all need a positive concept of future possibilities, i.e., hope, in order to move forward. Part of a leader's job is to be to motivate, and/or to know when that is needed, and providing that hope is important. There is a short book ~ "Leadership and the One Minute Manager" that talks about 4 different kinds (maturity levels) of reports, and the different treatment each needs, depending on their high or low levels of confidence and competence.
Someone that I consider my spiritual teacher once told me: "you can't be in Love with someone if you're not also in Truth with them." I really like that.
From a Christian perspective I prioritize the Truth aspect of Logos. I feel that is lacking in today's communication where people would rather be untruthful than risk being seen as unkind or risk not receiving love. It sounds like you are authentic in your expression however so that's great :)
It impresses me how consistently the Lord's example & teachings include principles in such perfection and balance. I don't mean we have a record of everything, but that it is so good in that way. He always taught truth, and is patient & helpful if we are sincere in moving forward, doing our very best, on His path, and while never lowering his standards. Kindness and truth, together. There is so much reason for gratitude. (Email me any time/if you want/profile.)
I was pleasantly surprised when the CEO gave a huge 'THANK YOU FOR THE TLDR version' in a reply all. The 'bottomline' comment kind of reminded me of that haha.
Yep. That's a good practice. I write a 2-4 sentence blurb at the beginning, that just says the key idea, point or request, followed by some empty space. And then a row of asterisks with the word "details" in it, where everything gets properly fleshed out in the right order.
Never got feedback for that, but I know it works because it has helped to halt email-thread-diarrhea.
I started doing this because there are SO MANY people who literally only read the first few sentences of an email, respond to the first thing that comes up and ignore the rest.
I'm reminded of the idea of Yes, and... [0]. Seems like a great idea for improv comedy, but it's a terrible idea for clear and mature argumentation, where the goal should be to find the root of disagreement rather than to pretend no disagreement exists. Hard to imagine serious philosophers using that kind of approach, for instance.
The manager's manager also has to be supportive. I had a manager once who, when one of my directs complained that I was "mean", told the direct that I shouldn't have been so direct. This undermined my ability to give direct feedback, and deprived my employee of the opportunity to practice the skill.
The good news is that we got it straight, he received the correction and succeed in the next class. The bad news was that failed the next class so bad that he went to jail and didn't pass go.