Providing Tough Feedback with High EQ

Having worked in North America and in Asia, I have had the opportunity to observe how cultural and societal influences can affect the sensitivity with which feedback and constructive criticism is provided. This sensitivity makes balancing tough feedback and emotions more difficult. Over the years, after an employee has made a mistake, I have seen these three common types of feedback:

• Email or group message blast to everyone on project: “PersonX messed up”
• Privately explain to PersonX they made a mistake, perhaps using feedback sandwiches (positive, negative, then positive comment)
• Nothing / No Feedback

Now the worst situation is when no feedback is provided. On the other extreme, public shaming will let the person know improvement is needed, but may hurt some feelings along the way. Privately informing the person of their mistake is better, but is still not optimal, even with feedback sandwiches. The goal is to have people discover WHY and HOW to improve. From this discovery, the conversation can trend towards next steps naturally. I use the word discover as opposed to explain, because we are not telling people they are wrong, we are providing the logical framework for them to understand how to trend towards perfection.

Key Question
How do we communicate our tough feedback to anyone within an organization with high emotional quotient and high impact?

Definitions

• Tough Feedback is commentary that stirs the pot and breaks the status quo directed at either an individual or a process. Typically, we want to generate change if 1) mistakes have been made or 2) a more optimal methodology exists. My piece on “Healthy Conflicts” spoke about how we can understand, propose, and set-up solutions to improve processes. We will focus on feedback sessions with individuals here.
• Emotional Quotient (EQ), often used to describe emotional intelligence, is a measure of interpersonal and communication skills. Alternatively phrased, EQ is a gauge of understanding of how emotions are connected to actions and vice-versa. In our context, EQ will measure the ability to provide tough feedback while understanding and considering the emotional implications to the recipient.
• Impact, in this article, signifies the amount of positive change resulting from our actions, in our case, the tough feedback. This positive change comes from both a project/process improvement and a people development perspective.

As mentioned, earlier, there are many ways for us to give tough feedback. To visualize the various types and how they compare on EQ and Impact, please see the following chart:

• Giving No Feedback: Not telling people when you see problems with their work. This will create zero impact and demonstrates zero understanding of emotional intelligence. To be very clear, any other feedback method is better than this option.
• Shaming Publicly: Telling everyone, whether involved or not, you have spotted mistake(s) in someone’s work, typically through non-face-to-face channels (e.g., email, Slack, Skype). Note that both shaming publicly and giving no feedback demonstrate low EQ, since there is no consideration of emotions for the individual(s) making the mistake.
• Informing Privately: Explaining to the individual that their work can be improved and the following mistakes were made. Informing privately can be utilized to address smaller issues (i.e., typos, colors on charts), but is sub-optimal for tough feedback because 1) it does not develop our team members fully and 2) it causes them to be defensive as opposed to reflective upon receipt of feedback. Both informing privately and shaming publicly have the same level of impact, since both let the person know there was a mistake, but neither are catered towards developing the individual.
• Inciting Discovery: Discussing the feedback recipient’s logic and methodology behind their decisions and then supplementing with your logic on contention areas. If done correctly, this should lead to the individual discovering the previous errors and realizing the proper next steps themselves. Inciting discovery should be utilized for substantial issues that require people to change the way they work. Note that inciting discovery has the highest impact, since we are addressing the issue and developing our team members, and the highest EQ, since we are showing them that their thought processes are genuinely considered with our approach.

Let’s dig into how can we appropriately incite discovery when providing tough feedback to drive high impact and demonstrate high EQ.

Inciting Discovery

Inciting discovery can be done privately or publicly, since we are promoting growth and not shaming. In most cases, I would recommend private discussions to increase the recipients’ comfort level. That being said, inciting discovery may also be done in group meetings if multiple parties need to understand the logic or if the issue is time sensitive. These discussions will have many ebbs and flows, so should occur in-person or over call and not via email or messaging.

Once we have the appropriate meeting set up, there are three key steps

1) Ask them to walk through their methodology

2) Discuss logic in any flawed areas or steps

3) List planned changes moving forward

Start by asking them to walk through their methodology, one step at a time, along with why their accompanying rationale. By hearing their methodology, we are seeking to understand their perspective. You may need to ask additional clarifying questions to ensure you are understanding each step to the appropriate amount of detail needed for your purposes. This demonstrates that we care about their decision and thought process. If we skip this step and go straight to explaining, we will reduce our emotional quotient. If short on time, potentially if meeting with a boss, an alternative can be walking through your understanding of their methodology and verifying if your understanding is correct. After hearing or verifying their methodology, if they have convinced you their way is correct, great — fix any small errors, if any, and we are done. If their approach does not seem appropriate, move onto next step.

If there can be improvements, discuss the pieces you believe can be optimized in further detail. If they are not fully aware of a better process, talk about the better alternatives. If they are doing one step inefficiently, talk about more streamlined approaches. When discussing these alternatives, also provide the logic and underlying reason on why the alternatives are better. By discussing better or best practices, they should soon discover what improvements they can make. By providing the rationale behind particular solutions, you will demonstrate that you care about the colleague’s growth and development, a high EQ essential. There may be cases where the feedback recipient does not agree with your approach. In such an event, we need to continue breaking down the contention points piece by piece to mutually arrive at the best decision. This step is certainly the hardest to execute and will require continued repetition. To further illustrate, an example will be provided after our third and final step.

After hearing their methodology and discussing the underlying ideas and contention points, we need to talk about the plan moving forward. Instead of telling the feedback recipient the next steps, ask them to explain their proposed next steps to you. This will ensure that the individual truly understands and retains the feedback points. The next steps should involve pit falls that the feedback recipient will avoid moving forward and the corresponding action item(s) on how they will do so. Some action items can be, but are not limited to, developing more expertise in a problem area by learning from company resources, setting up a process for checking X item, or working more closely alongside another peer. We should also take note of these action items and check in on them at appropriate time intervals. If you have been through several tough feedback sessions with an individual and provided action items that were never successfully completed, you now have additional data points to make an informed decision whether or not to keep the individual on your team or as your boss.

Example Feedback
During a client presentation, I saw numbers that looked wrong to me on a slide. I did not bring this up during the meeting, which would be public shaming. As an aside, best practice should have been for me to review the materials beforehand, but I was unable to do so in this circumstance. Immediately after meeting, I asked to have a quick conversation so the presenting individual could walk me through the calculation methodology from start to finish. I realized they were pulling data from an outdated source, but did not tell them. Instead, I provided information on how the data stored in our system usually provides data one day late. This was enough for the individual to discover they pulled data too early and should wait until at least one day after to gather the data. After this meeting, the individual left feeling confident, understanding what was wrong and how to solve the problem moving forward.

Closing Remarks

It could be your boss, it could be your teammate, or anyone else within an organization who made a sub-optimal choice. You, as a knowledgeable expert in your craft, need to provide tough feedback to them and incite discovery. Overall, more time would be invested than if we provided improvement points directly, but this time is an investment in team development. Doing so will ensure the organization is making the best choices possible and the feedback recipient will retain more learning and thereby continue to make better decisions moving forward.

Whether you are working in a sensitive work environment or not, we want our tough feedback to help the recipients discover the WHY and the HOW to trend towards perfection.

Are there nuances that I missed? If you have any comments or questions, feel free to respond below or connect with me on LinkedIn. Please follow me on medium.com/@dhuynh2979 for more articles about leadership and management.

If you enjoyed this piece, and would like to learn more about people development, check out my article about Mentoring Effectively.