Compassionate Confrontation: An instrument to make you a better manager
These days, we have relationships with our team members that are interdependent, maybe more than ever.
As you might expect from a data focused company like Facebook, we use a number of instruments and methods to collect feedback and data from employees to understand what they want, what they do, and what they believe they are doing. Everything from casual one-on-ones, where we walk around campus chatting about project development and career growth, to very formal internal instruments, like surveys, that try to understand more macro phenomena.
The way a manager interacts with the people that report to them today, is not like the boss/employee dynamics of the 1950s. Managers don’t simply give marching orders and demand they be done to a tee. Instead, we value and respect an environment where both parties have the ability to speak their mind and be heard; where employees can also manage up to the person they report to.
The other day, from one of these surveys, I received feedback that caused me to take pause. It seemed as though a team of mine was not feeling as good as I would want them to in areas that are incredibly important to me, including: Recognition, transparency, collaboration and autonomy.
If any of these areas have a hint of weakness, it’s cause for concern. While I realize that not everyone values broad staff surveys like the one I’m referring to, you can’t simply ignore them. They tell you something, even if it’s just a general trend. Ninety-nine times out of one-hundred everything is not upside-down, and for me, understanding what is motivating the feedback is more important than the points of feedback itself. Like a parent, part of being a manager is that you have to listen and care when your reports are unhappy. Sometimes, all they need is to be heard, other times, it’s the tiniest tweak that’s required to eliminate the issue.
This is what I did. After I got those survey results I planned a meeting with my team. I wanted to have a very open and honest conversation with them — and I told them that. I went on to explain that I can’t personally improve, nor improve the things around me, if we don’t openly discuss things I/we are not doing so great at—and maybe a few things that were going well too. So we did. I began by talking about what the survey results said to me:
“People aren’t feeling recognized for the good work we’re doing on this team.” I started.
“I am responsible for this. Can we talk about what’s happened in the past where I really missed the mark, or, when you feel I have done things that went well?” I asked.
People just stared at me at first, not knowing how to respond. It’s a pretty direct thing to ask. I imagine the initial tension was a combination of the directness of the approach and the thought of telling your boss that they fell short to their face. And believe me, it can be hard to hear it. But I wanted and needed to hear it. I spend a lot of my day supporting my team and it’s important to me to be effective.
Then things got rolling, almost as if we were in a design critique. Except, instead of dissecting pixels on a screen or the interactions of a prototype, we were talking about where we’d fallen short and what we could do better at. The awkward silence had been replaced with bright, constructive conversations that weren’t just harping on faults. We were discussing productive, relevant, realistic solutions.
What I liked most about this exercise wasn’t that I got to the bottom of what some of these issues actually meant or how we could improve them; rather, what I loved was that it gave me a chance to connect with these people I work with as people and have really great (albeit initially difficult) conversations about the things that really matter to us doing a good job, and being happy, together.
These compassionate confrontations will transform previous frustration into motivation and measurable results, not the least of which will be job satisfaction.
Today, the job of a manager is more about examining, uncovering, editing and refining information about their reports and their outputs — and maybe most importantly, a manager would do well to identify superfluous behaviors that get in the way of forming ideas, implementing skill sets, and realizing the potential of their direct reports. In other words, employee dissatisfaction is usually a combination of external factors your employees identify that could then be addressed by their manager. And, in the other direction, where a manager needs to identify ways their direct reports get in their own way and how they can shift something in their own perspective or work style to free themselves up. This two-pronged approach identifies specific ways that the manager can shift to better support their employees, and the manager identifies things that the employee can do for themselves. This transforms previous frustration into motivation and measurable results, not the least of which will be job satisfaction. An effective manager gets these points across: I care about your work quality, I care about your job satisfaction, and I also care about your own personal and professional growth.
It really doesn’t matter where you work, or what industry you work in. Sitting down and inviting an honest conversation is a powerful instrument and one we all have access to at all times and places.
Me, on Twitter.
