How to Give Feedback Without People Hating You
It’s faster and easier than you think
I never saw it coming. It was the kind of conversation that changes everything. It was an encounter I could have prevented if only I knew trouble was brewing. But I didn’t. I was blindsided.
I started my day like every other, setting out my most important tasks and responding to emails that came in throughout the evening. Then, out of nowhere, two board members from my organization knocked on my door. I’d never had spur of the moment conversations with them before, so I was caught off guard.
After a few minutes of painful small talk, they got to the point. I was going to be let go. The organization was struggling, and I wasn’t an essential employee for them moving forward.
I get it. These conversations happen all the time. And they aren’t always a result of poor performance. But it hurt, all the same. It hurt because I thought everything was great.
My boss was one of the most caring people I knew. I never doubted that he was concerned about not just my professional life but my personal life, too. Have you had a boss like this? You look forward to conversations with them because you know they care. You leave those conversations feeling known and valued. But how often do you get constructive feedback? If yours was like mine, the first full time boss I ever had, you probably didn’t get much. And that’s a problem. When you don’t get feedback, you get caught off guard by hard conversations.
It isn’t hard to grasp that being a great boss requires caring deeply about your team, but this empathy isn’t enough by itself. If you want to be a really great boss, if you want to see your team thrive and grow, you need to give feedback.
Once you’ve built a foundation of care, once your team knows you care about each of them individually (and this goes beyond caring about their performance- this is caring personally about them as people), you can start speaking into their job performance.
Now, when you hear that phrase “job performance,” you might start thinking about annual performance reviews. “Great! I already offer feedback to my team during their annual reviews!” But is that really enough? What about the other 364 days of the year?
Saving your feedback for a performance review is rarely a good idea. You end up being the boss that cares deeply for 364 days out of the year, and then spend one day piling on all of the feedback that should have been spaced out throughout the year. Offering feedback during a performance review is better than nothing, but it has the potential to leave your team feeling demoralized. They will inevitably be blindsided by things they thought were working.
So is the solution to offer a weekly performance review instead? Some of you might treat your weekly one on ones like this, which isn’t terrible (and if you aren’t doing weekly one on ones with your direct reports, find out why they’re important here). But it will leave your team dreading that time every week!
There’s a better option, though! Kim Scott writes in Radical Candor that the best way to offer feedback is through informal passing conversations. If you have a direct report that needs to improve something or modify something, don’t wait until an annual review or even for a weekly one on one. The next time you see that person, mention it in a brief conversation.
That’s it. You give the person the feedback they deserve and need in order to do their job, but you don’t make a big deal out of it. You don’t save things up for an annual review in which a person will be surprised by all of this. You don’t call them into your office for a meeting, because let’s face it, getting a request from the boss to “come to my office,” can sometimes feel like being summoned by the principal in elementary school.
You just offer consistent, impromptu feedback. And because they already know you care about them as a person, and care about their future, they are more likely to receive this in the good faith in which you offered it.
If you start doing just these two things and nothing else, caring personally and challenging directly, you will become a better boss and will be quickly on your way to becoming the great boss that builds healthy teams and thriving organizations.
