> 1. Ask (“Can I give you some feedback?”)
> 2. State the behavior (“When you X…”)
Yes, please do this when giving feedback
> 3. State the impact (“…the result is Y.”)
Your conversation partner might hear an immediate accusation out of this. Your statement will never be objective. Rather talk about yourself as in "... this is how I perceive your behavior".
> 4. Encourage effective future behavior (“Keep it up!” for positive feedback ...)
Yes, it's great to get positively reinforced.
> “Can you change that?” for negative feedback
If you do this to me after 5 seconds of conversation, I will shut off and not take any advice from you. This is bossy.
Tell your conversation partner what their behavior makes you feel like. Formulate a wish for the future. You're not entitled to "change" people. Tell them how you would like to be treated.
If you want to change people, then give them positive reinforcement. If you try to "change" others by negative feedback, they will likely do less of everything and try not to be caught doing anything because it might be the "wrong thing".
> If you want to change people, then give them positive reinforcement. If you try to "change" others by negative feedback, they will likely do less of everything and try not to be caught doing anything because it might be the "wrong thing".
Which is why Manager Tools emphasizes that this form of feedback should be used first exclusive with /positive/ feedback for quite some time (months) before using the format for negative feedback. And that, once started, positive feedback should outweigh negative feedback 3-1.
I see this as a proxy for building trust with someone. Positive feedback tells me that I am appreciated by this person, and that they care enough to let me know. If I trust that someone cares about my needs, then I am less likely to hear "negative" feedback as blame, or doing the wrong thing.
You sound like you want to prolong the feedback into some sort of collaborative discussion, instead of getting to the point. Quick feedback is meant to be ... Quick ... To save both parties from too many negative feelings
You can’t end your feedback with “Can you change that?” and then think “Boom, done in seconds”. No, we’re absolutely not done? You just asked me to commit on the spot to something I potentially haven’t thought about before you just brought it up. I haven’t had a chance to reflect or even to respond. And you think we’re already boom, done?
Edit: If you want to actually be done, you could end with something like “I would appreciate if you were mindful of this going forwards”. Then you’ve said what you need to say, and your feedback stands by itself regardless of how the other person reacts to it.
I think what irks me about this question is that changing your behavior is one of the hardest things you can do, and there are probably all sorts of complex causes for the behavior. If you’re demanding an immediate commitment you probably get a lie in response. The behavior will continue, everyone involved will feel even worse about it, and it will feel more awkward the next time you have to bring it up.
I also find these very blunt - this is what I would say if the person I was exerting my authority and the person I was talking to really had no choice, but I was being polite about it.
I would soften them a lot if I wasn't in a position of authority, or if I wanted to genuinely engage with that person.
Also in any case, I would say precisely what it was about:
"Can I give you feedback about X?" so that it doesn't induce anxiety and the person has a realistic idea of what they are being asked before they decide,
and,
"[You're doing good work, and] it would be better if you did Y" to reiterate and reinforce the goal.
It has been a while since I read the book, do they give a reason for step 1? Because it feels like there is only one possible answer to that question, which makes it feel a weird to me now.
Yes: practically, it just might not be a good time, and emotionally, it prepares the person to accept the feedback. Less so in the book, but definitely on the podcast, they really emphasize that the question is genuine; if someone says no to the question, then you accept the no and move on.
They also emphasize that you should give /only/ positive feedback for quite some time before starting to give negative feedback. That would probably go a long way to soften things enough that one feels they can say no when appropriate.
(There's a whole set of things to do if the direct /always/ says no, of course)
"State the impact" is the part I have the hardest time with. My first impulse is to judge. When I try to phrase it as a feeling instead, I feel vulnerable doing so.
> "Your conversation partner might hear an immediate accusation out of this. Your statement will never be objective. Rather talk about yourself as in "... this is how I perceive your behavior"."
Feedback should almost always be based on data. For example, you should never say stuff like "When you do code reviews, you are often rude". This is, as you say, a perception. What you should be saying is: "When you do code reviews, people often come to me and complain that they feel offended." This is not a perception, this is data. Then you can say: "Please try changing your behavior so that people don't feel offended." At this point you can also start a conversation about why other people feel offended, but it is optional.
> If you do this to me after 5 seconds of conversation, I will shut off and not take any advice from you. This is bossy.
Feedback is not an advice. Sometimes it can contain advice, but more often it doesn't. Feedback is about telling you that you should change some behavior or it is about reinforcing a behavior. Advice is different: that's thinking about how to change or keep the behavior. Managers should absolutely differentiate between the two.
Advice is also optional, while in a workplace, if the subordinate doesn't meet expectations, there will be bad consequences.
> You're not entitled to "change" people. Tell them how you would like to be treated.
True. The manager is not entitled to change people, but 1) he is entitled to tell her subordinates what the expectations are 2) the subordinates are actually entitled to know what the expectations are. The manager should never say stuff like 'you are X', she should always talk about behavior ('you are doing X').
> Tell your conversation partner what their behavior makes you feel like.
I think you're applying the rules of non-violent communication incorrectly. There will always be negative feelings during negative feedback -- what's happening is that someone is told that what she has been doing in the past was not up to expectations. This is necessarily difficult. If it is not difficult, the receiving party likely didn't understand it, most likely because the manager has wrapped the feedback in a 'shit sandwich' (saying many good things and wrapping the hard things in the middle of them), most likely because the manager is not able to have difficult conversations. Difficult conversations are fine though: that's how we all learn and develop.
----
Example: I want someone to stop breaking unit tests by submitting code without running them locally. I can say that "You are often submitting code without running the test locally, for example in the last month you did this 5 times. Can you please stop doing that and not clog the CI servers unnecessarily by not running the test before opening a pull request?"
How would you do this with positive reinforcement? One option is to always pat the person on the back when she's not breaking the build, but that's an ineffective workaround, and I'd even say it's dishonest with the person.
I do agree with you here. What I wanted to express is that you should hold back on interpretation. If you talk about your own perceptions, it allows other interpretations to also be valid.
Thank you for the example on clogging the CI servers. Indeed, I would find it hard to turn this into positive reinforcement. Also I would agree that it's dishonest in not telling them. I guess I would try to highlight my own pains with their behavior like "I was blocked five times in deploying because of your failing tests. Please run your tests locally first.". I would always want to give them the opportunity to take my perspective and understand my reasoning.
> What I wanted to express is that you should hold back on interpretation.
Yes, agreed. Also, if you interpret then say explicitly that 'my interpretation / perception / feeling based on fact X is Y, and feel free to disagree with the interpretation'. Eg. "Maybe you just simply forget checking things locally -- do you think it would help to set up a commit hook or do you have other ideas about we could help you not breaking the build?"
So you
1) declare the facts (breaking the build too often), there's no argument about those
2) state your expectations as a manager (this has to stop), the person can disagree but it's your decision as a manager to set expectations
3) offer one or more possible interpretation, the person can agree or disagree
> Are you focused on the past instead of the future? [...] If so, don’t give the feedback.
Years ago, after my then manager has been caught multiple times lying to the team sets up a meeting to calm us down, me in particular. He says something like the above. "Let's forget about the past and focus on the future." I lost my temper and replied without even thinking "If I slap you right now can we forget about it 2 minutes later?". Was escorted by security out of the building. I was sad losing that team but it was a good career move looking back on it. The whole team resigned one by one in about 2 months.
Wow that's harsh! I actually have pretty much same experience. Company has done the very same mistake again and again and again and on the meetings i bring up issue to the team and often get "let's focus on the future", but yeah i was focused on the future to avoid wasting months of work again and again.
Manager: Can I give you some feedback?
Direct: Sure, boss.
Manager: When you tell my boss bad news before me, even with the best of intentions, I end up getting in a lot of trouble for not knowing before he did. Can you try to tell me first, going forward?
Is soooo American (or maybe more countries?). All this tells me is that the boss of the manager is a whiny micromanager and I feel like the boss of the boss needs to be informed, I mean why would you ever bring someone into trouble over bad news. Bad news are just facts. What's this trouble anyway?? It's such an hierarchical chain of events. If the nature of the bad news is such that the boss really does get into trouble, then it's time for some open and honest discussion on how to do things better from now on. Nothing negative about this imo.
I mean the whole idea that you somehow need to discipline colleagues by giving them "trouble" is just ludicrous to me. Why not just assume that everyone around you is a smart individual with good intentions and that errors sometimes happen and we can bear the consequences together. Man this gets me worked up.
It's not a great example, but I do understand this, so I can share perspective. As a manager, you are hired to be an extension of your boss. Your boss may have 5 managers reporting to him, reach of which has 5 reports of their own. Your boss is tremendously busy and no longer has the time to understand all the details of all the work under their purview. If your report goes to your boss and starts presenting a problem, the report may have very little idea of how their problem fits into the other 25 problems that ICs may bring up, and yet is making a decision that this should be their boss' boss' (director) priority. If this happens continually, the direct manager is not doing their job, and the director will make sure they hear about it.
More shortly, sometimes what you think is bad news as an IC is something your manager can solve without getting their boss involved. Especially with more junior reports, they may have trouble distinguishing the difference.
Discussing with project manager is great. That's why PM is there. Discussing with the director of software engineering? Probably completely irrelevant to the Big Problem he or she is currently trying to solve, which is much more likely related to culture, hiring/firing, budget, or strategy. When you tell that person that you are shipping a suboptimal product for reason X, they may truly want to help, but have no context to actually do it, and have much bigger fish to fry besides.
I agree with all that, and indeed it would be wise to ask that employee to go through other/more appropriate channels first when they have "bad news". What bothers me is the "trouble" part. Completely unnecessary imho.
This makes a ton of sense. For all of us, things that hold us back the most are ones we refuse to see in ourselves. Meanwhile they are obvious to other people - who assume they must be as obvious to us and thus don't say anything.
What makes the quick and frequent feedback valuable is that it's easy and undramatic to give but can form patterns of irrefutable evidence about ourselves.
If I hear once from one person that I did X and caused Y, I can dismiss it. If I hear something similar from lots of different in many situations - at some point I have to admit there's something to it and investigate.
If that sounds weird, just think about this: if you literally stank, would you want to know? Would you want to hear it casually from 3 people in the morning so you can figure out that you had stepped into shit on the way to the office? Or would you want people to politely not say anything all day, sparing your feelings while every one of them thinks you smell like shit?
This blog post leaves a badtaste of hierarchical management regiments of the 80's office culture. I see my manager as an enabler, not some kind of a master I need to follow orders from. I give more feedback to my manager than the other way around. They're eager to know how things are in the weeds.
For myself, the example in the blog post brings up a lot of feelings from previous complex relationships with managers and their managers.
I have been in contexts where asking for a heads up on skip level feedback would have seemed reasonable. I have been in contexts where asking for a heads up on skip level feedback would have felt like retaliation. I’ve honestly been more fearful of saying anything at all in skip level 1:1 in recent years, from those previous experiences of feelings of retaliation.
Negative feedback is often narrow-minded, one-sided and even plain wrong. I find it better to ask as question about future action and start a dialogue. I find leadership monologue to be Waste.
I would find getting a "steady stream of rapid feedback" like this overwhelming, no matter how small the feedback is. Not all communication is criticism and I am really not sure that feedback needs to be given this often. Perhaps it's just me though.
There is a school of thought that selfish actions are the most honest. I don't agree, but it's often said to me, and I see evidence others believe what they want, by definition is for the best interest of the team.
That’s the whole basis for democracy is it not? That if everyone votes in their own best interest, you’d get a result that best reflects the voting populace.
Not to detract from your point but I think that's the point of constitutional republic over direct democracy. Statute and the judiciary constrains actions such as this which would require a supermajority to enact.
> When you tell my boss bad news before me, even with the best of intentions, I end up getting in a lot of trouble for not knowing before he did. Can you try to tell me first, going forward?
I understand that this is a contrived example for a book, but I wish they would have taken time to contrive a healthier example. As a manager, I can't imagine ever admonishing someone for not knowing something before I did, and at minimum I would explore what's going on.
While this might sound nit-picky, a book read by millions will in some small way create and enforce norms for managers, and do we really want to enforce that in this situation the feedback is for the low-level employee and not the senior manager?
Trying to distill a conversation that could have far reaching ramifications into a '5 second framework' is incredibly cold, and lacking any kind of empathy and awareness of the people on your team.
I feel like I just read a training data set for an AI manager.
This brief excerpt really does not do the Manager Tools' feedback model justice. All of the background has been stripped from it in order to fit in a pithy blog post and without that context it does sound jarring or shallow.
Over the past 3.5 years I've used the Manager Tools "management trinity" (including their feedback model) with my directs and found it works extremely well. If you've got a professional relationship with a direct and have briefed them on changes before enacting them, it doesn't come as a surprise and it's not seen/received as a "drive by."
In addition to Managers Tools they have a second podcast, Career Tools, which is geared towards any working professional. I recommend that one as well.
I used to work for a Japanese company, and a big part of the corporate culture was “Don’t complain, unless you also have a solution.”
This was basically a way to shut people up, and prevent feedback.
It also resulted in really unsatisfactory, badly-thought-out “solutions.”
"There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong."
"The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake."
I do this with my superiors all the time. They really appreciate it, because without this they'd be flying blind as managers. Useful, fact-based, clear bottom-up feedback is super-valuable.
Yes, please do this when giving feedback
> 3. State the impact (“…the result is Y.”)
Your conversation partner might hear an immediate accusation out of this. Your statement will never be objective. Rather talk about yourself as in "... this is how I perceive your behavior".
> 4. Encourage effective future behavior (“Keep it up!” for positive feedback ...)
Yes, it's great to get positively reinforced.
> “Can you change that?” for negative feedback
If you do this to me after 5 seconds of conversation, I will shut off and not take any advice from you. This is bossy.
Tell your conversation partner what their behavior makes you feel like. Formulate a wish for the future. You're not entitled to "change" people. Tell them how you would like to be treated.
If you want to change people, then give them positive reinforcement. If you try to "change" others by negative feedback, they will likely do less of everything and try not to be caught doing anything because it might be the "wrong thing".
edit: formatting