Feedback can be hard – hard to give, and hard to receive.  People want feedback so that they know if they’re meeting expectations and improve, but dread getting bad news.  Annual performance reviews do more harm than good.  So it’s no surprise that when I interviewed forty people managers and asked them what they wish they had known when they first started managing, “how to give feedback well” was a really common response.

There are a lot of great articles and books on how to give effective feedback.  Two feedback books that I recommend all the time in my work are Crucial Conversations and Radical Candor.  I won’t rehash what they talk about here.  Instead, in this article I’ll talk about some common mistakes that a new manager can make when giving feedback, with some stories that my interviewees were kind enough to share with me about their early years as managers.

Mistake #1:  Avoiding giving hard feedback because you don’t want to be mean or hurt someone’s feelings

“The biggest thing I've worked on as a manager is to be more direct with constructive and negative feedback. Early on I really danced around it. I'm not naturally a direct-conflict-addressing kind of person. And so I would put it off.  In one case the result was, I had to fire someone because they were so badly behaving... I could have helped prevent that by being more direct along the way with that person. And I regret those things. I hurt people unnecessarily because of my own fear.”

Managers who avoid having the hard conversations will sometimes try strategies like dropping vague hints, or moving work assignments from low performers to high performers.  Some managers will go so far as to do the work themselves, just to avoid the hard conversation.  These strategies just delay and grow the problem, or introduce new problems.  (And “hoping that something will improve” is not a useful strategy.) 

Of course no one wants to be “the bad guy”.  But the fear of being perceived that way is often unfounded.  People want to know how they are doing, and how they can improve.  If you approach performance issues as a coach and not an examiner, the conversation will probably be more positive that you might expect.

To my shame, I made this mistake myself in my early years as a manager.  A high performer on my staff had moved into a new position where they were just not working out.  Instead of addressing the issues directly I found myself procrastinating, hoping they’d soon figure it out.  The staff member eventually sought me out and demanded some feedback – hearing nothing at all from me was stressing them out in this new position far more than bad feedback would have.

So we sat down and had the hard conversation – which started with an apology from me.  The conversation was not fun, but turned out to be positive, strengthened our mutual trust and led to a great outcome.  If you really care about your people, and you approach the conversation as a mutual listening and problem-solving session, you don’t need to be “the bad guy”.  You can be a partner, or a coach.

Mistake #2:  Only pointing our what’s wrong

“I used to give really, really harsh critiques in the beginning. Not mean but really harsh. And I would barely give positive critique. I was never being mean but I always had really, really harsh critiques and I didn't give it with a lot of empathy.”

“For some reason some people would often perceive me as quite grumpy. I think I was frequently very direct and I didn't think I was being grumpy. I just thought I was telling them how things were.”

Some managers manage by exception – they give no feedback at all if the team is meeting expectations, and only speak up when they see something they don’t like.  They don’t see any need to speak up if things are good, because no change is required.

Unfortunately, that’s often not the perception of the team.  Team members who aren’t getting feedback can become quite anxious.  They might conclude that they are being ignored because the manager doesn’t like them or is considering them for layoff.  Teams who don’t get positive feedback can feel completely unappreciated.  And managers who do this develop a reputation of being someone who hates everything and can only see the fault in people.

Giving positive feedback is just as important, if not more so, than negative.  If you let people know what’s working well, and how it’s made a positive impact, you will see more of it.  People who feel appreciated perform better.  Hopefully your team is operating well most of the time, so most of your feedback should be positive.  And as a side benefit, people who get positive feedback most of the time are far more likely to take negative feedback seriously than people who only hear complaints.

Mistake #3:  Being inauthentic when giving feedback

“Empathy doesn't mean sandwiching.”

The manager who said that to me was talking about the famous “shit sandwich” method of giving negative feedback, where you take the difficult thing you want to say, and layer it between two “nice” things.  People see that coming a mile away, and while some may appreciate the attempted kindness, many will see it as insincere or condescending (or will miss the hard feedback altogether).

This is not to say you shouldn’t give positive feedback along with negative (see Mistake #2 above).  But people can tell the difference between substantive feedback and a vague compliment you pulled out of hat to soften the blow of something else you are going to say.

So what does it mean to be authentic when you give feedback?  It means approaching the conversation like a human being, and not putting on some role as The Boss or The Infallible Expert.  Don’t say things you know aren’t true just to make someone feel better.  Don’t make promises you won’t keep.  Answer questions honestly.

Also, don't assume you know what the problem is.  It’s easy as a manager to see a performance problem and jump immediately to “this person is incompetent/lazy/stupid”.  That assumption is called the fundamental attribution error and will lead you to make very bad decisions.  Instead, apply the local rationality principle – assume that “people do reasonable things given their goals, knowledge, understanding of the situation and focus of attention at a particular moment.”  If you start from that principle, you can have a useful conversation to figure out the root cause of a performance problem – it is a lack of knowledge or practice, a dysfunctional process, conflicting demands, bad inputs, or something else?  Does your staff member need training, or coaching, or require accommodation for their neurodiversity?  Does a system or process need fixing?  Does your staff member know something that you don’t?  When the conversation is an authentic partnership to fix a problem, and not Passing Judgement From Above, you can skip the sandwich and focus on what’s important.

Mistake #4:  Giving feedback about things that aren’t relevant

“[My staff] reacted surprisingly negatively to me trying to tell them exactly how they are and how they work. It was too blunt and too, too assertive…

30 plus years later, it's relatively easy now for me to give feedback. Today, when I give feedback, all I care about is to give the information that will help my team member to grow.  Everything else –  like the little mistakes, the annoying habits, behavior that maybe annoys me but doesn’t change the path of the employee – I put away that feedback.”

One of the hardest things about delegation for some managers is watching their staff do things differently than they would do it.  (My own mother couldn’t watch me bake, because being left-handed I stirred the bowl counter-clockwise, and it irrationally bugged her.  She had to leave the room when I was making cookies.)  It’s important to distinguish between something that’s worse, and something that’s just different.  Assuming your staff are competent, giving them the autonomy to do their jobs in a way that works for them is key to their well-being. 

Giving feedback on aspects of someone’s personality – something the seems to happen almost exclusively to female employees (no matter the gender of the manager) is also something you should avoid.  It doesn't help, and it makes people feel like they don’t belong, which decreases psychological safety in the team.  

Mistake #5:  Not establishing the trust or psychological safety required for feedback to have impact

“Our research was showing that design team was ineffective. And [the design manager] actually started excluding me from meetings and then telling people that I was basically really negative and all I did was criticize things. Because of course use of research was seen as criticism, even though it was objective data based on real customers.”

In this case, the research manager had the courage to give the difficult feedback, but the recipient of the bad news rejected the content because they felt attacked, or perhaps feared for their job position if the news got out.  If the design manager had trusted the research manager’s intentions (to help make them more successful), then this could have been the start of a great conversation about how the design process might change, or whether the right structures were in place to support the work, or whether the research was looking at the right things.

Establishing trust with your staff and co-workers takes time.  You can’t make trust happen with a stirring speech or sincere promise.  A person’s trust in you is based on the sum total of interactions with you that they’ve experienced or observed.  Do you treat everyone with respect?  Do you listen with interest when people tell you things?  Do you keep your promises?  Do you react to criticism with anger or curiosity? Do you admit your mistakes or lack of knowledge?  Do you demonstrate that you trust your staff to make decisions?  Once you have established that you are trusting and trustworthy and have their best interest at heart, your feedback will be more effective.

If you are giving feedback to someone who doesn’t know you, be aware that they do not yet have any reason to trust you or your motivations, and therefore it’s really important to frame your feedback well.  This article by Charity Majors has some great advice about how to communicate when trust is low.  

Giving feedback well can be hard.  But it gets easier when you have taken the time to develop trust and when you really care about the people on your team and want them to succeed.  (If you are a manager and don’t care about the people on your team, you should resign immediately and find another job where you will cause less damage.)

Caring doesn’t mean accepting poor performance or bad behaviour.  (As one manager said to me, “if you don’t care about your staff, they won’t care about your goals”).  Having frequent, authentic feedback points with your team will help keep things on track, drive engagement, and fix the root causes of problems before things get worse.

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