Manage up: Giving Feedback

There are always opportunities to share feedback up, but there are methods to being successful at it.

Transcript

Welcome back to my podcast Scaling Out.

I’ve listened to a lot of interviewees over the years and there was one response that resonated with me. We were asking candidates the question:

Describe a time that you received difficult feedback. How did the conversation go and what was the outcome.

The candidate started her response by stating:

The important thing to realize first is that someone is taking their time to provide you feedback because they want you to improve. No matter how difficult the feedback is to hear, it is coming from a place of helping you improve.

This level of emotional maturity in a new graduate was very impressive and has since helped me frame difficult feedback that I have had to give to team members.

The same type of framing can be used with your manager. Again, you have to be cognizant of any CLM (career limiting moves) so when giving feedback UP the management chain I would offer the following tips.

Understanding the why is extremely important first. Getting background on why the decisions were made they way they are will help frame the constructive feedback appropriately.

Here is an example, your manager has asked for new daily status meeting with a struggling team, but you have noticed this negatively impacts the ability for the team to actually get work completed because this increase in meeting time is eating into the day. Before arguing about whether or not they should continue with the meetings, you need to ask the why. For instance, in this situation your manager is being asked by their leadership to improve communication within a struggling team and this was the manager’s quickest path to achieving that request. Once you understand the goal, you can generate alternate proposals to accomplish the team improvement objectives and meet the leadership’s goal.

Next up is how to communicate this proposal back to your manager. If you just say ‘this isn’t working, this is why it isn’t working and this is what we are going to do instead’ you likely will be met with some reluctance. For most of us, it is difficult to admit that we made a mistake or wrong decisions, so don’t start with that. Start with ‘I understand that leadership has asked for x, I think we can accomplish it with y. I would like permission to trial a new approach so that this is a win-win for everyone.’ This initiates a conversation around what & how to change.

Ultimately, Isnt your job to make your manager’s job as easy as possible? If you include in your conversations the proposed change/strategy/ownership, you are reducing their workload because you are providing a solution. I’ll add to this next time.

Until then, stay safe everyone!