At my first internship, I played ping-pong in the game room almost every day (this is actually how I met my husband). There was a week or so when I didn’t really know how I was doing on my project, but everyday, I hacked away at it for many hours. One day, my intern host mentioned “hey looks like things are going really well, you’re getting a lot done.” Instead of working even harder, this confirmed that I was doing alright, and ramped up my ping-pong activities instead.
When I became a manager, I realized how differently people take in and absorb feedback. For some people, you could hit them over the head with a hammer that says “YOU’RE DOING AN AMAZING JOB” and they’d mumble thanks and redirect the conversation to all the things they could improve on (or slack off like me). Others can hear critical feedback and have it just drift out the other ear as quickly as it went in.
Part of the job is receiving and seeking out feedback for your direct reports, but a much more significant part is figuring out a strategy that results in behavior change. Here are some things to consider and keep in mind.
Direct feedback
First of all, a lot of times, you’re not the right person to deliver the feedback. If you’ve built up trust with your reports and others on your team, people will come to you with challenges and feedback on others. It’s tempting to want to solve other peoples’ problems, but in many cases, you want to coach someone to give feedback to their coworker directly. This is especially true if you know both individuals and have high confidence that they can have a successful feedback conversation that will deepen their trust. Most people don’t feel comfortable doing this themselves, which is why they go to a manager. By teaching them the skills to do so themselves, they gain confidence in their ability to navigate these situations on their own.
Context
Because people take in feedback so differently, context is super important. Say you have a junior engineer who has taken on some tech lead responsibilities, and you’ve observed that they’re forgetting to send weekly updates to the team. “Hey make sure you send those updates” is an approach. Painting a picture of how they’re really stepping up in a bunch of ways and have overall exceeded expectations of a junior engineer, and how demonstrating reliability fits into that as they expand their impact is a better approach.
Positive feedback
Some natural coordinators and leaders, early in their careers, have no idea that the things that come naturally to them are unique. If you’re effortlessly good at something, you may assume that others are too. Clarify for your coworkers and direct reports what it is they excel in, and what the impact is on the team of those strengths. “Good job running that meeting” is vague, but “Thanks for giving everyone a chance to speak uninterrupted. I noticed everyone felt very comfortable and safe to express their opinion, and we had great clarity by the end of it. Sometimes meetings have no clear agenda, and then it requires many equally unclear followup meetings, which is frustrating and a waste of time. Your facilitation made the meeting very effective, and it felt like the time was well spent” actually describes how they influenced team dynamics, and highlights their particular strengths.
Root issues
While it may be simpler to just be the messenger and pass on all pieces of feedback, keep in mind that people have limited capacity to hear critical feedback, when it is framed as such. Core issues that people are having at work can manifest in very different ways. A lack of foundation of trust between an individual and their team can result in tense code reviews, disinterest in meetings, slipped deadlines. It can be completely demoralizing to enumerate all the feedback from many people. Focusing on one core issue can provide focus and be more effective.
Desired outcomes
Think about what change you’d like to happen. If you feel like someone has wronged you, it can feel really good temporarily to rant and get it all out there. But if your desired outcome is that they change their behavior next time around, starting a conversation off by putting them on the defensive is often ineffective. By focusing on desired outcomes, you can brainstorm an effective strategy. But don’t use this as a roundabout way to avoid confrontation either — sometimes being direct is the most effective way to bring about change.
Keeping all those things in mind, rehearse a sample conversation out loud and then pretend you’re the feedback recipient. Did the feedback make you feel defensive and like you’d done something wrong? Or did you feel thankful and motivated to change?
After many years working full-time at tech companies, I’m now coaching and consulting engineering teams. If you’d like some help scaling your team or developing yourself as a leader, email me at jean@jeanhsu.com.
