How I think about giving feedback at work
Intended audience: people who work a similar performance and feedback culture to the one at my current workplace. The principles probably extend to other environments, but adjust accordingly.
I've structured this around common topics I find myself discussing with people at work. The context here is specifically formal, written feedback cycles. Giving ad-hoc feedback kindly and promptly is very useful, but is out of scope for this post.
I think this person is doing a great job, there's really nothing they're doing poorly. I don't have any constructive feedback to give.
- That may be true! And it means this person is at least meeting expectations.
- But for anyone, at any level, there's either a higher rating or a promotion that they could get.
- What would it look like for this person to exceed, or greatly exceed expectations? What could they do to get promoted to the next level?
- It might be something that doesn't make any sense for them at their current level, and that's fine. It's still useful to articulate, "You did great in (situation). The next-level behavior could be to turn (your plan) into a system that could be adopted by (our larger organization)".
I feel bad giving constructive feedback.
- A framing I love is: "here's how you could have even more impact". It doesn't imply that the person isn't already having enough impact -- it's just an idea from your perspective how they can go from good to great.
- I think it's almost always possible to give constructive feedback such that it still feels like it comes from a generally positive and appreciative place, and I think this sort of feedback -- in addition to, or rather as a result of being much more pleasant to receive -- is more likely to be accepted and acted upon.
Should I always give constructive feedback?
- Yes. Or at least, you should always try really hard to.
- A few things are true: 1) Most people aren't good at giving feedback. So 2) Most people don't receive good constructive feedback. But 3) Most people want to get better at what they do. Therefore: if you don't give someone feedback, there's a good chance that no one else will.
Do I need to share the feedback with this person, or can I just share it with their manager?
- I think both are fine. I tend to share privately by default, but this varies depending on the closeness and trust I have with the recipient, and the content of the feedback.
- It might take effort to frame your feedback in a way that doesn't feel like it'll damage your relationship with the recipient. If you can't figure out how to do so, or you simply lack the time and energy, I think it's better to share privately with the manager and let them figure out the messaging than to sanitize the value out of your feedback just so you can share it with the recipient.
- I also think that sharing with just a manager is useful for cases where you have low confidence in your feedback. Sometimes I've noticed a few scattered data points, or the hint of a trend that I might be misinterpreting. Or maybe I just have feedback that's dependent on some unknown information to me -- like the person's seniority level, or what expectations their manager set for them on a project. In these scenarios I like to give the feedback to the manager only, since the manager will be able to contextualize the feedback and deliver it more usefully. It might be that your "not sure, maybe kinda seems like" is a theme that shows up in feedback from all of this person's peers, and now the manager has a high-confidence growth area to convey to the recipient.
- This all assumes you trust the manager will do a good job conveying the feedback. If not, consider if you're okay with the possibility that your feedback never actually makes it to the recipient.
Should I give over-generalized, ambiguous feedback, or give specific examples?
- Okay, no one ever asked me this. I just felt it was important to include.
- Specifics are SO much more useful.
- No one wants to get feedback like "You tend to make bad decisions" -- what decisions? Why were they bad? In contrast, hearing "During (project), (person) warned about XYZ but your solution to (project) didn't address it. When (event) happened later, XYZ made it difficult to do (thing)" is amazing.
- Keep in mind that sometimes your feedback is wrong! You might not have the full picture to understand the person's decisions, and that's totally fine. The more specifics you give, the more you enable the person and/or their manager to interpret your feedback in context.
- In the above example, perhaps the warning from (person) never actually made it to the recipient, and now they can try to debug where the communication occurred. Alternatively, maybe the recipient did receive the warning, but never knew about the difficulty XYZ caused you later. Now they can reflect on their choice to ignore XYZ, and also figure out why they didn't realize the impact it had later.
- The point is: the more specific information you can include in your feedback, the more likely that the recipient is able to find value in it.
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