Nobody likes unpleasant and uncomfortable conversations. What an absolute shocker, right? 🙀

Sadly, for people managers, there's hardly a way around those. But feedback, no matter how tough, doesn't have to be an unpleasant experience at all. Quite the opposite. If shared in an insightful and supportive way, it can impact those around you in all sorts of meaningful ways. Here I'll share my four biggest learnings concerning feedback that I've accrued over the years of my leadership experience.

Let's talk  real-life examples, shall we? I'll paint you a picture:

• It’s feedback time of the year. Whether you practice continuous feedback (recommended) or annual appraisals (still better than no feedback at all), there is probably a point in time where you are required to evaluate one's results in the context of their goals, career level and compensation;
• You have a team of excellent people, however, one of your team members is falling behind some of the expectations of their level, and mistakes are starting to show;
• Some context-specific circumstances might have impacted their results. They might have shuffled between teams, managers, and projects over the past year. Their previous manager might have left the company on a short notice without a proper handover. Or you simply haven't had enough time to spend in one-on-ones and provide them with the much necessary support.

It's your job to share constructive feedback to help them improve and get back on track. So, what can you do? Where do you start?

☝️ First And Foremost, Seek To Understand

It's important to try to learn as much as you can about the other person's perspective before jumping into any conclusions or evaluations. You could ask them to fill in a Start, Stop & Continue self-evaluation form. This will help you keep the conversation focused on specific situations and understand what they observe as their positive contributions (Continue) and where they see opportunities to improve (Start & Stop).

Don’t be shy to ask why they believe those things are important, and why they behaved (or didn't behave) in a certain way. Delve deep into their motivations to really understand where they are coming from and find out how you can best support them.

Make sure to understand the expectations that were previously communicated to them. You'd be surprised as to how many times, where there are issues in performance, the actual problem boils down to misalignment on expectations, or the lack of thereof.

Reflect on the things that were expected of them and that you believe were under their control—those are the things you'll want to focus your feedback on. It doesn’t make sense to feedback on things that weren't asked of them, or those that they had little influence over. I'd feel quite puzzled to get feedback on my coding skills as I don't code as much anymore, and to my knowledge, I'm not expected to spend a bulk of my time coding. I would disagree and dismiss that feedback.

Have you collected enough context to be able to provide constructive feedback? See if you can answer these guiding questions:

1. Am I aware of all the factors that have contributed to this person's performance?
2. Is there clarity and alignment around the expectations of this job?
3. Do I have a complete picture of their contributions?
4. What could they have done differently to improve their work results?
   

✌️ Reflect On The Job Expectations

Whatever management style you might be energising, you won't get far without providing clear expectations on what's required from every individual on your team. It must be clear from the start how your people will be evaluated. Even if the how is open to interpretation—depending on your team's level of seniority—you absolutely need a specific and mutual understanding of the what.

Job requirements are as fluid as anything else in the dynamic work environment of today. They need to be frequently re-evaluated if you want to provide clear direction and guidance to your team.

We won't go as deep into expectations setting as it's quite a subject in and of its own, but I will say that clarity in expectations will serve you well in pretty much any relationship, at work and in life.

🤟 Balance The Good And The Not So Good

Striking the right balance between positive feedback and constructive criticism is a skill you'll want to master. Too much focus on the negatives will leave your people feeling discouraged, defensive and self-conscious about their abilities. Use every opportunity you get to recognise their accomplishments and successes. Share what you've observed as key strengths and talents they can tap into. If you're not able to find a number of positive things about this person, then it might just be too late for performance improvement.

You might want to consider which of the development areas you've just identified (question No.4 ☝️) will be relevant in the context of the job expectations. If there are quite a few areas you believe can be improved, it could be wise to draw their focus to the ones that will help them successfully meet their future objectives.

Go an extra mile and come up with a support plan for areas where you forsee they might experience difficulties. Let them know that they can count on you in overcoming challenges that come their way. You could offer your advice, but do ask for their input on how they would like to be supported. After all, they are the masters of their own development.

Think you're ready for that conversation? Consider the following guiding questions:

1. Has anything changed since the last review in terms of the job expectations?
2. What can this person Start/Stop/Continue to do in order to meet these expectations?
3. [Continue] What have I observed as their key strengths and how can those be of help?
4. [Start & Stop] Where do I see potential challenges and how can I best support them in overcoming those challenges?
   

🖖 Build a Feedback Friendly Culture

What can be of help on your mission to make feedback a more pleasant and valuable experience for everyone is a solid feedback process—as in running a regular cadence of feedback and performance talks throughout the year—and a reliable tool that supports multi perspective feedback and helps you build feedback habits across your team.

Exchanging feedback enables individuals and teams to align and define their own standards of successful performance. We might not know what excellence is in its essence, and it likely spells out differently for every individual, but we can come to an agreement on what we collectively perceive as excellent, valuable, important—but also inadequate, unacceptable or lacking. Aligning on these shared norms and standards is what makes feedback so important.

A few flash wisdoms before we bring this to a close:

• Giving feedback should target behaviours (never the person behind those behaviours) and the impact they have on results, projects and progress.
• When it gets uncomfortable, keep your positive intent top of mind.
• Stick to the facts, be honest, be direct and keep it simple.
  

The bottom line is: feedback is king. 👑 It is the absolute prerequisite of any personal or professional development. And feedback-sharing is a skill that anyone can master. I hope my learnings will come in handy the next time you find yourself dwelling over delivering some improvement feedback to your team.

Did you find this insightful? Let us know at hello@imfrank.app.

I'm Frank is a fast, simple and fun feedback app that helps your team share real-time development feedback and praise without ever having to leave Slack!

For all the bad rap that follows critical feedback, the most common complaint leaders get is that we could all do with more of it.

Time and again, feedback comes up as one of the lowest scoring factors in engagement surveys. Data shows that we either don't get enough of it, or it's often too vague and generic to help us improve. Still, being fully honest with ourselves, do we really want to invite more negative feedback? 🤔

Individual differences are significant in tolerance to criticism. Some people are perfectly fine with being pointed towards their mistakes. The cartoonist and writer Scott Addams claims to be delighted to admit that he's failed at more challenges than anyone he knows. Our receptiveness to criticism has a lot to do with how we frame failure and attribute causes to events — some of which can be learned and developed.

For most of us, though, being criticised is uncomfortable at best, and de-stabilising or even devastating at worst. On a rational level, we all know feedback powers growth. Essentially, feedback is information to how other people perceive us. Taking in other perspectives helps us develop a more holistic understanding of our behaviour and the impact we're having on others. Emotionally though, we can't help feeling discouraged in the face of criticism. For something that's supposed to be helping us improve, corrective feedback can feel quite disheartening.

As it turns out, our emotional reaction to criticism might have roots in evolution. Being socially accepted is one of basic human needs, and criticism can put our social standing at risk. It can also impact our sense of self-worth, which is heavily influenced by how others perceive us. Neurologically, there's little difference between our reaction to a negative critique and an actual life endangering situation. As Daniel Goleman puts it:

Threats to our standing in the eyes of others can be remarkably potent biologically, almost as those to our very survival.

For better or worse, our brains are incredible at protecting us from negative influences from the outside world. We've developed neural mechanisms to block or filter out stimuli that could potentially harm our self-image and social status. It follows that defensiveness and denial in reaction to criticism are natural responses, triggered automatically by the amygdala — the part of our brain responsible for interpretation of experiences, memory and emotional reactions.

What amygdala does essentially is scan the incoming information for the level of threat. If the data is interpreted as non-threatening, it gets a safe passage to neocortex — the rational part of our brain — where it can be processed, stored and integrated into our long-term memory and perception of the world. The feedback received can be taken in as valuable input and we can reflect on how our behaviour needs to change in order to achieve better results.

If, however, the information is labeled as a threat, the amygdala activates survival responses in the lower parts of the brain, overriding the conscious control, and giving us emotions of fear, distress and confusion. This might explain why reactions we sometimes get to critical feedback can seem inadequate and over the top.

If you just skimmed through the parts on the brain structures, that's alright. The key take-away is that some defensiveness is perfectly normal in the face of criticism. The neural reaction chain helped preserve our species for millions of years. However, what was once advantageous and significant from an evolutionary perspective, is now all so frustrating and damaging in the work environment. 💔

There are very few things more challenging for a manager to deal with than defensiveness to criticism. Often times these uncomfortable conversations get avoided or postponed until the very last moment. Needless to say that employees often get caught by surprise to learn they're being put on a performance improvement, or yet worse, that termination is being mentioned as a possibility. This can only reinforce the reaction chain described above, and when it comes to that, improvement is a very unlikely outcome.

In conclusion, criticism can feel emotionally draining, but withholding it from others, we deprive them of valuable opportunities for improvement. As leaders, our most important job is to do everything in our power to enable people to grow. So we need to get out there and get uncomfortable, knowing that we're doing a good thing, even if hurts some feelings. Fortunately, there are ways to make feedback a different, better experience for everyone involved. We'll explore these in our next article on how to offer criticism in the right spirit and make sure it gets to travel to neocortex. 🧳

Did you find this insightful? Let us know at hello@imfrank.app.

I'm Frank is a fast, simple and fun feedback app that helps your team share real-time development feedback and praise without ever having to leave Slack!