Giving Feedback

There are few phrases scarier than "Can I give you some feedback?"

As a manager or executive, one of the most important things you can do is provide feedback to employees to help them develop their skills. 

Throughout your career, people will give you you feedback. Early on, as an individual contributor, your manager should give you feedback on how to improve your performance, whether it’s how to write better quality code, or better present to customers. Sometimes you’ll learn useful skills from your manager. And sometimes, you learn to be unlike your manager.  

An entry level sales associate I know receives input from her manager routinely telling her why she’s not closing deals. Helpful? Yes. It’s helped her decide to look for a new job where the management is more willing to invest in skills development. My bet is she’ll be a great sales manager because she’s already seen how not to motivate people. (Could the bar be any lower?) 

Chester, the VP of Engineering at Duo learned how to be great by working for VPs who were awful at their job and vowing to do things differently. Chester cared about people and helped them develop their technical and communications skills. He is one of the best VP’s I’ve ever worked with. 

Good managers teach their employees the best practices in their field. These aren’t short cuts or “hacks” like those internet ads that purport to help you shed ten pounds of belly fat in a week. By best practices, I mean the techniques that professionals have developed over many years to improve their rate of success. 

So what’s a good way to give employees feedback?

Feedback should be timely, specific and actionable. It does not need to be dressed up in a lot of sensitive language. But keep in mind the goal of feedback is to help someone improve. It’s not a lecture or a put-down. It’s meant to help them develop their skills. 

Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades

One best practice our HR leader at Duo, Ashley, developed was around providing feedback using the Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades model. The idea is consider feedback along two dimensions positive/negative and general / specific. It’s easy to provide positive general feedback along the lines of “That was a good presentation!” But if you really want to help someone, you must identify what was specifically good. Otherwise, there’s no take-away, nothing that can be learned. So you need to dig a little deeper to consider what made the presentation impactful. Was it the examples? Was it the level of detail? Was it the clean design? Was it the competitive information? Don’t leave them guessing.  

Similarly the general negative “You’re not going to close deals that way” is useless at best and likely demotivating. But if you said “You offered a discount without establishing the value to the customer” or “You should ask them about their current situation before diving in with a solution” this will allow them to develop their skills and do better.

So take your generalized positive Heart and negative Club feedback and provide more specific detail so that they are useful Diamonds and Spades that reinforce the positive behaviors you want to see more of and help people learn. 

Praise in Public

It’s a bit of a cliché but in general consider the rule: praise in public, criticize in private. There are cases where a constructive critique can be done in front of others, but I have seen negative results more often than positive. 

I have a friend who told me that getting christened by Bill Gates with “that’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard” in a product review meeting was a right of passage at Microsoft. It may have been, but my guess is it still stung. After he left Microsoft, he went to work for a competitor and ate their lunch. 

Here are some additional ideas to ensure your feedback is received. 

• Don’t wait for the quarterly review to give feedback. When the dog pees on the carpet, you don’t wait until the end of the quarter to scold them. Feedback should be within 48 hours. 

• Don’t deliver a s**t sandwich. That’s when you dilute bad news by covering it on either side with good news. “Hey that customer presentation was great… but the ROI analysis was lousy… and your examples were super!” At best this is a mixed message to an employee. More likely they’ll hear the positive feedback and gloss over anything else, which is exactly what you did. 

• In cases of ongoing poor performance or unacceptable behavior (toxic complaining, political maneuvering, integrity issues, sexism, racism, or other HR violations) you should deliver the feedback verbally and follow up in writing. Make it clear that if they cannot improve, they will not remain employed.

• If you’re not sure on how to start a conversation on feedback, try to be empathic rather than dictatorial. If you say “Here’s what I would have done” you come across as second-guessing. If you say “I saw you struggle with how to explained the technology. One thing I’ve found works well is to give a customer example of someone from the same industry” it’s more likely to stick. 

When you give feedback it should always be with kindness and the goal of helping someone improve. Not everyone will listen to feedback and not everyone will improve. But as a manager, it’s better to err on the side of over-communicating. At the very least, you employees should never be blindsided when they are not getting the job done. 

For those who didn’t figure out the picture at the top, that’s Link Wray, considered to be one of the pioneers of guitar feedback in his live shows. Has someone helped you with feedback? What made it work? Share your thoughts by posting a comment below.

In a follow up post, I’ll talk about how you can best receive feedback.