This is a concise post, summarizing Manager Tools podcasts about feedback. Examples are mine, I couldn’t remember specific examples.

Manager Tools recommendations are based on data about what’s effective gathered from companies from different industries and of different sizes.

Purpose of Feedback

The only purpose of feedback is to encourage productive behavior and to discourage unproductive behavior in the future.

Why Give Feedback?

As a manager, you are measured by results and retention. Results are achievable through behaviors. Your job as a manager is to adjust the behaviors, mostly through feedback, in order to improve results.

Prerequisites

For a feedback to be effective, there must be established relationship. In a professional context, the way to establish and maintain a relationship between a manager and their directs are weekly one-on-one meetings (which deserve a separate post). Without established relationship, feedback will most likely be ineffective. After having one-on-ones for some time, you can start with positive feedback, then add negative.

Be calm when giving feedback. If you are angry, wait until you are calm to give feedback.

Frequency

Overwhelming majority of directs want more feedback. Therefore, the feedback must be short. If it’s not short, it won’t be frequent.

Length

One feedback instance should take 30-90 seconds. (Don’t remember the exact numbers but something close to this).

Timing

The more adjacent in time the feedback is to the discussed behavior, the more effective it is.

Positive to Negative Ratio

Positive feedback is when you encourage productive behavior. Negative feedback is when you discourage unproductive behavior.

Ideally, for 10 positive pieces of feedback there would be one negative piece.

What’s Worthy of Feedback?

Pretty much any behavior, positive or negative.

Note that the amorphous “culture” is just a set of accepted behaviors. Maintaining “culture” can only be done through continuous feedback (by managers on all levels) and can not be done by producing the famous “our culture” style documents alone.

Delivery

Deliver in private. In order of decreasing effectiveness, as for any other communication:

• Face to face
• Video conference
• Voice call

Procedure and Content

Giving feedback consists of the following steps.

Ask

Ask if the recipient is ready: “Can I give you some feedback?”

Do not proceed with feedback if the answer is no. In general, don’t ask questions when the response is irrelevant.

Describe the Situation

Example: “yesterday during the meeting”.

Describe the Behavior

Example: “you were talking over other people “

Describe the Effect

Example: “it made the discussion less effective” (TODO: better phrasing)

Ask to do More or Less

Example: “please don’t talk over other people in future meetings”

This part is left out if the person you are talking to is not under your management. You can’t ask of more or less of a particular behavior in this case. You operate under assumption that the person was not aware of the effect of their behavior and providing the insight can help. If you omit this part, the conversation is not called feedback (according to this model) anymore.

Positive Example

– Can I give you some feedback?

– Sure

– You had deliverable X. You had delivered it on time and the quality met the expectations. This unblocked team Y on time and we are on schedule to finish the whole project, which is important for the client. Please continue delivering on time and to the expected quality.

– Good. Thanks!

Notes:

• The feedback is about specific behaviors.
• Schedule and quality of the deliverables are also behaviors.

Common Mistakes

Discussing Attitudes

Do not discuss attitudes, only behaviors. “You have a shitty attitude” is too amorphous and will cause “no, I don’t”. That’s an argument that you can’t possibly win. You should only give feedback about behaviors.

Root Cause Analysis

Don’t try to do root cause analysis with the direct. You are not well equipped to analyze what’s going on inside a head of another person.

More generally, don’t slip into digging into the past. The focus of feedback is future behavior.

Accumulating

Don’t wait for several instances of behavior to occur before giving feedback. Common mistake is to wait “to make sure we have a real issue here”.

Ignoring “Normal” Behavior

The excuse “this is the expected behavior of a person in this role” is invalid. Do give positive feedback for any behavior you want to continue in the future.

Asymmetric Delivery

Making positive and negative feedback items delivery asymmetrical is a mistake. They should be delivered in an identical manner except for the last section when you ask to do more or less of the behavior.

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I intend to update this post for better phrasing and possibly more content (still keeping it concise).

Ideally, each point should have a link to the original podcast for deeper understanding. Hope I’ll get to do this some day.