How to Deliver Feedback to Unlock Your Best Team Ever
Have you ever found yourself fuming after someone told you not to take their criticism “personally?” Have you ever struggled to give clear, direct feedback to employees without hurting their feelings or worse, negatively affecting their performance?
You’re not alone if you’ve ever found yourself on either end of this spectrum. Both of these scenarios play out regularly in the workplace. Giving feedback in the workplace is a powerful tool for achieving results. It’s essential to managing teams. It’s also incredibly challenging to do correctly. Most of us fail miserably.
This is especially burdensome for managers. From the time we learn to speak, we’re told that if you don’t have anything nice to say, then you shouldn’t say anything at all. This advice doesn’t work for managers or anyone who works on a team. In other words, everyone that works in your organization. Everyone who works in your organization is responsible for delivering results. They’re trusted to deliver on their projects, complete a task, serve a customer, and to do their part to meet the organization’s objectives. But they can’t do it alone; their job is to lead, to delegate, to manage, and to get things done. Having difficult conversations with subordinates, colleagues, and superiors needs to happen to deliver results and get the job done.
These conversations can be daunting. If conducted poorly, can ruin a relationship with a colleague and compromise the productivity of an entire team. Making conversations effective is a tremendous opportunity that has much room for improvement in every organization we have encountered. Kim Scott is an exception.
Fixing the feedback problem is her mission. She’s the creative genius behind “Radical Candor,” a novel that is rising to the top of Executive’s reading lists. Scott earned her stripes as a highly successful manager at Google before making the switch to Apple University, where she developed classes on optimal management. Embedding vivid storytelling and case studies, as well as psychological and organizational theory, she has created a compelling yet practical framework to teach managers how to be awesome bosses.
Her new management philosophy for being a “kick-ass boss without losing your humanity” focuses on creating an enabling environment for effective, results-driven teams. The four main pillars of her strategy are: to build radically candid relationships, to get, give and encourage guidance, to understand what motivates each person on your team, and to drive results collaboratively.
Build Radically Candid Relationships
There’s a lot of emotional labor that goes into being a manager. Or an employee. On the one hand, work is highly impersonal – it’s a matter of the job being done right or not. On the other hand, it is incredibly personal – it’s a compilation of your best efforts over a few weeks, months or years. In some cases, this can literally include blood, sweat, and tears.
Great bosses acknowledge this and develop strong relationships with their employees. They make their trust and respect in their employees known. Great teams recognize that they must have trust, care, and honesty with everyone on the team. They have no exceptions. The radical candor method shows that the best bosses do two distinct things: they care personally and challenge directly.
Caring involves leaving the notion of keeping it entirely “professional” at the door, and treating your employees as true equals. Caring means acknowledging that we are all human beings with human struggles and feelings, not emotionless robots. It also means steadfastly discarding the damaging sense of superiority that can impede personal connection.
Challenging directly is a two-way street where both the manager and employee care enough to point out both the things that aren’t going well and to admit their mistakes. When paired with caring, it can allow both parties to build the best relationship of your career.
Create a Culture of Open Communication
Radical candor is a bit of a paradox: it’s much about being honest and authentic as it is about being strategic and intentional in your communication. Caring personally and challenging directly are the two dimensions of proper guidance that help achieve radical candor. But you can easily fall short on one – or even both – of those dimensions and end up in a less-than-ideal relationship with your employee. The table below gives an overview of three toxic states of guidance.
In essence, obnoxious aggression is when management acts without taking two seconds to show they care. The result is employees that feel belittled, undervalued, humiliated – the list goes on. Manipulative insincerity is the second poor guidance form. This happens when you don’t care enough to challenge directly, so you end up giving praise in place of criticism. It can be political – an attempt to “get ahead” by being fake – but produces no growth for either party. The final category is ruinous empathy. It’s an attempt to keep the peace at work. But avoiding or even intentionally overlooking poor performance to avoid tension produces measly results, and the team performance as a whole will suffer.
Understand What Motivates Each Person on Your Team
Each person on your team is motivated by different external and internal factors. They all have different ambitions and skill-sets. Some are “rock-stars” that want to stay focused on their craft. They find their work rewarding and don’t need another promotion to feel fulfilled. Others are “superstars” that need to be challenged and given opportunities to explore growth and fulfill their potential. Both are equally valuable to a team.
Typically, talent management focuses on the superstars and sourcing ways to keep them engaged. This approach doesn’t work for rockstars who’s motivation comes from things unrelated to their growth trajectory. Ditch the “one-size-fits-all” formula for performance management and start identifying the unique motivators of each person to maximize the performance of your employees and team as a whole.
In a similar vein, managers often focus on struggling employees to get their performance up to par. This might be good for the individual, but it probably isn’t for the team. Imagine if you invested that time in making your good employees great, or your great employees phenomenal. Focusing your energy on excellence as opposed to mediocrity is a quick way to boost the performance of the team unit.
Drive Results Collaboratively
We all want to get things done as efficiently as possible, and sometimes the quickest and easiest way is to tell people what to do. Kim Scott calls this the “get shit done” (GSD) wheel. Knowing how to get things done without being autocratic is an art that takes effort to curate. Laying the groundwork for collaboration releases your team from the GSD wheel that stifles creativity in the short run, and ruins relationships in the long run.
There are seven simple steps to create teams that excel at both productivity and collaboration:
Listen
Actively welcome the voices of all team members and candidly listen to their suggestions to create a culture of listening. This shows your employees that you value their contributions. Strive to incorporate an element of their feedback into your solution where possible.
Clarify
Ask for clarification if you don’t understand the point your employee is trying to make. It’s a way of showing engagement. The idea may have tremendous insight even if expressed poorly. Your role as a boss is like that of an editor, not an author.
Debate
The debate takes time and energy, true. But the good debate also gives back time, in the form of efficiency, and gives back energy, in the form of motivated and impassioned employees. Scott suggests the following rules to guide your debates: keep the conversation focused on ideas, not egos, create an obligation to dissent, pause for emotion/exhaustion, use humor and have fun, be clear about when the debate will end. Don’t jump rapidly to a decision just because the debate has gotten painful.
Decide
To escape the GSD wheel, you need to create a transparent decision-making process that empowers the people closest to the facts to make as many decisions as possible, as opposed to always taking the reins.
Persuade
Once your decision has been made, you need to convince others to get on board with the decision to execute it. The lift for this will be lighter if they’ve been involved with the decision-making process through active debate and listening.
Execute
Part of a boss’s job is to take the “collaboration tax” on themselves so that his or her team can spend more time executing. Follow these simple rules: don’t waste your team’s time, keep the “dirt under your fingernails” by getting involved in the actual work and block time to execute.
Learn
Good bosses learn from their mistakes and are intentional in implementing lessons learned the next time around. And yet, denial is the more common reaction to imperfection than learning. Guard yourself against the two enormous pressures that lead bosses to quit: pressure to be perfect and burnout.
Don’t feel overwhelmed by this step-wise checklist. It isn’t intended to become your rulebook for structuring your conversations. In fact, it’s more of a description of how your conversations will start to flow once you adopt a collaboratively candid management style naturally. These conversations don’t have to be lengthy to be rich – try it and see.
Radical candor can transform organizations and even lend themselvesa competitive advantage in the industry. It creates a workplace where employees are engaged and respected, and where management is sensitized to their areas of improvement. Radical candor leads to innovations in processes and mitigation in risks. It can empower your organization to execute winning strategies.
Steve Jobs was famous for getting into heated debates with his employees over his ideas. He wanted them to tell him when his idea was terrible. He wanted his ideas to be challenged and refined into their purest form of perfection. Apple is one of the most innovative and nimble multinational corporations in the world because of his open and welcoming approach to feedback, which continues on today. Radical candor is guinuinely a win-win.
In the spirit of irony, allow me to be honest with you: radical candor is challenging to implement. Not every organization is ready for this cultural transformation. I encourage you to be one of the few that is.
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