Chapter 8
Elephant: You Don’t Know How to Give and Receive Effective Feedback
I like a turkey and cranberry sandwich. A BLT. A British Marks & Spencer’s prawn mayonnaise on granary bread. A real butter and marmite sandwich on a crusty white loaf.
What I hate is a feedback sandwich.
We all know how it goes. Say something nice, then say something critical, then say something nice again to round it out. It’s a worn-out formula with a good intention behind it. Bosses are, in general, petrified of saying anything negative to their employees, especially someone they like and care about. Thus, the feedback sandwich was invented so bosses could couch the “negative”—which is most likely the point of the entire interaction—between two banal “positives.”
But employees can see right through it. If you ask to have a private conversation with someone on your team, chances are his antenna is all the way up. If you have feedback for him that will help him execute his role better, he’ll be relieved, not hurt.
In this chapter, we’ll talk about how to “get right to it” when giving feedback and how to do it in a way that makes you vulnerable and builds trust with your team members. The goal is honesty that leads to improved relationships and better work. For feedback to be effective, it must flow both ways between you and your direct report.
Why the Feedback Sandwich Is Hard to Swallow
Remember: Your employees are smart. If something is wrong on the team or with their own performance, they know it. The longer you let the issue go on without addressing it, the more uncomfortable everyone feels. An inability to directly address problems when they arise sows confusion. Team members may think, “Am I crazy? Can’t everyone see what a drag on the team Person X is?” Or, “My boss doesn’t seem to realize I’m having a problem with this. Is she really that out of it?” Or, “Person Y is bringing our team down and the boss is turning a blind eye—she must like him more.” Suspicions and resentments form.
Still, most of us would rather eat our own hair than confront others. This reluctance stems from lots of different reasons. We’re afraid our team members will turn on us. We anticipate employees’ emotional reactions and want to prevent them from becoming sad or frustrated. For women, gender dynamics can play a role: The quest to be “likable” can lead us to avoid difficult conversations. So feedback avoidance becomes the invisible elephant in the room. When struggling teammates are not confronted directly, your unicorns end up picking up the slack, and eventually they will burn out. If it’s your unicorn who’s struggling, your discomfort with providing feedback bars you from having candid conversations about his performance, and ultimately better positioning him to serve your organization.
Of course, feedback doesn’t have to be negative. Refraining from giving positive feedback is just as deadly. We’ve all heard the adage “praise in public, criticize in private,” but that’s not necessarily true. Some of your team members might rather have a tooth pulled than be acknowledged publicly, no matter how warm the accolade. You have to know them as individuals. Taking the time to learn what motivates your direct reports will allow you to give feedback—both positive and negative—in the way they are most likely to hear it.
But first, you must establish trust.
Trust: The First Building Block of Effective Feedback
Your direct reports have to know you care about them as individuals. Trust is key—and trust takes time. It is built through small daily interactions. Taking the time to get to know your employees personally—asking about their lives and being sincerely interested in the answers—is more than just chitchat. These conversations are how relationships are built. They are not a distraction from your work. These conversations are actually part of your job as a people leader.
If employees don’t sense that you care for them as people, your feedback is not going to be well-received. Simply put, you run the risk of sounding like a total jerk. As Kim Scott details in her 2017 book Radical Candor, employees would rather work for a jerk who gets results than for a boss who is “too nice.” “Too nice” means that important issues are not being confronted, there are lots of areas of slack, and some team members are shouldering more than their share.
But these two options present a false dichotomy. As a people leader, you don’t have to choose between being a pushover who fails to deliver or a bully who gets results. You can care personally and challenge your team in a way that inspires and motivates them to do their best work.
How to Gain Integrity When Giving Feedback
Here’s a secret: You will have a lot more integrity when offering feedback if your team sees you receiving feedback. The best people leaders work hard to dissolve the hierarchical boundaries that prevent team members lower on the ladder from speaking out when they see a problem higher up. They put systems in place by which any person, no matter his rank, can “pull the lever,” so to speak, and stop the chain of production. People leaders within these organizations establish a sense of shared responsibility for all aspects of the company’s success. Whatever a person’s rank, she should be able to speak out if there’s a problem; the best leaders can set aside their egos and listen to legitimate criticism, no matter who it’s coming from.
Establishing this kind of culture is hard. But to quote Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own: “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.” Not everyone is up for creating a candid company culture. Not every people leader is committed to giving and receiving truthful, sometimes tough feedback from everyone. But people leaders who want to lead great teams and great organizations are.
Yet when you’re the boss, it’s rare to find lower-level employees who will speak their minds candidly. There’s a strange dynamic shift when you become a manager. Suddenly, team members with whom you’ve enjoyed open, frank relationships in the past clam up. Everyone wants to be on their best behavior around you. Something in our brains is so afraid of challenging authority that we’ll do almost anything to convince ourselves that we don’t need to speak up when there’s a problem. “I guess it’s not all that bad.” “It’s probably just me—I need to find a way to deal with it.” Yet true growth only comes when people are free to speak their minds and confront problems.
Why It’s So Hard for Your Direct Reports to Give You Feedback
I’ve encountered this uncomfortable dynamic in my own work when direct reports left unexpectedly—at least, it was unexpected to me. This played out memorably with two former employees—we’ll call them Ben and Rebecca. Rebecca was not entirely happy with her job description at FORWARD. I would talk about benchmarks we needed to meet, and Rebecca would say, “I’m not comfortable doing that.” My inner response was: What do you mean? It’s part of your job! Yet Rebecca never felt she could speak freely about the parts of her job that were a bad fit. I suspect she may have disliked the payment structure: commissions on top of a base salary, rather than a salary with bonuses based on company performance. I wish she had felt secure enough to talk to me about it and find a solution. What could I have done to establish a more trusting environment in which she felt free to share her concerns? Had I done that, I believe I could have helped Rebecca lean into the aspects of the job that sparked her interests and used her talents. She might still have left, but we would have had more of a sense of closure. And Rebecca would have gone into her next position with a more complete knowledge of her wants and needs and the language to articulate those desires more clearly.
Similarly, I longed to speak candidly with Ben, another direct report at FORWARD. I could tell he was not bringing his whole self to work, and I wanted to know why. I pried: “What’s going on? You’re drifting off. I can tell you’re not really into it.” I wanted to help him succeed; that’s my job. But Ben didn’t feel he could tell me what was wrong because I was the boss. In my mind, I was working hard to establish a trusting working relationship. In Ben’s mind, speaking openly about his mistakes and struggles would be like telling on himself to the teacher. We were at an impasse. When we parted ways soon thereafter, I was left with a feeling of regret for all the conversations we’d never had.
So how can you as a people leader encourage candor from your direct reports? You have to continually ask for feedback on yourself and heap praise on the team members who actually give it. Acknowledge openly that you have struggles and need to course correct, too. If your direct reports don’t give you feedback when you ask for it, wait. Sit in silence for an uncomfortably long time. Then ask again. They’ll eventually say something, just to get out of the room! When they do, be exuberant in your gratitude. Your direct reports will get the picture: When you ask for feedback, you really mean it. They need to know you won’t bite their heads off for speaking the truth.
We mentioned earlier that a boss should criticize in private and praise in public. When you’re the one being criticized, though, that adage is flipped on its head. You have to receive public criticism from your direct reports. They must see you receiving criticism if it is to become a regular feature of your work culture. And once the feedback has been given, you must thank the person bold enough to speak his mind to the boss.
Does this mean you have to act on the criticism? No. You’re allowed to think the feedback is off-base or misguided. But you should know if the person who spoke out did so in good faith. If this is the case, you must thank him in public. You can have your own reaction later in private. Whether or not the feedback leads to changes in your team or the larger organization, honor the person who offered his opinion by sitting with whatever he has said. Never react in the moment; don’t shut down someone speaking truthfully by telling him how he is mistaken or why his suggestion will never work. Say “thank you”—again and again, so that other direct reports will feel encouraged to speak up, too—and then give the suggestion space so that you can, in time, give a thoughtful response.
Feedback Can (and Should) Be Collaborative
I love Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull’s description of their Braintrust meetings in his 2014 book Creativity, Inc. In these meetings, directors come together with other colleagues who have deep experience in storytelling—writers, story editors, etc.—to workshop their films. The purpose of these meetings is to see what’s working and what isn’t as the other storytellers offer feedback in a judgment-free zone.
In this collaborative environment, storytellers set aside their egos and listen to candid feedback from top minds who have a vested interest in their success. The directors know the product needs work, so the purpose of these meetings is to take the movie “from suck to not-suck.” Ed, a former academic, brought the concept of peer review with him to Pixar. The candid environment he helped create is one of the reasons Pixar consistently delivers top-notch entertainment.
Meetings run this way are a brilliant way to get at the heart of a problem. Receiving candid feedback from others who value your success is crucial to your development. It’s the process by which artists refine their vision and create masterworks. Every novel on the shelves has been read by many other people who helped the author shape the narrative into something more satisfying. No television show emerged fully formed; it endured a process of narrowing the creator’s vision and homing in on the elements that really make it click. Artists understand the value of candid feedback, no matter where it comes from. Likewise, people leaders who want to create strong and healthy teams need to foster ways of delivering and receiving feedback all the time.
I’m not talking about performance reviews. There is plenty of debate concerning how often performance reviews should happen or even whether they should be done away with altogether. I won’t get into that, but I will say that whatever you tell your direct reports in their performance review should be no surprise. Your ongoing dialogue with your team members should be conducted so that they are aware of concerns with their performance in real time. If you hold off on negative feedback until the performance review, your direct report will feel sucker-punched. You’ll make yourself sick with dread thinking, “Now I really have to tell her. Can’t avoid this conversation any longer.” Most important, you will have wasted valuable time in which the two of you could have faced the problem head-on and come up with a solution.
CASE STUDY
How Creating a “Self-User Manual” Can Position Your Teams for Success
Jay Desai is the cofounder and CEO of the health-care startup PatientPing. As of this writing, the company has 100 employees, with seven reporting directly to Jay. Leading a startup is a high-pressure gig. There are innumerable opportunities for miscommunications, unclear expectations, and general confusion. That’s why Jay decided to get ahead of those issues with a brilliant solution: a user manual for himself. In it, he details how he gives feedback and how he would like team members to communicate with him. He spoke with me about the method behind the manual.
“As a younger executive, I struggled with management in the early days,” Jay told me. When there were communication troubles, he said, pinning down the source was difficult. Is it you? Is it me? “I felt like I was doing wrong by my reports,” said Jay. “I thought, ‘Why is this so hard?’”
In an attempt to bypass those problems, he created his self-user manual. It’s a guide for his direct reports so they understand from the start of the working relationship what to expect from Jay as a boss. The guide is detailed, covering everything from preferred methods of communication and how to contact him for the most urgent matters to issues like personal space (Jay asks them to tell him if he is violating team members’ space).
Jay calls creating and sharing his user guide an “act of empathy.” The goal is to set radically clear expectations from the beginning: to build trust with his direct reports and signify that he is committed to growth, both theirs and his own. It’s a brilliant way to establish that communication and feedback will flow both ways in the boss-employee relationship.
Jay introduces his user guide in interviews. Some candidates are thrilled that their prospective boss has laid out his expectations, habits, quirks, etc. so plainly and taken the guesswork out of the relationship. Others are turned off by it: They find the guide overwhelming and don’t jibe with Jay’s working style. Either reaction is invaluable: For candidates who become hires, he has already begun to build a level of trust before their first onboarding day. And candidates who don’t continue know that the job wouldn’t be a good fit and can cut their losses with no hard feelings on either side. Jay’s honesty brings forth their own.
Jay’s user guide is a fabulous example of a boss deploying openness and vulnerability. Everyone wants to be authentic and vulnerable these days, but few know how to do it. Jay told me that his team were not initially onboard when he first created it. It is unusual for a CEO to be so transparent and forthcoming about his own flaws. Yet Jay has gained immeasurable value from his strategic use of candor.
“What people want from their leaders is honesty and authenticity,” he said. “You need to be really comfortable in your own skin. Know who you are, love who you are. Then you can be there for your employees.” Jay found that by “putting it all out there”—yet still acknowledging workplace dynamics and roles—he could build trust quickly. And trust is the first building block of effective feedback. “I talk a lot about trust with our employees,” said Jay. “Trust is a superpower. Trust can be an elephant in the room. Trust comes through feeling like you’re being your authentic self.”
The result for his teams? Liberation. According to Jay, his direct reports can now manage his expectations—not his personality. When Jay communicates in a way that could be interpreted as blunt, his direct reports understand the intent behind the request, and friction is minimized. In one-on-ones, employees will tell him, “I went back and I read the user guide, and I think that this may be a better way to approach XYZ.” Jay has found that his user guide not only helps him communicate with direct reports but also enables direct reports to communicate better with one another. In turn, many of his direct reports have created their own user manuals. (Want to create one for yourself? Visit https://managerreadme.com/, where you’ll find a template for your own user guide.)
Jay said that back before he was a CEO, he and his colleagues would often gripe about the boss. But it’s difficult to complain about the boss when the boss has already put the “complainable” stuff out there. Jay said, “I’ve owned the less desirable parts of myself.”
If that’s not an example of an emotionally intelligent leader, I don’t know what is.
The Emotional Intelligence Factor
If you’ve served too many foul “feedback sandwiches,” bringing awareness to the problem is the first step. Enhancing your EQ, particularly the self-expression component, is crucial for people leaders who want to get better at giving feedback. Self-expression is made up of three subcategories. The first is emotional expression. People leaders who wish to express their emotions well must first be able to acknowledge them. “I’m feeling XYZ” (frustrated, anxious, sad, etc.). From this point of awareness, they can relate to others without being ruled by their predominating feelings or transmitting negative emotion.
The second component is assertiveness: communicating your feelings, thoughts, and beliefs openly in an inoffensive, nondestructive manner. If your employees know that you care for the person you’re speaking with, you’ll be poised to deliver direct feedback without causing offense. You won’t need to backpedal and mitigate your feedback with false assurances and meaningless praise. Remember: Employees would rather work for an efficient jerk than a pushover nice guy. Cushioning your criticism too much will only cause confusion. But you don’t have to choose—employees who know that you can demonstrate your care and regularly see you, the boss, receiving and implementing feedback are more likely to take your criticism in good faith and work to improve.
The final component of self-expression is independence: the ability to be self-directed and free of emotional dependency on others. You care about your direct reports. You don’t want them to be pained by what you have to say. Yet when you try to manage their emotional response to criticism, you’re setting yourself up for a world of hurt. Learning to resist the urge to manage other people’s emotions for them can be a long process. But remember: You’re not doing your direct reports any favors by being “too nice.” In fact, failing to be assertive when delivering criticism isn’t really about your direct reports at all—it’s about you.
We all want to be liked. If you suffer from a “disease to please,” the desire to be liked can be so intense it’s almost painful. Yet the journey of becoming emotionally intelligent involves taking responsibility for your emotions and desires—including the desire to be liked—and seeing how they are helping or harming you and those around you. Rather than helping your direct reports, your disease to please could actually be harming them. Failing to communicate issues clearly will leave your employees confused. But that doesn’t give you an excuse to act like a jerk. If you can’t maintain your emotional independence by realizing that you are responsible for your emotional reactions and no one else’s, you will muddle interactions—and ultimately cripple your team.
The ability to receive and implement candid feedback is how we grow. The ability to give candid feedback is necessary for any boss who wants her team to flourish. If feedback avoidance is an elephant for you, take heart. This stuff can be learned. With emotional intelligence, you can navigate the sometimes difficult process of giving and receiving feedback until it becomes second nature.
How does feedback flow in your organization? Below are some questions for you to consider:
▶ Do you as a boss regularly ask for feedback from your direct reports?
▶ Do they actually give it?
▶ If not, how could you empower your direct reports to be candid with you?
▶ What is one change you’ve made in how you work based on feedback you’ve received?
Regarding the last question: If you can’t think of any changes you’ve made in your behavior based on feedback you’ve received, you’ve got a problem. For whatever reason, you have a hard time asking for feedback, hearing feedback, acting on feedback—or all of the above. But awareness of the problem is the first step toward finding a solution. Recognize that it is possible to implement thoughtful feedback while still standing on your integrity. That’s how you get better, and that’s what we’re after.