Therese Huston - Lets Talk: Make Effective Feedback Your Superpower

How Women Decide

Teaching What You Dont Know

Feedback is hard because were taught from a very young age if you dont have anything nice to say, dont say it at all. And voil, now its your job to say it.

Kim Scott, Radical Candor

Feedback isnt rocket science. Its harder.

Some aerospace engineers might object, but think about it. If youre a rocket scientist, youll have years of formal training and focused simulations and risk-free brainstorming with a whiteboard and a whip-smart team before anyone even lets you in the same building with a rocket.

But giving feedback? Chances are you walk into that professional situation alone, with little or no training and no team to guide you. The only simulations youve run, if any, were all in your head and amounted to Is there some way to say this so he wont get upset?

Because we all know that rockets arent the only things that explode.

How do you give feedback that works? Researchers find there are many things we can get wrong when we give feedback. In this book, well explore what the research reveals, but chances are, you already know, from your own lived experience, how hard it is to get right.

Ive known managers who had honorable intentions and still flubbed their feedback. In my early thirties, I had a great boss who was incredibly pressed for time. It was the end of my first year in a new job and Id asked what I was doing well and what I could improve. My boss had just been promoted, however, and she was swimming in her own new responsibilities. We happened to go into a public restroom together after a lunch meeting, and as we both peed, she suddenly launched into how Id done that year. She meant well and was trying to squeeze me into her schedule, but all I could think was Now? Really? I cant even write any of this down.

Its easy to be incredulous, but she was a good boss having a bad couple of months. Letting me know how I was performing was just one more stress she didnt want to face.

Feedback is hard for managers. One national study finds that more than one-third (37 percent) of managers are uncomfortable giving employees critical feedback, and managers Ive interviewed think that number is grossly underreported. Yet a common misconception about feedback is that its stressful only for the person receiving it. When I lead workshops on how to give feedback, I often ask, True or false? The person being evaluated typically finds the experience more stressful than the person doing the evaluation. Nearly everyone shouts, True. We can immediately feel what its like to be the recipient: you feel scrutinized, you feel your past mistakes are going to be paraded in front of you, and you feel a pressure to defend your choices. Yet when researchers ask employees to rate how stressful their organizations evaluation process is, the senior employees giving feedback report significantly higher stress levels than the junior people receiving it. Giving critical feedback face-to-face is so hard, in fact, some of us simply dont do it. One in five managers (21 percent) admit they avoid negative feedback conversations with their employees altogether.

In many ways, it feels as if it should be easier to give feedback today than it was ten years ago. Weve become a society that offers feedback everywhere we go. We leave reviews of restaurants we loved and Airbnb apartments we hated. In an emergency room, you can review your doctor, and in prison, you can review your warden. London Heathrow airport even asks passengers to rate the dreaded security lines with the press of a button: on a good day, reward them with a smiling face, and on a bad day, with a frown.

Despite all the practice we have giving feedback publicly, however, when its time to give feedback privately, human to human, we find ourselves ill-equipped. There is no magic button.

Ive been researching why managers avoid critical feedback conversations and why they find such conversations so stressful. An obvious part of the problem is that giving feedback to people on your team is personal. You know nothing about the executive chef behind your meal or the security guard behind the scanner, but you do know Emily. You hired her. You know she has a daughter and is finishing a degree. You also know shes easily discouraged. You cant find the heart to tell her shes woefully underperforming.

But managers also face obstacles that are less obvious but just as vexing. First, most of us havent been formally trained to give effective feedback. Youre not sure where to begin or what to do if the other person becomes upset. You might be concerned your feedback will backfire. Your employees may not love you, but at least they dont hate you, and if you told Jos he could be more strategic or Megan she could be more concise, you might alienate two people you count on. No manager is eager to do something badly, and most of us would rather make the mistake of saying nothing than saying the wrong thing.

Managers are also reluctant to give feedback because it creates a lot of work. As one mid-level manager at a tech company explained, Ive read books about giving feedback. If Im going to do this right, I have to identify something I can measure. Then I need to develop measurable goals with you. Then I need to take the time to assess whether you have improved or not; then I need to close the loop and discuss it with you all over again. Why even try? Lets just have the conversation we normally have. Then we cross our fingers and hope annoying problems will just fix themselves.