Attention: Feedback Givers! Don’t Become the 21%
Cameron Conaway
Prof @ University of San Francisco | On social media hiatus to focus on deep work and mindfulness practice | Contact: cameronconaway.com
This week’s tip is about working through the fears that can arise within feedback givers. We are all feedback givers in one way or another, but people managers are often in such a position far more than others.
At work yesterday, someone booked a video call with me titled “Need your feedback on X.” I didn’t quite know what X was, but the 30-minute call was essentially me learning about X, which happened to be a new quarterly operations review framework, and then giving feedback on various parts of it.
It was a great call and, in my experience, most of us are completely fine stepping into these type of situations when our feedback is requested on a thing—a process, a strategy, a mockup, etc.
It’s when feedback is directed to a person that we struggle. A lot.
In a feedback survey covered at Harvard Business Review, Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman wrote:
“When talking with managers about giving feedback we often hear comments such as, ‘I did not sleep the night before,’ ‘I just wanted to get it over quickly,’ ‘My hands were sweating and I was nervous,’ and ‘They don’t pay me enough to do this job.’ We find that because of this anxiety, some managers resist giving their direct reports any kind of critical feedback at all: when we asked a different group of 7,808 people to conduct a self-assessment, 21% admitted that they avoid giving negative feedback.”
Team – let’s pause there.
According to this survey, 37% of people managers avoid giving positive feedback (which is vital), and a whopping 21% also completely avoid giving negative feedback (also vital).
And when you consider that many of these people managers are likely high-performing professionals who have had to navigate countless other elements of the corporate environment to be elevated to a leadership role, it shows just how challenging giving negative feedback can be.
And yet nobody is really talking about it. For reasons we will address in a future post, many of us have had to become quite good at masking this very real experience. I mean, how often has someone at work pulled you aside to say:
“Hey, we’ve got quarterly performance reviews coming up and I’m completely terrified to give feedback to my teammates.”
It's so rare. But what a tremendous act of counter-cultural courage!
Such comments likely only surfaced in this Harvard Business Review article because those asking the questions were leadership development consultants outside of the company.
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So, since we know negative feedback is absolutely critical for personal and professional growth, how can we swim in the waters of the other group, the 79%?
This is all easier said than done, but here’s a 2-step approach.
1. Experience feedback
We can’t just read about it. We can’t just download some slick “Feedback Cheat Sheet” that went viral on LinkedIn and call it a day. We can't even step into a feedback relationship and then robotically use that cheat sheet. We actually have to enter into real and authentic relationships with:
2. Empower our teams
Part of the reason there’s a 21% is because feedback givers are scared of how feedback receivers will respond. But if, on an ongoing basis and well before needing to give any negative feedback, you’ve been talking about the importance of feedback and generally building a feedback-literate team culture, your role as a feedback giver will be so much easier. You’ll have a shared sense of what feedback is and you’ll have a better sense of how the feedback receivers may respond.
This approach involves receiving some feedback training. You can compile resources and lead something yourself, or you can bring someone in, but either way you need to get into the feedback gym and, with the right form and ideally with excellent guidance, put the reps in.