Are You Sugarcoating Your Feedback Without Realizing It? - Michael Schaerer, Roderick Swaab, HBR

This resource first appeared in issue #18 on 03 Apr 2020 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Feedback, Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals

We have to work harder to keep connected with our remote teams now, but that doesn’t mean we stop giving corrective feedback about things that aren’t going well. In fact there’s probably a lot of new expectations about “how we do things”, and there’ll have to be a lot of nudges to get people on the right path.

This article talks about one problem that people have giving positive but especially negative feedback; the “illusion of transparency”. Put simply, people can’t see into your head, and (a) the thing you’re giving feedback about isn’t as clear to your team member as it is to you, who have spent much longer observing and thinking about it, and (b) what you’re trying to communicate the team member may be very clear to you and much less clear to them.

I’m really bad at this, particularly when I’m trying to not be overly negative about something or trying to steer away from being very prescriptive: I often say things that are utterly clear to me but leave people on our team with a lot of questions.

The best way to make sure you’re communicating what you think you are communicating is just to ask! But even just remembering that what you’re seeing isn’t necessarily as obvious to your team members is enough to help us be clearer:

Before the review, we told one group of the managers that the evaluations would not be evident to the employees, and that the employees would be unlikely to see the evaluation the same way as the managers. We found that the managers who were given this warning delivered much more accurate feedback than the others — the gap between the perceptions of the evaluation disappeared.