jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
This resource first appeared in issue #61 on 12 Feb 2021 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Feedback
Getting Over Your Fear of Giving Tough Feedback - Said Ketchman, The Introverted Engineer
Research: Men Get More Actionable Feedback Than Women - Elena Doldor, Madeleine Wyatt, and Jo Silvester
We’re people who went into both research and computing, and so as a population we are disproportionately task-focussed and introverted. That can make giving negative feedback - especially about work practices, maybe less about work outcomes - deeply uncomfortable. And humans avoid doing things that make us uncomfortable!
But your team members deserve to know when something they’ve been doing doesn’t meet your expectations. You wouldn’t want your boss to to keep feedback from you if there was something they thought you could do better, and it’s unfair to do the same to your team members. You’d want them to communicate it with kindness, but with clarity. Ketchman talks about three steps in getting over the discomfort of giving tough feedback:
Having a ready-made formula for giving feedback can be a huge help for this. Whether it’s the Manager-Tools feedback model or the very similar Situation-Behaviour-Impact model, it helps you give a structure you can practice on while keeping the purpose - improved future outcomes - in mind.
Building trust of course comes from regular one-on-ones, and from holding up your end of responsibilities when you’re asked to do things for your team member.
There’s an equity reason to get over discomfort about giving corrective feedback, too. Doldor, Wyatt, and Silverster looked at feedback given to 146 mid-career leaders, provided anonymously by more than 1,000 of their peers and managers and fount that corrective feedback was given less to women, and even positive feedback was given in a more fuzzy way that is harder to translate into concrete next steps. This was true of both men and women bosses of women. The more comfortable we can get giving concrete feedback, positive and negative, to all our results, the better they’ll be able to grow and develop. It’s not fair to let team members repeatedly fail to meet our expectations and stay silent about it just because we’re uncomfortable bringing it up.
