jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
This resource first appeared in issue #93 on 24 Sep 2021 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Feedback, Managing A Team: Other
The lettuce pact: The ultimate hack for giving difficult feedback - Brennan McEachran, Hypercontext
If you’re struggling to figure out how to improve your team’s frank but kind feedback to each other, McEachran has a suggestion. Riffing off a discussion from the Radical Candor team, the suggestion is to make things concrete, with a personally embarrassing but minor situation like someone about to give a talk with spinach between their teeth. They clearly have a right to be told, and there’s clearly better and worse ways to share it with the person, but it’s hard to know how to bring it up. It’s a good way to frame the discussion of giving feedback.
I think McEachran takes this too far and not far enough - a formal agreement 1:1 with each team member, but focussing only on personally embarrassing feedback rather than more generally telling someone that they’re not meeting an expectation - but nonetheless it may be a useful starting point for discussing feedback within your team.
