The Feedback Mistake This New Manager Is About to Make

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

Hey folks, we're going to go to Experience Dev's subreddit. This one is from a new manager who is asking about feedback on giving feedback. And so they wrote this pretty lengthy post. Uh I did not even read the entire thing because I think there's enough information kind of in the beginning to to talk about some framing um and then kind of get into more I don't know generic advice or thoughts on this kind of stuff. So they are describing a scenario uh where they are new to being a manager and there is someone on the team they're managing who uh is submitting poll requests and the concern they have they said it's like very concerning is that um poll requests are going up from this engineer and basically the team is spending time uh essentially rewriting uh the code that this engineer your submits as in like it's almost like a zero net contribution to the team.

Uh if anything, it probably takes away because people just have to simply rewrite things. And so, uh their strategy and like they're looking for feedback on this, right? So, number one, I just want to call out like it's good that you're looking for feedback on this. Um, and this is the kind of thing that obviously like it's uh it's a little it's gonna be a little bit ironic as I go through this because how I'm giving feedback in a video is also not how I would genuinely want to give feedback to this person. But uh given that we're just here on a YouTube channel recording stuff for general advice is how it goes. Um so this person said that um the way that they want to give feedback to this engineer is that you know it's there sort of in their instinct to be able to to document things.

So they wrote a sixpage report to give to this engineer as feedback and they were saying uh they heard that that might be considered like it's a little bit too uh you know overwhelming for someone to receive. Um, and I guess that's where I'm going to kind of stop the, you know, the details of this example because, um, the answer is yes. That would be extremely overwhelming for someone to receive. And when it comes to giving feedback and stuff like this, these types of situations, the the documentation that is helpful when it comes to feedback and stuff like that is uh not documenting like not writing a report on all the ways that you want to correct someone. Um it's documenting timelines, right? And generally this is helpful because if you're trying to make decisions around if someone is improving on their performance like if you're doing a performance improvement plan type of thing and it I'm saying that doesn't have to be you know as formal as a performance improvement plan or a PIP.

I know some people hear that and their immediate thought is like a PIP is you know and the only way a PIP is used is to you know to to exit someone. Uh which by the way is literally not a factually true statement. And I have used pips and had people absolutely turn around. Okay, so it's just saying yes, statistically maybe that is uh what ends up happening is that people get exited from them. But the you want to use documentation for timelines. Okay, so the I was trying to think when I was reading this, my first reaction was kind of like holy like like it to me I'm like is it not obvious that that would be an overwhelming thing for a person and the the thought like if I could say this to the person like the the new manager in sort of

like a 101 scenario would be something like well imagine this imagine that my sort of the the visceral reaction I had to to reading this post about wanting to write a report I was thinking like imagine the feedback that I want to give this manager. Imagine I wrote a six-page report to give to this person. Instead of starting off things by saying, "Hey, I want to talk about a scenario. I want to talk about an observation. I want to talk about I think there's feedback that was shared uh to the manager about this kind of thing, right? Hey, I want to talk about, you know, your perspective on this." immediately going into I have taken the time to write a six-page report that talks about all the things I'm trying to to fix in you before actually even talking to you about it to me seems like it seems to me like it should be an obvious thing about how that might um be overwhelming or taken the wrong way.

And one of the the techniques that you can use to gut check is how would I feel if someone did that to me? Um, right. Obviously, this person's intentions are good. This new manager, right? They're they're trying to they're trying to help. That's like why they put the time into documenting this stuff. Trying to help this person improve, get better, help their team out. I can rationalize that. when we start removing the people element in a people position like this is where things get kind of shitty. So we like we want to think about being people first. So if you have and this goes for like if you're not in a manager position, right? Like if you're still listening to this and watching this and you're like, "Well, I'm not a manager, but maybe this will have uh you know, a hint of something valuable." Like the the piece that I want you to take away is like we're people, right?

We're people working with other people. We need to be humans and people to each other and treat each other the way that people like to be treated. And that will go a very long way for a lot of us because a lot of the time this kind of gets forgotten. Like when you write a six-page document for someone instead of just starting off with a conversation, I think it's absolutely okay for you as a manager or someone who wants to give feedback to collect your thoughts. And if that means writing them down and all of your thoughts happen to equate to a six-page document, no problem in doing whatever you need to do to collect your thoughts. But giving someone a six-page report as the mechanism to start the feedback I think is uh it's a bit of a bit of a concern for me um if we're talking about concerns.

So like how how do you do this then? Right? If it's not give them a six-page report. Well, like I said, you can start off for sure by doing what you need to do to document for yourself. So, if you're like in a situation like this and you're like, "Okay, maybe I've observed some things, maybe I've had feedback come in um from multiple sources or something like that." I think it's totally fine to collect your thoughts, write them down in a document, in a on paper, whatever it is, use the tool that's helpful for you, but those are your thoughts, right? that the intended audience for whatever you're doing there is you. So that's number one. I would start with that. Number two is like I need you to think about your working relationship with this person because if you are someone who has uh you I didn't coin this and I'm not claiming to have uh but the term radical cander.

So if you are in a position where you have a high trust, high respect working relationship with someone, um the the reality is like it it does more benefit to uh to be direct with the feedback, >> right? And so if you haven't, there's a there's a book called Radical Cander. I wish I the author's name is escaping me. Uh it's it's a great read. I think it's really really helpful. Um, but it talks about things like uh there's this idea of like ruinous empathy and radical cander and they have them on a uh like a quadrant and really talks about the val in my opinion the focus is on this this value of like high trust, high respect working relationships where you can be direct with people and it's because they know that you're cutting to the chase.

they know that um that you're coming from a place where you do really want them to succeed because they can trust and they do respect you and actually in those situations where you're kind of dancing around something uh it's just not effective like it could be ruinous empathy like I don't want to hurt this person's feelings like I see where they're coming from and like a and then the the feedback never makes it through right so when you think about your working relationship with someone if you're not in a position where you have high trust, high respect, and you are leaning in the oh, let me try some radical cander things, you might just be coming across like an absolute to someone because they don't have trust and they don't have respect for you. You want to get there.

So, if you're feeling that way about people that you're working with on your team, um I don't know, like if you're not in a position where you feel like you can be direct and people receive things, well, um that might be something to work on. So, think about the working relationship you have because that will determine how you are going to be able to effectively give feedback. Right? If it's a low trust, low respect kind of situation, um it's really tricky because when you go to deliver feedback to someone, like what kind of like if I say those two things to you, right? Low trust, low respect, you give feedback. What do you what do you expect is going to happen with that? Who is this person to give me feedback? Right? Like why should I care what this person has to say? Right? That's kind of like the low respect.

Um the low trust thing might be like, "Oh, I've I've seen this kind of thing before and like you know, you're you don't really trust that you know where that feedback is coming from or that uh that action is taken or could be, oh, I know where this is going, right?" Like you don't trust what this person's doing. Um and when you combine that with like low trust, low respect, it's like it's kind of a shitty situation for feedback. So hopefully you're not in a situation where you have both of those things but think about your working relationship in terms of like structuring the mechanism uh and how you give the feedback right probably in a conversation. So, I would recommend um you know if you're remote like a video call but uh if you're in person like in person I think is always super helpful for giving feedback on things but my recommendation is always to try and get the other person's side of the story.

I don't care if you have one person that's giving, you know, reporting feedback for an individual, multiple, whatever. Um, I think it's really important to get the other person's side of the story. You will sometimes you will learn very interesting things. So, if someone's doing something or someone's not doing something and like their their performance is impacted and other people are observing it, is there something going on that you're not aware of? Maybe something outside of work that's causing them, you know, some issues at work. Are there things going on at work that are causing them issues at work? Like, do you understand enough about what's actually going on or are you just aggregating the responses? So, I think it's very important to give other people the opportunity to talk about their their experiences. So that's why I do think instead of jumping into here's a report on all the things I want you to change and here's a list of all the people that complained about you kind of thing.

It's more like you are you are observing things and or there is some feedback coming in and you want to take this opportunity to talk to the individual about some of these scenarios. For example, this case is about poll requests and people rewriting code. You could say, "Hey, like I wanted to talk to you about some of the poll requests that have been going up. Uh, and depending on how you received this feedback and how much you observed it, you can lean into either of those. Obvious like I don't think being dishonest is the path. But if you're like, you know, seems like there's been a couple of times and if you have the examples in your head, like good to be able to to have them to talk to to be more specific.

you know, in these situations, it seems like code went up and uh we might have missed the mark on, you know, on what the the design was supposed to be or like how some of the coding patterns uh look in the codebase and kind of seems like ultimately people ended up having to to rewrite it or you do a significant amount of work sort of late in the in the process. So, I wanted to hear from you like when you were going through these like what did that look like for you? can you walk me through that? Right? And just I'm going to make up a totally random example, right? this person might have full awareness of that and they might say, "Hey, look, like on, you know, that first one you're talking about, but I actually sat down with Billy and Sally and we

went through this and I have like a a doc that we put together like aligning on the goals for like how we're going to structure that that feature or like how we're going to refactor that part of the codebase and like we agreed on it and um you know, I did that and so I I do feel like I delivered what we talked about, but it's not Billy and Sally ultimately that were on the poll request. and suggesting rewriting it. It was actually um it was actually Steven, right? Steven was the the one who was like violently against it and in the end like Steven agreed that we could put the code in, but like Steven was saying that he's going to have to rewrite it or I don't know, right? But you know, in a in an example like this, it's like hold on, wait a second.

Like we didn't have that information when we were talking about this originally. Okay, so you did get sign off in alignment from people ahead of time. Those are good things. And like, okay, so it is it's Stephen in this particular case who was the one violently against it. Okay, interesting. Like, we didn't know that before. And then instead of being like all of your feedback is, hey, when you submit pull request, people need to rewrite it. Um, maybe that's not even the focus then. Maybe the thing that you're trying to address in this situation is, wait a second, did you have the right stakeholders up front? Or maybe you have some repeat offenders, right? And there are some personalities on the team that are really difficult with letting code go through. I don't I don't know the answer here. And I'm not saying like we can generalize it.

My point is like when you are curious about the other person's perspective, you will often uncover more things that are helpful. It doesn't mean that some of the feedback that you have uh and suggestions you want to guide them with are are wrong, but like it just means that I think it's a good opportunity to hear the other side of the story. Okay. So, let's assume that you're hearing the other side of the story and uh ultimately someone is acknowledging like, hey, yeah, like you know, uh there was some gaps there and on this one and on that one and um I I do feel like I you know, um I'm having some challenges being able to get code pushed up. that's aligning with people and like that's been kind of frustrating for me and like uh trying a couple things out but not really seems like it's not really working.

Like you might find from talking to this person that they're experiencing some frustration as well. they're observing it and um and then it's like giving someone the opportunity to talk about their side on it also affords you this this opening where instead of being like ah how am I going to like deliver this like this hard feedback and it's going to like bother them or whatever because I think giving feedback's hard for people um you might be able to kind of structure the whole thing as like cool okay like you observe this too so let's you know let's work together on making this better, right? You're no longer going into it where like they have to defend and uh like automatically their their guards up. It's like no, like you also acknowledge this. You're frustrated by it too. Like let's let's talk about this. What could we do to to make this better for you and then ultimately for the team, right?

Like I am partnering with you on making this a better situation. And you may be in situations as well where you talk through it and someone's like, "Nope, that's not my my lived experience here." Sorry, one second. I just got to look for parking spots. Oh man. Okay, got to go back around. There's tons and I I got greedy. Figured I could park in the normal spots, but no. Um, so you may have these situations where people they don't have the same observation. they don't have the awareness of what's happening and that's okay too and one of the things I want you to keep in mind is that like um if you have these situations and uh the feedback is not given timely and you're going to someone and it's like pretty late in uh you know you're giving them feedback from months ago or

something uh I would caution you because Um, you'll be in situations where people like you you sat on this for months and like you did you weren't able to come talk to me about it so I could improve. Like that can feel almost like betrayal. It's like you you didn't trust me to give me feedback or like you couldn't approach me or you didn't give me this opportunity to improve. Now you're coming and telling me with like six months worth of evidence that you think I suck. Um, by the way, Andy, you wrote it as a report like, "Oh my god, like why wouldn't you just come talk to me about this?" So, being timely uh is also very valuable here, too. But, I mean, lots of I kind of was all over the map on this one. My apologies, but like one of the things I just want to remind you as I sign off here is like try to be a person.

Try to treat people like people. And if uh if you're struggling with that, try to put yourself in their situation and say like, would that be helpful for me? I think it's a good gut check. So, thanks for watching. Uh if you have questions, leave them below in the comments and otherwise you can go to codeme.com and submit anonymously. I will see you in the next one. Take care.