I Manage You, You're Pretty Good, Now Change
A Primer on Giving Critical Feedback
Feedback is the way we understand our own actions. It is how we understand consequences and effect. It is how we grow.
You cannot effectively manage people if you cannot provide critical feedback. Full stop. If you’re thinking of getting into people management or if you’re in people management and struggling, take a hard look at yourself and ask: Can I criticize someone to their face?
Note that I asked if you can do it—not whether you’re comfortable doing it. They’re different.
Note that I also asked if you could do it to their face. Not over email. Not in a Slack message or via text: to their face.
Note that I asked if you could criticize them. Not talk about something. Not help them intuit it. To their face criticize them—because even if you don’t think it was critical, they will.
Your job as a manager is to help your people grow and develop. Stagnant teams produce stale work of middling quality. People who press the button to stamp a widget in the same way, every day, for years on end—who are no better at it today than they were five years ago—are not making your team or company better. They’re not finding defects. They’re not engaging with clients. They’re not more efficient. They are inert. The job of a manager is to make their teams better—and you do that via critical feedback, which is what spurs growth.
If you cannot see yourself providing critical feedback, then, good news: you know something important about yourself! But, also, people management is not a good fit for you and that’s great! Better that you know this and not spend a few months gaslighting a failing report, telling them they’re doing well right up until you fire them because they’re incapable of doing their job.
And that is the best-case scenario for when you can’t bring yourself to provide critical feedback.
Best. Case.
Worst case? The high-performers of your team start leaving because they don’t have faith in you and they see that sub-par employees are allowed to linger and drag down the whole team and you’re left with a team of underperformers who think they’re pretty great—and they’re being led by an underperformer who thinks they’re pretty great: you!
Have you ever heard, You don’t quit a job, you quit a manager? Well, that’s this. They’re quitting you.
When you don’t correct and push struggling employees the message to the rest of the team is clear: bad performers are welcome. It takes only a few months for strong employees to decide that either they don’t need to work that hard anymore—Why should I make up for Johnny Suckbag’s shortcomings? Why am I putting in the extra effort when I can coast instead?—or they lose faith in you as a manager and look for other opportunities.
Sit down and talk with any team of, I dunno, 7 or more people and individually ask them who really struggles and who really excels. Having done this probably twenty times, I can tell you two things will emerge:
Everyone will have the same lowest performer, except (maybe) for the person everyone else identifies
Most everyone will have a different high performer
I don’t have a good name for this phenomenon, but it holds true in nearly every social group I’ve encountered. On a college or high school campus, who’s the “coolest” club/sorority/sports team and who’s the worst? In an office environment, who are the effective groups and who just talks about “strategy” without getting anything done? On a team, who’s really strong and who is bad? Bang, people know the weakest link. The high performer entrants will bell curve around what that person individually values—work ethic, communication, techbro bonafides, technical skill, etc.—but everyone knows the weak link.
The salient point here is that “bad” groups and individuals are easily and nearly universally identifiable.
Notably, the answers are not always right –sometimes people just do not see what someone does or what a group does, but if perception is reality, then, the reality is that the poor performing group/person has a big problem.
So let’s evolve this scenario: You take over a team where they’ve had a poor manager who has let underperformance thrive. You walk in, assess the team over a period (4-8 weeks-ish), learn who the high and low performers are, who’s mismatched to their role, who’s underutilized and then set about giving the poor performers feedback. If they can’t or won’t change, you release them or move them into a role more suited for their skill set.
What happens?
Worst case, your team is in a better position because they’re not covering for underperformers who were dragging down the team. Addition by subtraction is a brutal phrase, but it contains a lot of truth. Teams that spend time covering for someone, doing rework, letting someone slide by while others do their work, suffer. The level of work, the quality, suffers. When you remove that lodestone, the team rises by itself—before you help any of your middling or high performers.
Best Case?
Your high performers come alive. Your middle performers surge. The underperformers step up to be middle performers—if they’re still there. You team jumps in ability, in focus and in execution—potentially with fewer people. This happens because you’re resetting expectations and showing your high performers that you appreciate and respect their abilities and hard work and that you will not tolerate C or D Team level talent.
Feedback is not easy. It is, in fact, probably the hardest thing you can do as a manager, or a manager of managers.
But it is necessary and good. It is what makes high performing teams, rather than having a few high performing individuals. It is what makes culture. It is what elevates an organization.
Remember that managers are force multipliers. This is part of how you add value to the company. You make your people better. You make your team more than the sum of its parts—and you make even the individual parts better.
Back to the earlier question: If you can see yourself providing critical feedback, then, also, good news: you know you have the baseline capacity for people management! You have the table stakes.
The next step is asking how and when you can provide that feedback, followed by learning how to deliver that message in a way that it will be heard, thought about and internalized.
Feedback consists of three co-equal parts and for feedback to be maximally effective you need to deliver it:
for the right reason
at the right time
in the right way
This is about the audience
We’ll explore those over the next week