Critical Feedback Part 3: At the Right Time

I have a two-year-old who is a ball of energy and exploration. As often as he might climb up the ladder on a slide, something he loves doing and which we encourage, he’s climbing up a chair to reach something he shouldn’t, which we don’t encourage. Behavioral psychologists tell us that providing immediate feedback to him on what is acceptable behavior is the only way that the toddler mind actually internalizes those kinds of lessons. If you wait and discuss it at the end of the day, or if you discuss it even an hour later, they are unlikely to associate the conversation with the behavior. They may honestly not even remember the behavior.

Kids are fun like that.

When providing feedback to adults it is important to remember that we all grew up out of that toddler who put their hands in and on things they shouldn’t—and that we can quickly disassociate behavior from consequence. When there is a gap between behavior and feedback or behavior and consequence it becomes easier for us to dissociate the two from each other and to treat them as either uncorrelated or as misremembered by the other party. This is also true for the person providing feedback. Time and space allows us to build narratives in our head. It allows us to assign motivations and inference because we’ve had space to let our imagination fill in gaps and forget details—or worse, assign details that didn’t exist. This is dangerous.

For feedback to be effective it must be timely.

This does not mean interrupting someone or stepping out with someone in the middle of a meeting. This isn’t about embarrassing the person or nit picking or making them defensive: this is about making the better and helping them improve.

This does mean providing feedback that day or even that hour so that you can quickly go from Behavior to Effect to Feedback. This can be a small conversation—five or ten minutes. It should be direct and about the behavior at issue.

It can also mean setting up meetings specifically to provide immediate feedback. This is especially true and effective for highly trainable skills, such as public speaking.

A few years ago my business unit performed quarterly business reviews—QBR’s—where each account director had three to five minutes to run down the health of their account, including current activity, highlights, lowlights and a projection for the coming quarter. My directors, each in charge of a very large, very public account, had great metrics and great projections but struggled with the presentation side and their message got lost in a sea of “um’s” and, “so, uh’s” that put the audience of senior executives to sleep.

I scheduled an hour-long meeting and told them we were going to run through their 5-minute presentations, so they should prepare. I then pulled out an old training exercise a teacher had used in high school Model UN: The “um” Count.

The first director ran through his presentation and each time he said “um” or “uh”, I would make a tic mark on my notepad. He got through his presentation in about six minutes and said “um” probably 45 times. A few “um’s” is fine: they’re a useful verbal pause. This isn’t that. He said an “um” every 8 seconds. Time yourself and try that out. See how distracting that is? How much does that undermine your message? How much does it make it sound like you don’t know what you’re talking about? Like you’re unprepared?

I asked other directors for feedback and they had very little – minor stuff. Overall, his content was good, but the way he was delivering that content was not. I asked if others had caught the “um’s” and people said variants of, Sure, but it wasn’t bad. I gave him the count and that it was distracting and made him sound like he was making it up or thinking about this for the first time while speaking.

The second director went. She was in the low thirties for “um’s”. She thought she was higher because she was listening to herself and over-estimating. She had room for improvement, but the self-awareness was a major first step.

The third director went and I stopped counting at seventy five. I barely heard his discussion and projections because it was so burdened by “um’s” that his report was lost. I asked how many he thought he had and he guessed somewhere around the previous director. The overreliance on “um’s” was so innate, so ingrained, he did not hear them or think about them.

We repeated the exercise the next day. First and second directors improved. Third one barely improved—but this time I recorded him so he could hear himself. As soon as he heard himself speaking he changed. He heard it now. He heard how distracting it was, how it sunk his narrative. I scheduled another run through—only thirty minutes this time – because when you’re giving the actual presentation the adrenaline will be flowing, you’ll be nervous and if you dropped ten “um’s” in a practice setting, you’ll drop twenty live.

The third director ran through the exercise two more times with me and another few times with his fellow directors. They all performed admirably during their presentations and feedback from senior executives was very positive—and the difference in speaking ability was noticeable compared to other groups.

I’m highlighting this story for a few reasons:

Immediate feedback is highly effective at adjusting behavior because there is no space between behavior and feedback.
Consistent feedback is highly effective at adjusting behavior because people see that other people are being treated the same way – e.g. they’re all receiving feedback based on similar measurements.
Effective feedback is internalized and worked on outside of the actual feedback delivery mechanism. The third director spent time on his own and with his fellow directors working on his presentation.
Good feedback is for the benefit of the recipient. I was giving that feedback to my directors because it let them highlight their successes and keep the message focused on what they and their teams had accomplished.

Providing feedback in the moment is the single most effective way to help someone adjust their behavior.

When to Wait

There are times, however, where waiting is recommended. This is where knowing your employees really matters. Is someone in the midst of a divorce? Did someone just lose a family member, or did they have something traumatic happen? You do not want to be “piling on”, and if someone is focused outside of the office, as long as the issue is not impacting their overall performance, you may want to let it slide. If the issue is impacting their performance, well, be gentle. That doesn’t mean, Don’t bring it up, or, Undermine yourself by saying it is no big deal, it means, Approach them with concern, not judgement. It is a subtle difference, but an important one.

Sometimes you just don’t have time to talk with someone. At the latest, discuss the behavior with them during their next one on one. I’ve started some one on ones like this:

Hey, so, I wanted to apologize because I want to talk about ____ that happened in the meeting on Monday, but I didn’t have time right then to chat. I wanted to talk about how you ____ when X happened. Do you remember what I’m talking about?

Own that you didn’t have a chance to discuss right then, set the stage for the discussion and be specific. Be direct.

I want to talk about <EVENT/BEHAVIOR> that happened <LOCATION/TIME>.

Place the other person at the time and place and help them recall what happened, how they felt and how they reacted. Prime them for a discussion and help set the stage for a discussion. Even if you had to wait a few days, this should help.

Delayed Feedback

Delaying feedback is a cowardly half-measure to avoid giving actual feedback. Waiting weeks to discuss a behavior with someone accomplished three things:

It changes nothing and no behavior
It lets the manager check the box of, I discussed this with them
It lowers the manager’s overall effectiveness.

All great things!

People can feel weakness on the part of a manager, and they will take advantage of it. Managers who avoid tough conversations, or who hide behind inference or indirect suggestion, do not affect change and they do not improve their teams or employees. In short, they do not act as force multipliers (or maybe they multiply by a decimal place, making their team 80% as effective as it could be) and they need to either improve or stop managing.

“Forgetting” or “Got busy with other topics” are no excuse. If you recognize a behavior as being detrimental to that person, or the team, or the company, you have an obligation to that person to help them improve that behavior. You either take that obligation seriously, or you don’t—and if you don’t, chances are you’re slacking on other aspects of people management too. Taking the easy, non-confrontational road is a great way to accomplish little and to find out you do not have what it takes to be a manager.

Annual Reviews as Feedback Mechanism

Annual reviews are as much a measure of the manager as they are of the managed. They are often viewed as the mechanic for feedback and commentary on someone’s performance, but they serve absolutely no purpose in changing and improving performance or behavior. Zero. None. Annual reviews exist to memorialize someone’s performance and that is it.

If you get into an annual review and a new topic or behavior is discussed, that manager has failed. Full stop. Nothing new should be discussed in an annual review. The topics, the discussion, even the career pathing, should be retreads of conversations that have been happening all year. This should be a synopsis, not an info dump.

Bringing up new information in an annual review means that feedback will be ignored—or worse, rejected, meaning the behavior will be intensified. Why? Because of motivation: the employee thinks, probably correctly, that the feedback is an attempt to undermine them and reduce any kind of raise or bonus.

If managers are waiting for an annual review to provide feedback, they are not doing their job as a manager and they’re unlikely to be affecting positive change. Annual reviews are not a mechanism for feedback.

Recap

Providing feedback that someone will internalize is equal parts why, how and when. The When of providing feedback is important because the person receiving the feedback needs to be in a place where they directly associate behavior with consequence and outcome.