Providing feedback as a manager

“We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.”

— Bill Gates

Despite me doing design work daily, I also handle some management tasks and one of my favorite parts is communication with people in my line management. I get to work with bright professionals, where I learn how to master supporting people not only whom I can teach something, but also the people who can teach me.

If you ever struggle with the manager Imposter Syndrome, know this: you aren’t doing that because you are supposed to know everything. You are doing this because you can be another empathetic mind in the professional life of other people. You can mirror them or prompt the questions, spark and share ideas, and listen to people and their challenges.

I try to achieve different results from my conversations with direct reports on a weekly basis and during quarter reviews – by using different types of feedback. Some of those I started using pretty recently and I hope this will make an even better change.

There are 4 main types of feedback:

General feedback

This one has probably the least info since the general feedback is driven by common sense. It should be rightfully suitable for the timeframe events took place or will (if it’s the next quarter/week planning). Signs of good feedback I really like from source mscareergirl.com:

• It’s focused on the future – since we cannot change things that have already happened;

• It’s descriptive and specific – “It’s easy to look at feedback as a complaint when there’s little information offered”;

• It’s personalized – include the motivation and goals of your direct reports;

• It’s actionable – saying what went wrong isn’t enough, to provide ideas on how things could be changed in the future.

“Conduct at least 3 exploratory user interviews during the next quarter, to straighten our general knowledge about the product”.

“Keep on building the relationship within the team and product stakeholders via regular communication”.

Performance improvement

This type of feedback for me was at first really foreign – I never wanted to come as the critiquing party. However, now I know how to access this type of collaboration, where you basically focus solely on the potential you see. From the source hbr.org, I have a great quote: “Richard Boyatzi’s recent research on the best approach to coaching has used brain imaging to analyze how coaching affects the brain differently when you focus on dreams instead of failings. These findings have great implications for how to best help someone – or yourself — improve”.

How can we use it? We can use it in the form of a roadmap or list of tasks, that are usually smaller than the big goal in mind. If you want to improve someone’s product thinking, for example, a great approach would be to have assigned tasks such as having a list with features, product team discovery recordings for each, adding links with requirements, etc, – basically to start guiding the person through smaller steps which will guide to a bigger goal.

However, when you want to balance out the behavior, which you cannot add to the roadmap, you can always use the redirect option for feedback. Down below you can find some feedback examples from workhuman.com:

“I really appreciated your enthusiasm in today’s meeting. However, I noticed that you spoke over some other team members in your excitement. Your input is always welcome, but we also need to hear from others. What do you think?”

“I really admire how receptive you are to feedback. By being proactive and soliciting feedback from your teammates, you’re able to produce much stronger designs.”

“Thanks for letting me know you’re behind schedule on this assignment. Let’s look at how you spend your time and see if there’s a way to tackle tasks more efficiently.”

“I appreciate your willingness to work overtime to meet deadlines, and you have great attention to detail. However, I’ve noticed that when you interact with team members, you’re sarcastic or roll your eyes. I wanted to check in and see if anything was wrong. Is there anything I can do to help you enjoy being here like you used to?”

Kudos

Balance out your feedback! It’s really important to make sure you highlight the strengths of your direct reports – this way you reinforce this positive behavior. Create that connection with your colleagues, because one of the popular reasons for people to seek new job opportunities starts with feeling more alone in the project, feeling less heard and less appreciated. Like their work doesn’t make any difference.

My general rule of thumb is: if you ever feel like you want to share kind words of appreciation with your manager, colleague, or direct report – do it now. This feeling will be gone in 5 seconds and then no words would be exchanged. Letting know other people you value their work and time only happens really during those short gratitude spikes. Sometimes I love to create Slack messages with a delay, if I feel like this message would be perceived better at the end of a colleague’s presentation, for example.

“You always have such creative ideas during our meetings and brainstorming sessions. I appreciate your input.“ – from workhuman.com.

Promise (collective effort)

This type of feedback was super new for me, but I recognized the need during my 1-on-1s sessions with colleagues. Some of the issues they face cannot be resolved only by encouraging your direct report to change things, sometimes you as a manager need to talk to other parties to resolve some communication issues. This could be about processes, work transparency, etc. We want to keep everyone informed on the situation, this is why this effort is collective and I usually specify this explicitly in my reviews.

But what is the promise part? It’s simple – we are letting know people that we hear their struggles and they are not alone in those.

“We will work on clear design deadlines and roadmap to create more predictability in workload and planning during next quarter”.

Summary

I will end this article with yet another quote: “Constructive, empowering feedback is more about asking questions than providing solutions” – by Michael Gough, VP of Product Design at Uber. We are all here to learn and we all try to guide through this life and our jobs to the best ability we can. Let’s make our communication kinder, let’s not withhold kudos, yet let’s not be afraid to aim all of us toward greater goals and results.