The Manager-Tools Holy Trinity: Feedback

“Hey,” I said to a new employee, “can I give you some feedback?” A look of total panic flashed across his face. “Erm, sure, OK, I guess” he stammered.

A while back I read Ken Blanchard’s One Minute Manager; more recently I’ve been listening to Mike Auzenne and Mark Horstman’s Manager Tools podcast. There’s a common theme going: constant, concise and precise feedback is a vital management skill.

When you give effective feedback, here’s what happens: Your staff know what’s expected of them and know that you’re watching. You increase the effectiveness of your team and make a noticeable impact outside your department.

In The One Minute Manager, Ken Blanchard tediously spins the story of a young man who goes in search of an effective manager. The young man finds an effective manager and asks for the secret. The manager sends him to six people he’s shared the secret with. (If he just answered the question the book would be about a quarter the size.) The basic result being that you should spend one minute with someone you manage talking about the goals of what they’re working on. You should spend one minute reprimanding them when they transgress and one minute praising them when they perform well. And you need to do it regularly. The audio book goes for 1 hour and 38 minutes so it’s not long and the book is a classic — you need to read it.

At Manager Tools, they’ve update the idea a bit and it feels more polished. Mike and Mark have what they call the ‘Holy Trinity’ of Manager Tools. The first tool is feedback and they recommend that you start with affirming feedback for eight weeks before introducing adjusting feedback.

Somethings I picked up from the podcast:

• Feedback shouldn’t be used to punish the past. You can’t do anything about the past, so make sure any adjusting feedback is about the future.
• Give lots of affirming feedback. It softens the heavy impact of adjusting feedback and gives it a lot greater chance of bringing about real change.
• Be precise and talk about behaviour. Telling someone they’re ‘doing great’ is nice, but telling them “when you distribute meeting minutes as quickly as you did today makes it easier for the rest of the team to  meet their commitments” is specific and reinforces a particular behavior and encourages repetition. For adjusting feedback, saying someone is rude is a judgement call on who they are as a person. Describing a situation in which they behaved in a rude manner doesn’t call their character into question.

The Manager Tools model has four steps:

1. Ask if you can give feedback. This gets them in a frame of mind to receive the feedback. If they say no, come back later. “Hey Joe, can I give you some feedback?”
2. Describe the behavior. Adding to what I said above, this means you’re not guessing at motivation. Saying “You’re lazy” makes an assumption on the reason something didn’t get done. “When you don’t send the meeting minutes out until I remind you …”
3. Descibe the impact. If you just say “You didn’t send the meeting minutes” then all they’ve done is failed to do something you asked them to do that has no known impact on anyone other than the Department of Paperwork. “… here’s what happens: the team misses important decisions and action items and the rest of the company feels we don’t meet our commitments”
4. Discuss next steps. For affirmative feedback this is easy. “Thanks! Keep it up!”. For adjusting feedback, put the ball back in their court: “What can you do to change this next time?” Even if the answer is as obvious as getting the minutes out quickly, by asking them to vocalise the change in behaviour, they’re making a commitment.

Easy right? You can find this particular episode on the Manager Tools website.

Do you give feedback to your team? If so how? How has it gone for you?

The new employee I was giving feedback to listened carefully as I outlined a piece of work he’d been involved with and the great impact it had on how he’s seen by me, by the team and by the company. But he still looked nervous. “But ..?” he questioned. “But nothing! Keep it up! Great work! Great to have you on board!”