Feedback…or a conversation?
When a manager has a difficult conversation coming up, they often feel like they need to do lots of preparation before they go in.
And yes, you do need to prepare. But perhaps not in the way you think.
Because they’re preparing for an outcome they’ve predicted. And they can’t predict it. We can’t predict how humans are going to respond to stuff. So when the conversation doesn’t go to plan, or something unpredictable happens, it’s really hard to work with whatever’s going on in that room.
If you go in preparing to deliver a message, you’re starting off holding the power. If it doesn’t work out, and the other person becomes emotional, or perhaps even aggressive, you hand that power over. And then it becomes a tug of war.
If you’re on the receiving end, and it feels like a message is being delivered to you, your back automatically goes up. Because you feel like you’re in a process.
And part of the problem is that we aren’t always very good at having these conversations early. So by the time the conversation happens, it’s a really big message you’re trying to deliver, and a big message to receive.
Take your armour off
Brené Brown talks about this in Dare to Lead. She expected fear to be the biggest barrier to courageous leadership, but her research found it wasn’t. The real barrier is the armour we put on to protect ourselves from that fear.
One of the types of armour she describes is being a ‘knower’ rather than a ‘learner’. It’s a really good leadership lesson to have in your back pocket. We feel like, as leaders, we should always be the knower. But how many times can you think of when you’ve put your learner hat on, and how much better the conversation was?
Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen make a similar point in Difficult Conversations. Feelings are what make these conversations difficult, so we often try to frame them in a way that leaves the emotion out…but that’s the bit that’s going to make it hard.
What to prepare instead
The preparation is in challenging yourself to see the whole picture, rather than an isolated incident or a series of things.
Check yourself first.
Check your facts, and make sure you’re not falling foul of the old confirmation bias.
Is what you’re bringing up fair?
Is it based on facts?
Can you describe it in a way that helps the other person see the challenge?
Would you challenge someone in the team you have a better relationship with in the same way?
If you can’t answer those, that’s where your preparation goes.
Then be really clear on the consequences. What are the consequences of whatever you’re feeding back about, and how can you relay it in a way that helps the other person see them too?
This isn’t about punishing somebody. It’s about saying, what’s going on here is not working, and we need to find a different way.
Solving it together
When managers get it right, they go into the conversation as joint problem solvers.
You still have a responsibility as a manager to manage. But it comes from a much more human place. You present the challenge, and then you invite ‘how are we going to work our way through this?’
And there’s no tug of war to have, because you haven’t gone in holding the power over them.
One thing I’ve done in the past is to say at the beginning of these conversations: ‘Here’s the outcome I’d like to get to by the end. What would make this feel like a good conversation for you?’
You could even ask ‘what worries you about this conversation?’
Creating the conditions for healthy conversations
I worked with a chief executive who, whenever he had a new person in his team, one of the first questions he’d ask was: how do you like to receive feedback?
That’s praise and positive stuff, as well as things to improve on. Some people are quite happy to have a shout out in a team meeting, while others find that uncomfortable. And when it’s things to improve on, some people like the detail and would welcome a chat once they’ve had time to process it. Others would much rather have a very informal conversation, move on, and not have it in writing.
We tend to think of feedback as something that happens when somebody’s done something wrong. But there will always be opportunities to improve, for both people in the conversation.
