Youâre somewhere in Q4âââletâs say itâs the first week of December. If youâre in a startup, chances are good that you feel like you *just* nailed down Q4 goals. And now, before you can blink, the end of the year is upon you.
Itâs time for some serious reflectionâââon the team, the year that was, whatâs in the hopper for next year.
As you pull together the professional feedback, thereâs one thing nagging at you. You have feedback for a person on your team that isnât really professional feedback at all. At least not in the classical sense. Itâs a character flaw. And you think itâs getting in the way of their success.
You donât want to go through another year without it being addressed, but thereâs no easy way to bring it up.
Now what?
Itâs not personal except itâs totally personal
For years I would get a variation of the same feedback in every performance review.
Youâre intimidating.
I was never sure what to do with this.
In retrospect, this was problematic feedback for a young woman in tech on a management track. But the first few times I heard it, I didnât spend much time on the gendered nature of the feedback.
I mostly just wanted to stop hearing it. I didnât stop to think about whether the feedback itself was fair or balanced.
I set about fixing it.
Iâm loathe to admit it now, but I actually tried smiling more (yes, really). I tried using more exclamation marks in my writing. I tried incorporating smiley faces.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it didnât work. Year after year, job after job, review after review, I got the same feedback.
Youâre intimidating.
I advanced in my career, I got raises and a few key promotions. But some version of it was always tucked away in otherwise straightforward performance reviews.
I finally worked up the nerve to ask my manager what he meant and what he thought I might do to address it.
He explainedâââif people feel like they canât talk to you or if they feel scared to, youâll miss critical information that you need to do your job.
He talked about how part of the gig is understanding the organizational context, both when things are flowing and when they are not.
If your staff wonât tell you when things have gone off the rails, youâve got a problem.
You need to get them to talk to you. And you need them to feel safe with you or they never will.
And for the first time in my professional career, I understood what the heck people had been trying to tell me all this time.
Mind the gap
If youâre reviewing someone who has been in the work world for a few years, thereâs a good chance youâre about to touch a live wire.
Telling people to work on a character attribute is sort of bullshit.
Telling the most introverted person on your team that he needs to speak up in meetings wonât go well. Not because heâll yell at you. But because, worse than that, heâll nod along and say yep he knows and then youâll be having the exact same conversation the following year.
âBe more extroverted,â is pretty much useless feedback. Itâs like saying “be taller.”
In my case, âbe less intimidatingâ was not actionable. Yes, itâs closely tied to âpeople are scared to tell you things.â But the framing of the feedback is completely different.
One version is about an elemental construct of my character. The other is about the pursuit of a business objectiveâââcontextâââand how it impacts me as a leader.
Get the difference?
âWe need you to be different than you are,â is not the same as âwe need you to develop in these areas.” They are related but they come from a different starting point. And your staff are likely to be able to absorb one much more easily than the other.
Tackling the elephant in the room
Iâve done a couple of these in my time and hereâs the thing Iâve found: telling people to work on a character attribute is sort of bullshit.
As youâre prepping your review, shift the focus of your feedback from the character attribute to the intended outcome. Force yourself to dig in on why you want your introvert to be more vocal in meetings.
Do you think youâre missing a perspective? An important strategic voice? Where are you seeing the impact of this team memberâs quietness?
The shift from personal to intended outcome lets you discuss more concrete changes in terms of how they benefit both the company and the individual.
In my case, once my manager shifted the conversation to the impact of me being perceived as intimidating, there was a lot more he could do to support me and a lot more I could do to address it. It was actionable.
I no longer felt haunted by this looming piece of annual feedback. With this context, it became clear why all the smiley faces and exclamation marks werenât helping.
This article was syndicated with permission from The Co-Pour