A Simple Framework for Giving (and Receiving) Feedback at Work

Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I’m Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers and tactical leadership advice.

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I was a manager for the majority of my career. If you’re a conscientious manager, providing feedback is a large part of your job. I knew that going into the job.

What I didn’t expect was that managers rarely receive feedback themselves. Most of the rare feedback they receive is from their manager. This feedback is usually regarding their upward communication or progress against their team’s goals.

I remember when I got a new manager at Amazon (which happens often enough). He lectured me that I needed to be very thorough during my team’s annual review.

“This is a critical time of the year. They need us to be detailed, and growth oriented. Our feedback can help shape their behavior over the next year, and helps determine if their career succeeds. This is the most important job we have.”

I agreed and fully intended to spend a significant amount of time on each employee’s annual review. I wrote pages for every employee, detailing their behavior, how it was interpreted by me and their peers, what they did well, and what they could improve. I am proud of how detailed and fair I was.

My manager copy and pasted my 360 feedback (from the members of my team) and told me to “keep doing a great job.” Yeah, that’s it.

This wasn’t unusual; I wasn’t terribly surprised (despite the hypocrisy of his feedback), and I continued doing my best.

While you might get feedback from your manager, what you rarely get is feedback from your team members. A good 360 feedback process can get you some light feedback, but it requires a trusting relationship for an employee to directly criticize a person who heavily influences their career. As a related note, this is a great reason to make sure you find a manager you can trust and work well with.

As direct report feedback is uncommon, it can feel surprising and jarring to receive it. Many managers, unfortunately, confuse being the boss with being a better employee. If you believe that you're supposed to have more experience and skills than the other people on your team, it can feel threatening for those people to say that they've observed you making a mistake.

This is not just true of managers. Plenty of employees begin their careers open minded, but as they enter leadership positions, they begin to think of themselves as above feedback from less experienced co-workers.

I don’t know how many times in engineering team standups I observed a senior engineer speaking down to or ignoring the feedback of a junior engineer. Not necessarily that the junior engineer was right or wrong, but the idea of being corrected by the junior engineer was clearly offensive.

Being humble and open to feedback is a critical skill.

A manager working for me asked for a one-on-one meeting.

Manager Erin - "I'm going to use feeling words ok? It's hard for me to bring up emotions at work, so I want you to understand that bringing this up is important for me."

Me - "Absolutely, I understand."

Manager Erin - "I felt hurt when you asked my team to work on that project earlier today when I was in the room. It made me feel reluctant to direct my team's activities when you're around. I lost my autonomy by you speaking directly to my team."

Me - "I greatly appreciate your feedback! It's so hard to get feedback from anyone, and it's great you felt you trusted me enough to say these things. By asking your team to work on that ticket, I stepped around you and your position. I can see how you'd feel that way. I'll be very careful going forward to work through you when assigning tasks to your team, and please let me know as soon as you notice me doing that type of thing again."

Feedback to your manager?

I know your manager should be open and happy to get feedback, because they likely don’t get a lot. But everyone is human, and I think it’s safest to take things easy.

When you’re giving feedback to a person who might be prickly about it, and particularly your manager (with a lot of control over your career), you want to create a trusting dialog. You want this to be a safe space, as the saying goes. Particularly assuming you don't regularly give feedback, you may wish to give an introduction that helps open the doors to a safe discussion.

Your first goal should be to create a common understanding that providing feedback is hard and uses emotional energy.

Managers (should) spend a lot of time providing feedback to their team members. They may need to be reminded that giving feedback to your manager is different from providing feedback to a direct report. It may be valuable to begin your conversation by helping your manager recognize this challenge and the stress this may cause you.

If a manager recognizes that their employee is putting themselves out there emotionally, it might help the manager internalize that they should respond gratefully, rather than defensively. Experienced managers who manage with empathy will recognize that feedback from their employees is a wonderful gift.

First, when giving feedback to anyone at any time, you never want to address their intentions. This can be tricky, because if you’re not careful, that’s automatic for most of us. You may have interpreted their actions or behaviors as an intention, but your feedback needs to be factual, identifying their actions or behaviors.

The most obvious version of that is, “When you were so angry at me and yelled at me, I wanted to quit.”

What will they say back? I’m willing to bet that almost everyone’s first response would be, “I wasn’t angry!”

Or if you said, “You never listen when I say …,” their natural response will almost certainly be, “I always listen!”

Because you were talking about something you can’t know. Their intentions. Their emotions. This is unfair to them, and won’t work.

If you’re giving your manager feedback, clearly you have a goal in mind. Because if you don’t think anything will change, I’d advise you to only give your manager positive feedback. Don’t shoot yourself in the face for no reason.

Instead, let’s assume you hope that your manager changes their actions or behaviors in some way. Your path to achieving this is to ensure the manager knows how their actions (or lack of actions) have created a negative impact they didn’t intend. You want to provide them a clear path to change while preserving their ego and their ability to change.

No one can change if they feel attacked...