The Leaflet #115: i do-you do-we do for work; pre-loading your confidence in direct feedback; enrolling your people in receipt of direct feedback
I do - you do - we do for the workplace
There’s a common approach in K-12 teaching called “I do, we do, you do.” You can imagine how this approach works just from reading the handle. The part that can easily get lost when you apply this in the workplace is that all three steps require full attention from both parties. Too often, a leader delegating something skips straight to “you do” and only looks at the output of the delegate’s work.
When handing off a skill and practicing it, the “I do” part doesn’t mean the teacher is just doing it in a vacuum. “I do” means the teacher is doing it and the student is paying attention to how they do it. It’s still a two-way street. “We do” can take a few different forms: we’re either sharing the task by taking different parts of it or we’re literally holding hands on the same pencil and doing it together in lockstep. Obviously, this step requires full participation of teacher and student. In the “you do” phase, the student does it and the teacher is paying careful attention, giving feedback.
When you’re transitioning a skill set or a set of structures, you’re roughly using that framework. It’s worth noting that all three steps of this can be done in a pretty short amount of time, depending on what the skill or task is that you’re delegating. You may not need a detailed work plan or calendar gymnastics to get it done. Watch me open this meeting, then we’ll open the next one together, then the one after that, you open on your own (with me observing).
-ben
How to pre-load your confidence in your direct feedback
My confidence in giving somebody corrective feedback very directly is based on two things.
One: a fairly robust history of my noticing just as many positive things about them, or even more, that I’ve communicated to them. I’ve removed the worry that this person might reasonably think I don’t ever approve of them, or that this person is going to be concerned that they’re in some binary state with me at all times (fine or maybe-about-to-get-fired).
Two: I’ve usually constructed a fairly clear agreement with this person on the front end of their employment that they are hungry for corrective feedback and so am I. That agreement is the subtext of my feedback. If there is a thing I leave unsaid, because it’s mutually understood, it’s a prelude like: “Hey, I know when you came on board you said one of the most important things you could get from your boss is really direct, clarifying feedback that you could act on right away and it would change things in a big way. So I’m going to give you something.”
I usually have literally asked a member of my team to commit to that when they join the team and even practiced it with them as part of their hiring process. Again in their onboarding, I’ve usually gone out of my way to make this a pretty densely experienced phenomenon for them.
Hiring and onboarding are your only real opportunities to set durable, helpful subtext for difficult feedback. Otherwise, you should hire people who just don’t need much feedback.
-ben
Methods for enrolling people in the exchange of difficult feedback
Make them an exemplar. You give them some tough feedback, they take it pretty well, and you immediately tell them how powerful it was for you that they just took it so well. Bring this up again later. Use them as an exemplar to other people — shout somebody out on the Slack for being not just ready to hear some pretty tough feedback, but acting on it right away and going out of their way to make me feel good about having given it to them. This builds their identity on the team as somebody who is an exemplar of this. They want to be proud of and protect that identity.
The second-grade homework approach. A teacher says to second graders: “Okay kids, tonight for math, do you want second-grade homework or third-grade homework?” The kids of course all actively choose third grade because it makes them feel cooler to take on the bigger challenge. The feedback delivery version of this could sound like: “I could say all this to you in a variety of really couched ways, or I could give it to you really directly—which do you prefer?” Invariably people will say directly. But that act—even if that’s not what they feel in their bones—the act of choosing it really does help galvanize them in a way that not having that choice does not.
Re-inoculate aka re-hire This is a bracing and useful approach. You say something like: “Look, feedback here—it’s got to be fast and direct. You’ve got to be ready to receive it. You’ve got to even be ready to receive it well and with gratitude, or it’s not going to work. I need you to get to that place, or we have to have talks about changing this whole thing up. Take some time, get back to me.” Changing things up could mean any of the following: they have a different job, they have a different manager, they leave the team altogether.
-ben
COMPELLING QUOTATIONS
Maintenance maven Stewart Brand with a science lesson in four words:
Rust is slow fire.
Careful observer of patterns Kathryn Schulz on extinction:
To European observers [of the 1820s], the scariest thing about … dinosaurs was, ironically, the same thing small children find reassuring about them today: they no longer exist. For people accustomed to the idea that nature was eternal and unchanging … the idea of extinction was profoundly troubling. The Flood was one thing, but what kind of God would destroy his own handiwork again and again? And what did that mean about the fate of human beings?
Writer Sam Kriss on 21st century maxxers:
The twenty-first century is going to be a century of the maxxer. It won’t take many maxxers to make a century; when you drag yourself to the absolute furthest point in a distribution tail you leave a lot of turbulence in your wake. The twentieth century was a century of the masses, class and ethnic conflicts, nationalism and the great contests of history. The realist novel, the personal essay, the strip-mining of ordinary life for patterns and insights. Our century will not make nearly as much sense.
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