The Leaflet #116: managing those with more expertise; building a culture of feedback; regular feedback structures
Managing people who have more technical skill than you do
Critiquing people who far exceed your technical skill set in the thing you’re critiquing is a very common part of management. It may become even more a part of your management work the higher you go in the org chart. A CEO usually has emerged from a specialty, like operations or sales or product, rather than having been a generalist who has done all of those. Despite how common this responsibility is, people are often terrible at it for the reasons we’d guess.
I was very lucky that I had a management mentor early on in my life, when I was a 28-year-old principal managing teachers who had double the experience I had. I was very nervous about that all the time. And that mentor just gave me this phrase: your job is not to be better than them, it is to make them better. I held that in my head and repeated it, over and over.
If you share that story with those you manage, they will likely agree with you and they’ll be glad they agreed. It can help to do this explicitly: our story, by the way, is not that I’m better at this than you, and that’s why I get to tell you what you need to do to improve. The story we share is that I am the person we have both agreed can make you better at this. And that is what allows me to push you the way I’m about to.
The next step can be talking with them about the ways in which they can envision that happening. You can identify some things where I don’t need to be inside the technical skill set to tell you whether it’s improving or not. I don’t even need to know what hacks, tips, and procedures make somebody better at that thing. We can brainstorm those things together. It’s my job to make sure we have the brainstorm. It’s my job to hold you accountable to what we produce in that brainstorm. Who else is going to do it if not me?
What I’m sketching here is manager as coach. I’m holding us both accountable to you identifying, with me sort of stamping and agreeing and perhaps even critiquing and vetoing occasionally, the next level you want to get to. I can hold that. If you say, “Today I would correctly assess myself as a six,” I can say to you, “Okay, by next quarter you should be an eight.” You might know way more about what that six-to-eight leap is going to require than I do, so I’m going to ask you to identify what those things are. Whether it’s additional guides who aren’t me, or resources I can give you, or focus and accountability I can give you, or the opportunity to thought-partner — I’m going to provide every single one of those things.
That is my role as manager: to marshal the resources and the clarity to make you better.
-ben
Building a culture of candid feedback (a real one)
Establishing a culture that promotes constructive feedback—specifically voluntarily, not just when prompted—starts with a shared theory of why that’s important that’s explicitly nameable among all teammates.
It’s usually something like: one, we don’t want to miss any opportunities to get better, and the thought that we’d leave a bunch of those on the table all the time is worth avoiding. And the other—which I actually think is more compelling to people in the long run—is just better trust throughout the team. The knowledge that you walk around this place knowing no information is being withheld from you. Therefore there’s no politics. Nobody’s ever reading between someone’s lines. No one’s ever worried somebody’s not going to be humble enough. Nobody’s ever worried that somebody’s going to have a personal agenda driving their moves underneath the surface.
Whatever it is, it’s something you should decide together. If a third party were to ask, “Why do you guys seem to give each other corrections so often?”—everybody would have the same answer independently. That helps immeasurably.
Care Personally, Challenge Directly
I endorse the Kim Scott radical candor principle: care personally, challenge directly. The more evidence there is of real caring across relationships, the more valuable, warranted, and motivated constructive feedback becomes. Retreats, recognizing when people are doing the right thing, the moments you have where you’re asking people about their lives and how they’re making it all work at work—these moments produce not just more opportunities for tough feedback, but actually more desire for it from people, because they feel safer and they want to know what you think.
A distinction generally to make: our feedback should not make anybody feel comfortable, but it shouldn’t make people feel unsafe.
Three Things That Build the Culture
I tend to think there are three things that help create a culture of strong, candid feedback if you don’t have one.
Open the gate by creating moments of risk and vulnerability on a regular cadence. How often are you having that retreat where you ask the question: could any of you have given this feedback earlier? How often are you having people actually tell their stories of their experiences? Having step-backs to do that is really useful.
Raise the ceiling on the level of candor. This is usually done by spotlighting really intense candor for others to see—most often by people at the top receiving it. Nobody will ever think it’s okay to give feedback that is stronger than what they’ve seen you receive. So if you simply raise that ceiling—somebody sends you really tough feedback that is really helpful on Slack, share it with the rest of the team. Intentionally create a moment where somebody could give you feedback live. The more people who enter into that space doing that, the more safe they feel, and the more safe others feel in those interactions with them.
Make it regular and unavoidable. Set an expectation that everyone will do feedback exchanges in regularly occurring structures like the 2x2 and the 360 review, that occur outside of formal performance reviews. This makes feedback delivery and receipt a high-value but lower-stakes practice, rather than a dramatic, only-in-extremes performance.
-ben
Structures for a steady stream of feedback
A good goal to chase is a steady stream of feedback, such that people on your team never get feedback too late and people never feel like they’re sitting on feedback that others could be using to improve. Here are some structures that can get you there:
The 2x2. At the individual managerial level, do something called a 2x2 in your one-on-one meetings. You have a spot in the agenda where, let’s say you’re the manager: you give a piece of feedback to yourself, positive; a piece of feedback to yourself, constructive; a piece of feedback to the report, positive; a piece of feedback to the report, constructive. And the report does the same. You both come in with that.
360 reviews. When people get performance reviews, are they getting reviewed by their peers, their leaders, and those who report to them as well? This can creating a motivating, holistic picture and also bring some very clear themes to the surface. Generating this can be as simple as a Google form asking for a piece of positive and a piece of constructive for each person.
A #feedback Slack channel. Structure and reify feedback via channels like Slack. If you create a Slack channel for productive feedback for the team, that automatically signals that it’s more welcome and creates a vibe around it.
Retreats. Have a somehow more foundational moment where you say: what do we really need to productively change about the team to improve? Usually vis-à-vis some big goals you just set for yourselves—what’s going to keep us back from this?
Feedback speed dating. I used to do this at those same events. Everybody looks around the room, finds a piece of positive and a piece of constructive for everybody there. You run a two-minute total speed dating round. Each person talks with each person, and they have to go really quickly. It’s gamified and fun, but you’re still getting a lot of content out there really fast.
And: the question that builds culture
A worthwhile measure of your culture of feedback: is productive feedback exchange happening even outside of the regular structures? In other words, is your culture wholly reliant on those structures or have people embraced it in a more robust way?
After a speed dating round or a big group feedback session at a retreat, I like to ask: is there anything that you shared today that could have been shared earlier … before this retreat, in other words? If so, what kept you from sharing it earlier?
It’s good to get some answers that are not shared out loud in the group. Have people write them down and submit them. What people tend to say out loud is “it just didn’t occur to me” or “I didn’t have time.” What you want to discover is people saying: I didn’t know whether this person would receive it well. I didn’t know if in my role I had a right to feedback on this thing. I could have had it, but I just wasn’t prompted to have it, so I never formulated the thought.
That actually can give you a recipe for how to make the culture much stronger on a regular basis.
-ben
COMPELLING QUOTATIONS
One-time aspiring math professor Ulysses S. Grant on punishment after the US war with Mexico for Texas:
Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war in modern times.
Painter Francisco Goya on cause and effect:
The sleep of reason produces monsters.
Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy on learning:
The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.
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