You can watch this Meme Lesson on Feedback on YouTube.
Poor feedback is often as simple as one vague sentence that travels down a corporate hierarchy and quietly breaks a person it was intended to help.
We’re starting our new lesson on how to provide feedback in a manner that doesn't traumatize people, and will provide you with practical managerial skills that you can deploy to give feedback that actually helps people it's intended for, and, somewhat importantly, your organization.
But first, let me start with a feedback story.
You will recognize it because it's all too typical for every single failing and sick organization in the corporate universe.
What you will notice is that nobody in it is evil, and that's what makes it particularly painful.
It's Wednesday morning. Sarah walks out of the CEO's office stung.
In that office, the CEO provided Sara with feedback, and in it, he told her to be more commercial in her thinking. He had also mentioned Strategic depth once and Commercial instinct twice.
In the tone of a man who'd been saving it up.
Sara nodded.
Agreed, she'd do better.
Sara didn't ask what it meant — because asking would've proved his point.
So, what's the problem, you would ask?
The problem is in what happens next.
Sara walks out of the meeting, processing two words in her mind.
Commercial thinking.
That same afternoon, Sara is having her 1:1 session with Mark. Mark has only been in the job for six weeks. Mark thinks that he is doing fine.
He's about to stop being fine.
Sarah opens with full certainty: Mark hasn't been demonstrating sufficient commercial thinking.
She says it with passion.
Examples.
Fluency.
The examples come easily — she's been thinking about commercial thinking for four hours.
She sincerely believes that she's been thinking about Mark.
Mark listens. Nods.
Mark does what people do when the boss uses words they don't understand with great conviction.
He decides it's his fault.
Fast-forward six months.
Sarah now sees weak commercial thinking everywhere — including places where the word commercial doesn't technically apply.
Mark tries.
He fails.
Because Nobody ever told him what the words mean.
He starts adding "commercial implications" to sentences that didn't need them.
Overrides his own judgment.
Mark is slowly destroying himself.
In a few months, Sara will do her assessment that concludes:
Mark has demonstrated insufficient progress on commercial thinking.
Mark is placed on a Performance Improvement Plan. Core objective: Enhance Commercial Thinking.
Nobody — not Mark, not HR — asks what that means, and of course, Sara doesn't explain it.
This keeps happening thousands of times every day across the world. Sarah, who is, of course, our proxy for the feedback giver, won't remember the Wednesday it started. Neither will the CEO.
Nobody will ever connect poor feedback formed in vague sentences and the slowly collapsing morale of employees.
Because the feedback was never about Mark.
Maybe it wasn't even about Sarah. It was about something the CEO couldn't say clearly, passed down by someone equally unable, absorbed by the one person with no way to know better.
So why do those situations keep happening in the corporate world in thousands every day, destroying people and sending down an anxiety-induced, destructive carousel of self-doubt?
Stay tuned; we will make it easy and help resolve it.
