Feedback Culture
He was devastated. It was his annual review where he was expecting a positive review and healthy raise, and I only had bad news for this senior engineer.
What Fred was experiencing was painful on two fronts: 1) We hadn’t done a good job of setting Fred’s expectations throughout the year, and 2) we were delivering this feedback at the same time we made an important decision with respect to Fred’s career without allowing him any time to course-correct from the information.
Fred had left a well paying gig to work with us a year prior. He had a lot of industry experience and participated in groups outside of work that indicated he shared our values. Just as Fred’s annual review was approaching his old manager transferred to another office. As part of the handoff process to me, I went over the feedback Fred’s manager had collected over the past eleven months. From that conversation with Fred’s manager it was clear that there was a significant amount of feedback that was critical of how Fred was behaving on his team, and Fred’s manager had not shared any of that feedback with Fred.
The company already had a culture of giving feedback frequently. Teams make time to give personal feedback for personal coaching purposes. In this case the feedback was hard to deliver, and Fred’s teammates opted to give feedback to Fred’s manager in written form. Great. Those same teammates were expecting Fred’s manager to act on that feedback, and that’s where everyone was let down.
I already knew how Fred’s annual review was going to go: poorly.
There was no raise for Fred at that time. His actions on his project made people not want to work with him and had a negative impact on team morale. He thought he was making things better, but instead he was making them worse… for eleven months straight.
Now, you should look at this situation and have a few suggestions right away, “Fred should be more in tune with how his teammates view him”, “Fred’s teammates should give him feedback directly if they don’t see change from his manager”, and “Fred’s manager should do his job and deliver hard feedback to Fred more regularly than once a year.” Of course, you’re right on all fronts. And that’s exactly what we did.
Giving Fred his annual review was the first step in delivering the hard feedback. The data that we already had, needed to be shared so Fred knew what was happening. We also acknowledged our fault in the situation and offered to revisit Fred’s compensation off-cycle with the hope that Fred would be able to demonstrate change in that time.
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That opened Fred up. What initially felt like a dead-end conversation, “You’ve done poorly, there’s nothing for you” easily transformed into “Here’s some feedback, we will reward you for positive changes you make”. This was now an opportunity to grow, and the company loves people who grow.
Next, Fred started gathering feedback on his own. He asked for explicit feedback during lunch to help measure his progress, while being more in tune to the body language his teammates put out during the day.
This made Fred an active player in the outcome of his efforts. He had information and perspective to bring to his coaching one on one’s with me, and we could have productive conversations when the data wasn’t aligned with his perception of self. No longer was Fred just the recipient of some uncontrollable outcome, he was empowered to affect change.
Simultaneously, I continued gathering feedback about Fred. Sometimes I would receive written feedback, other times I would seek out in-person feedback for more color on a particular situation. I then delivered my own findings to Fred in our semi-weekly coaching one on ones.
Fred got feedback very frequently in this way. It allowed him to make small adjustments over time. The frequency of the feedback also let him know if he was moving in the right direction — he could afford to make mistakes and try new things because the cost was a couple of weeks, not an entire year’s worth of work.
As you would hope, Fred turned it around. In his off-cycle review, Fred received a raise that was inline with his own expectations. His peers said he was a pleasure to work with. A full year after his initial review, Fred was leading one of our largest and most challenging projects, and receiving encouraging feedback about his interactions at the individual level as well as the leadership, inspiration, and motivation he was providing to the team as a whole. And Fred finally felt that he was providing the value to our company that he wanted to be offering all along.
Takeaways
Things got hairy when Fred’s understanding of self did not match his peers’ understanding of Fred and the company’s understanding of Fred.
Fixing the disparity involved three things: 1) delivering existing feedback to Fred, 2) empowering Fred to be involved in his own growth, and 3) continuing to deliver feedback to Fred so he can make small adjustments and recover from missteps with a small cost.
