They don’t want to hear it.
They don’t.
It is legit good feedback. It is substantive, and it is 100% true, but they do not want to hear it.
How do you know this? You’ve provided the feedback several times. Three different variants of the critical feedback, and each time, the response is one of these:
- “I know, I know. I’m working on it.” They are not.
- An immediate, abrupt topic change. What?
- (My favorite) Twisting the feedback and making it about you. Impressive.
This is not a bad employee, this is not a person incapable of changing, and this is most certainly not an adversarial situation.
They don’t want to hear it.
Not a Trick
I have a move. It’s not a guarantee, but if you’ve tried the obvious approaches, if you’ve tried straight talk, and if you’ve made no progress, I offer The Slide.
There are prerequisites for The Slide:
- You’ve tried a couple of different approaches to giving this feedback. They’ve heard it, but they have not acted.
- You have high confidence that if they actually absorbed the feedback and acted on it, they’d attempt to change. Somewhere in the back of their head, past the denial, you know they’ll get it.
- You’ve had to learn the same lesson in your professional career.
I can not tell you when to deploy The Slide, the opportunity will present itself when the person who needs the feedback, once again, complains or otherwise comments on the by-product consequence of their negligence. Yes, it’s infuriating because if they just listened to you, they’d have a stronger set of tools to tackle the problem, but bury that and Slide ’em:
Them: “Yeah, and isn’t just the endless meetings, it’s the fact that I don’t have anyone on the team who can do the meetings. Francis is deep in backend debugging, Jake isn’t ready to run that meeting, and Jason, well, Jason doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.”
Sweet, sweet irony. Take a deep breath and Slide:
“Back at Pinterest, we didn’t have a CTO. I was the VP of Engineering, and had this loose collection of very bright senior engineers who wanted to help. Problem was… me. Whenever a CTO-class problem came up, I’d try to be the CTO, which meant I wasn’t being the VP of Engineering. After a bit, I was doing poorly at both jobs.”
Them: “Poorly, how? What’d you do?”
“It’s mostly the sense of ‘Is there enough time in the day?’ If the answer to that question is ever ‘no’, then I’m doing poorly. Doesn’t hurt when others point that out, too. After a few months of barely treading water, I gathered together the senior engineer leaders, and we built a small council. When CTO problems arrived, we gave it one of them. They drove, but they relied on the other members and me to get it done.”
So, what feedback had I been attempting and failing to give this mysterious former manager prior to this bearing of my soul? Correct. Delegation. The single biggest challenge for new managers — giving up the responsibility for the product… for the building. Learning how to give accountability for projects of significance to the team. It’s an essential set of complex skills involving trust, communication, and, most importantly, judgment. Failure to understand delegation is failing to be a leader. Senior or not.
My thesis is why this skill is hard to learn; the reason they don’t want to hear this feedback is that it contradicts the valuable core engineering skills that got them the role in the first place. The Slide is you gently sliding up right next to that discomfort, that contradiction, and not accusing, not lecturing, just telling the story of that time you learned the thing.
Not a Guarantee
Why won’t they listen? What is it about this particular habit or behavior that has this capable, smart, and reasonable human ignore the advice of a seasoned, well-informed, and trusted leader?
The answer is usually fear. The variants of fear that apply here are as numerous as the situations, but fear is fear. They have an inner monologue about this topic, “I will be less if I do this. I will have failed if I don’t achieve. I should have known. They will finally know I am a fraud.”
You will never diagnose the fear, but slide up next to them and tell them about the time you were scared, too.
