One of the most dreaded workplace responsibilities for leaders is giving feedback to others. Whether you’re a manager delivering a performance review or a peer trying to talk to a colleague about how their behavior impacts you and your work, most people feel like they don’t have a solid approach for delivering difficult feedback. How can they give it effectively without hurting the other persons’ feelings, and how can they make sure the recipient actually understands it?
Last week organizational psychologist Adam Grant published a fantastic Substack about this very topic. He advises us to stop delivering the “compliment sandwich,” the format where you deliver a positive compliment, then the difficult feedback, then another compliment at the end. This is supposed to “soften the blow” for the recipient, but Grant found that it has the opposite effect.
Depending on the recipient’s aptitude for receiving feedback, they either focus only on the compliments and miss the comments about their behavior, or they ignore the compliments and feel personally attacked by the feedback, making the compliments irrelevant.
Grant offers a different approach. He suggests getting straight to the point and setting expectations for the recipient which opens them up to the feedback:
A team of psychologists boosted openness to tough feedback by at least 40% by prefacing it with just 19 words: “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.”
Grant goes on to share that it’s important to take yourself off the pedestal and make things equal between you and the recipient: “Now that we’ve been working together for a while, I think it would be great if we gave each other suggestions for how we can be more effective.”
The next two steps Grant recommends are what I describe as “coaching manager” skills. They invite the colleague to collaborate on the feedback, which makes them far more receptive to what they will hear and what they will do as a result.
Grant suggests asking the other person if they’d be open to feedback based on the other person’s observations. Then, invite the recipient’s own perception of the behavior you’re addressing:
“I want to start by describing what I saw… and see if you saw the same things…. Then we can decide what, if anything, we need to do going forward. I’m open to the possibility that I may be missing things or that I contributed to the concerns I’m raising. How does that work for you?”
This is exactly how professional coaches engage with clients. We build a relationship of trust with our clients. We set high expectations with our client that we both know they can achieve (even if the client has doubts at the beginning). Then we partner with them as a peer, asking for permission to poke and prod when needed. And we stay curious, inviting their feedback on what we observe and share.
I’ve shared this feedback approach with several clients over the last week and they have all been delighted to try it with their direct reports or even their managers. If more managers delivered feedback in this way, we’d make huge strides in creating more conscious cultures at our organizations.
I’m grateful for leaders like Adam Grant, who is doing phenomenal research and work in creating a more conscious workplace that truly helps people thrive and reach their full potential. I hope you’ll try his feedback approach and I’d love to hear how it goes for you.
Work happy. Live happy. BE happy.
Meredith
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The way we work and build teams is rapidly changing. Leaders often feel unprepared to navigate the transition. As a conscious leadership coach, consultant, and communicator, Meredith helps leaders and their teams create new ways of working and relating so they can prepare for the future by consciously co-creating it.
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