So one of your direct reports has comments on another employee. Maybe it was an offhand comment, maybe it was a long discussion in a 1:1. As a manager, your job is to improve the leverage of your team.

If a team member’s morale has taken a hit, or a piece of work has been delayed, you should try to understand the scale of the impact to see if this is a conversation the employees can handle themselves, whether you should deliver the feedback, or if the issue needs to be escalated.

On the other end of the spectrum, if a team member is feeling energized or work is progressing faster than expected, you’ll still want to gather information to deliver feedback. Celebrate the good times and encourage more of this behaviour.

Either way, remember that feedback is meant to be a snapshot of how a person behaved in a given instant, it is not a reflection of who the employee is as a person. Negative feedback doesn’t mean they’re a bad employee, and positive feedback doesn’t mean they can do no wrong. We’re all human, and we have good times and bad.

Negative feedback

The first time you have negative feedback for someone, you should go into the conversation assuming they had good intent. Jumping in with accusations and assumptions is going to make people defensive and they might clam up or you’ll just have an argument on your hands. Even if you’re the kind of person who likes to yell, it’s not going to be productive. Maybe you’ll get to blow off some steam, but the person receiving the feedback isn’t going to learn anything from it and you’re just going to have to do it all over again until they eventually guess what you want.

If your team isn’t learning from their feedback, you aren’t improving their leverage.

Go into the conversation with curiosity. You’re just trying to figure out what happened and prevent it from happening again. There’s no point in placing blame.

Always assume good intent. When things go wrong, it’s best to assume that an employee was acting with the best intentions given the context they had at the time. While you discuss the events with an employee, you can find out what context they were working with, what their train of thought was, and how that lead to decisions and actions that brought you to where you are now.

Preparing to give feedback

The first step of delivering feedback is to lay the groundwork to prevent the receiver from getting defensive. I like to start off with something like

Hey, I have some feedback that I’ve received, if you’re open to hearing it right now.

By starting off this way, the receiver has to agree to hear the feedback before you proceed. It’s not guaranteed to work, but on average it makes people less likely to react defensively to constructive criticism.

The next step is optional, but I highly recommend that you do this with newer employees that aren’t familiar with a culture of psychological safety, or especially anxious employees that might not be thinking about the benefits of feedback and psychological safety when they hear their boss say “feedback”. Remind them why we give feedback in the first place, what the feedback represents, and that you are doing this for everyone’s benefit including theirs.

We’ve worked very hard to establish a culture of psychological safety on this team, so by giving you this feedback, I’m not trying to place any blame on you. I’m trying to uncover how this happened, so that we can prevent it from happening again. I’m giving you this feedback as a reflection of your actions in that situation at that time, and not as a reflection of who you are inherently as a person. We’re having this conversation because I know that you can improve, and we can be stronger as a team.

Next focus on objective truth about a behaviour or action, and the impact that it has. Don’t focus on the person, but make sure the feedback is specific.

You were assigned the task of doing final edits and proofreading the presentation. During the presentation, I received comments about 3 incorrect statements that the audience spotted. The statements were X, Y, and Z. When the audience is able to spot errors in our presentation, it degrades their trust in our expertise.

Next, you open it up to the receiver of your feedback to see if that’s also how they see it.

Does that match up with the way you saw events?

If they agree, you can start to work on an action plan to avoid these issues coming up in the future.

But you’re not here for situations where everything goes by the book. What happens if they don’t agree? From your perspective as the manager, everything you just said is objectively true. They were assigned a task, they did not complete it to a satisfactory level, and your team or company is seen as less of an authority because of it. You’ve got to really listen to see what other conversations you’ll need to have later. Keep an eye out for any new information they bring up.

Remember that these issues could be a failure of process, of management, or of individuals. Let’s look at some potential examples

---

There was a breakdown in communication and they didn’t know they were supposed to do final edits and proofreading

This could be a failure of process. Together you can review old emails, instant messages, meeting notes, action items in project management software, or any other written communication and discuss where the breakdown in communication occurred. Can you agree on where communication broke down?

The statements aren’t incorrect

Ask why they think that. Perhaps the employee is working with outdated information. Did they miss an update? Was a key piece of information not communicated to Individual Contributors?

Someone else wrote those statements

Dig deeper into why they didn’t correct the statements. Were they concerned about contradicting a more senior employee? Was something blocking them from having the required authority to perform the task? In these cases, remind them that if they were blocked on a task, they should come to you as their manager to unblock it.

The incorrect statements were added after the final check was done

This could be a failure of process. Maybe the team wasn’t notified when final checks were being performed and someone else thought they could still add information.

---

In any case, keep the conversation focused on this specific situation. If the employee is trying to make you aware of some other pattern of behaviour, assure them that you can have that conversation after you have worked together to come up with an action plan to address this situation.

Remember that throughout the feedback process, you’re not trying to place blame. Placing blame only encourages people to hide their mistakes and creates an environment where people are driven by fear. If feedback is delivered in a way that allows your team members to come up with a plan of action to improve, and they’re given encouragement when improvement does happen, you’ll be on your way to building an open and psychologically safe work environment.