Examples of using expectations to improve your performance feedback
The Manager by Designsm blog writes about the art of providing performance feedback. That’s because performance feedback is a fundamental skill needed for managers to perform their jobs as managers.
One important aspect of providing feedback is that it is based on some sort of standard, a bar that has been set, or a series of expectations of performance. So let’s talk about it!
In my prior article, I offer providing expectations as an alternative to giving public feedback. But there are more advantages to setting expectations than being perceived as a forward, clear thinking manager who knows what she wants and how to get there.
I suppose that’s reason enough, but there are more reasons to hone your skills at providing expectations!
Providing expectations also give you the ability to give performance feedback more effectively.
The formula is simple: If you’ve set a performance bar in advance, when you give feedback to your employee you can now measure against that expected performance.
What’s amazing is how infrequently this is performed by managers. So I hereby set the performance expectations to managers: Have you set performance expectations to your employees? If so, great! You are now ahead of the game.
Let’s look at examples of identifying expectations for performance prior to having to give feedback:
Examples of providing expectations to your team
I have written in the Manager by Design blog about the scourge of public feedback. Public feedback is when managers try to solve performance problems by addressing their entire organization at once. I make the case that doing this a) does not change the behavior of the one needing to change and b) could make worse the behavior of those who are already performing correctly. Public feedback is an example of a manager short cut and should be stopped.
So let’s look at — in a more positive manner — what a manager should focus on doing in a public setting: Setting expectations.
I would like to recommend to all of you managers out there to focus your announcements, all-team meetings and proclamations on the theme of setting expectations. Doing so will help you down the course of leading, and the more you set expectations with your staff, the more likely they will actually do the things that you expect. So let’s look at some of the things you can do to set expectations.
a) Start your presentations or announcements with “I’d like to provide you my expectations.”
Perhaps this is too simple of an idea to even document, but how often do you hear managers doing this? Not enough in my estimation, so let’s increase this introductory statement on the part of managers. By using the “I’d like to provide you my expectations” line, you are now forced to articulate what you do want.
In doing this, you can now embark on a project that allows you to identify the behaviors and values that you’d like to see on your team. Let’s try a few!
Check your usage of the word “just.” It could mean you’re managing from a deficit
Many managers want things to just get done. Or they want their employees to just resolve the issue. Or they want their employees to just answer the question. Or they want their employees to just stop doing something they don’t like.
However, this could be more of a symptom of the manager’s poor behaviors and less a symptom of the employees’ inability to perform. In all of these examples, the usage of the word “just” implies a need to take a short-cut to better performance. It’s also an indicator that the manager is “managing from a deficit.”
It’s a great marker – the word “just.” Check yourself each time you use it. Let’s look at some sample situations:
–The manager receives a report and says, “Just give me the high level summary.”
–The manager sees people unable to come to a recommendation and says, “Just figure it out and get back to me.”
–The manager sees in the metrics that errors are up and says, “Just do what it takes to stop making these errors.”
In these examples, the manager is making a request to get something resolved – without making any effort to resolve it. What great management! Wouldn’t it be great to have this skill?
One more option for providing feedback to manager: 3rd Party Assessment and Coaching
I have recently written a series of articles on the topic of how managers obtain feedback on how they manage. Conclusion: It’s spotty. I’ve also recently published a series of articles on how employees can give feedback to managers. Conclusion: It’s possible, but takes a lot of work. Even the people who would best be able to give feedback, the manager’s employees, have to go through many machinations just to get to the point of providing corrective feedback, and it still isn’t without the associated risks of recrimination over time. Boo to that!
This is an important topic, because receiving performance feedback on how you are doing a job is a critical component for obtaining minimally acceptable performance, and then — let’s aspire to this — accelerating to high performance. Getting better at what you do simply isn’t possible without some sort of systematic performance feedback mechanism.
So that leaves one more option to consider: Bringing in a 3rd Party.
Let’s take another look at the grid of options for how managers receive feedback on being a manager (initially published in How to give feedback to your manager: Some possible openings).
Step 6 for Employees Providing Feedback to a Manager: Phrases to use during the feedback conversation
This is the last in a series of articles designed to help you give feedback to your manager. In the previous articles, we discussed the previous steps:
1. Setting up a performance log
2. Giving positive reinforcement of the behaviors you believe are good
3. Contracting with your manager to give feedback on improvement
4. Previewing the conversation with HR
5. Preparing for giving the feedback.
Yes, it’s a lot of work to get to this point. But hopefully you’ve discovered that the very act of doing the previous steps will a) Actually solve problems you’re experiencing already and b) keep you focused on what areas you’d like to give feedback.
Today, I’ll provide you some phrases to help you perform the feedback discussion on behaviors you’d like to change in your boss.
1. The setup
Here you want to ease into the conversation with your boss based on your preparation. The more you are focused on the intent (provide feedback) and result (better results), the better the setup will be:
“I’d like to provide some feedback to you in regards to what happened last week. Is this a good time?”
2. The context Read more
Step 5 for Employees Providing Feedback to a Manager: Identifying what the feedback is and when to give the feedback
On to step 5 of giving feedback to your manager: Identifying the feedback and doing the final preparation for the feedback! If you want to give feedback to a manager, you have to make sure you have engaged in step 1 (prepare and start a log) , step 2 (give positive feedback on the behaviors you do like), step 3 (set up a contract for when the manager wants feedback) and step 4 (talk to HR). If not, you are taking some risks that your feedback may backfire. That is, your manager could be resistant to the feedback, not trust your feedback, could directly or indirectly engage in recrimination over time.
Yes, giving feedback to your manager is a risk, and no, it’s not fair that managers could engage in some bad behaviors solely on you trying to give them feedback! The emerging field of Management Design needs to address this design flaw of Managers engaging in immature and recriminating behaviors based on an employee trying to help the manager improve, but until then, here’s an approach to take to get that much needed feedback to your manager.
OK, assuming you have a log of observations of behavior, you have already started giving positive feedback where it is merited, and have contracted for that moment and you have discussed your plans to talk with your boss with HR, where you might want to give corrective feedback, here are some options for your next move:
1. Analyze your log to make sure that you know which feedback you’d like to prioritize.
Step 4 for Employees Providing Feedback to a Manager: Prepare by talking to Human Resources first
This is the latest in a series of posts to help employees give corrective feedback to their manager. If done well, the manager improves at being a manager, the team works better together, and there is less cost of poor quality management. If done poorly, the manager can recriminate on the employees trying to give feedback, making a bad situation worse.
This series is designed to help employees maximize the likelihood that feedback to the manager goes well, and minimize the likelihood that the manager does not accept the feedback and causes further damage to the team. Here are the prior steps:
Step 1: Keep a log and identify non-feedback strategies
Step 2: Provide positive reinforcement to the behaviors you like
Step 3: Create an agreement in advance with the manager to receive feedback from employees
Now step 4: Make a pre-emptive trip to Human Resources:
Step 3 for Employees Providing Feedback to a Manager: Ask how your manager prefers to receive feedback
This is the latest in a series of articles designed to help employees give managers feedback about the manager’s behaviors as managers. In previous articles, I describe how keeping a log on what the manager does helps you identify strategies for changing your own behavior, and when to give systematic, positive reinforcement. The key to both of these is that you identify the specific behaviors that you’ve observed, rather than summarize the general behaviors, and this creates the ability to provide feedback that works at actually helping you manage your boss’s behavior.
In today’s article, I’ll provide some tips for how to approach a manager whose behavior you’d like to change for the better. This is a more risky than providing positive feedback or changing your own behaviors (as discussed in previous articles), but sometimes it is necessary, because a manager who is doing things wrong can have a huge negative impact on the team, and typically only the employees are close enough to the situation to be able to correct it. But how?
1. Ask your manager how and when he or she wants to receive feedback
At some point in your relationship with your manager, preferably earlier in the relationship, but any time works, ask your manager the following, “If I notice something that you do that I think could be done differently, do you want to receive that feedback?” Most likely the answer is “Yes.”
It could happen that the manager then replies with, “Is there something that you want to tell me now?” Read more
Step 2 for Employees Providing Feedback to a Manager: Reinforce the positive behaviors
This article is the latest in a series of articles identifying the step for how employees can better provide feedback to managers. In the previous article, I describe the first step for providing feedback to your manager is to create a log on your manager’s behavior and the impact of the behavior. This way you can identify patterns and even simply change your own behavior and strategies that change the dynamic without having to go into giving feedback. It’s a start. Now, on to providing feedback, and that’s step two: Reinforce the positive behaviors that you want to see repeated.
Giving feedback to a manager is a lot easier if you focus on the behaviors that you like and want to see more of from your boss. But it isn’t a matter of just saying, “Good job” to your boss. You have to be more systematic and specific than that. The idea is that you want to provide reinforcement of the specific things that your boss did, with the aim that you are training your boss to continue to do the things you like. Setting up the process of positive reinforcement is designed to re-focus the boss’s efforts to the things that work for you and your team.
The things that don’t work do not get reinforced, so boss does these things less over time. Instead, your boss is likely to increase the reinforced behaviors to continue to get the positive reinforcement.
Step 1 for Employees Providing Feedback to a Manager: Prepare for it and you might get some insights
The Manager by Designsm blog advocates for a new field, “Management Design,” which systemically attempts to create great managers by design rather than by accident. I have recently run a series of articles examining a flaw in the current management design: Managers don’t receive specific and immediate feedback on how they are doing with people management.
The series concluded the best candidates for providing feedback are the manager’s employees themselves. However, this has its risks, since the less artful the feedback the more dangerous the situation for the employee.
It is perhaps best if the manager ask for feedback from their employees, and this blog provides tips for how to do this. However, whether or not feedback is requested, employees must be careful in how they provide feedback to their managers. In the coming articles I’ll walk you through the steps to give feedback to your manager.
Today I’ll provide step one in helping employees provide feedback to their manager: Prepare for providing feedback. Read more
