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 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
