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).
