When moving from an individual contributor role into management, the biggest challenge for me was to provide difficult feedback. This might have been bigger for me compared to others as within a very short period of time a number of my colleagues and peers suddenly started to report to me. Looking back at 2019 overcoming this has been my biggest personal achievement.
What is ruinous empathy? Link to heading
One of the books I read in 2019 is Radical Candor, a “new management philosophy”. It separates management in two dimensions: care personally and challenge directly. Based on these you can group management behaviour in four groups: obnoxious aggression, manipulative insincerity, ruinous empathy and radical candor.
A leader in the obnoxious aggression quadrant is the a-hole in the room that challenges people directly (“you need to deliver X”) but does not care about them personally. Is the person capable of delivering X? Might they need training? Do they have mentoring setup to help them succeed? This type of leader does not care about how you get there and whether you might need help.
The manipulative insincerity leader is the worst. They don’t challenge people and don’t care about them. They will always try to manipulate the environment to get the best for themselves. When your boss behaves like this, there is only one solution: run.
What happens to most leaders around the globe is being in the ruinous empathy quadrant. They do care about people and their success, but they cannot challenge them. I started my management career in the ruinous empathy quadrant of Radical Candor. For me, this also included not being confident enough to provide negative feedback. Most of my directs being former colleagues, it was very difficult for me to start tough and difficult conversation. I leaned too much towards duck and cover when people behaved in ways that are against my own moral compass.
Finally in the radical candor quadrant you overcome this and not only care for people but also challenge them. Give them opportunities to develop their own craft, provide them with training, mentoring and give direct feedback. Obviously in this framework this is the holy grail but at least for me it was not as easy as it sounds.
What did I change? Link to heading
Or rather: what has changed? At some point a small number of instances happened that forced me to provide some negative feedback. Obviously these situations only escalated because I did not provide the feedback earlier. Now it was up to me to fix the situation. What helped me was to take some time to prepare the feedback. Taking an hour, writing down what I wanted to say, re-framing it a couple of times helped me prepare my mind for the conversation.
While initially it felt strange and awkward, in hindsight the conversation went very well. My preparation payed off as I had been ready for all kinds of arguments I anticipated. I repeated this a number of times on different occasions, now providing feedback earlier than I used to.
Big surprise: showing people where they need to improve actually helps them improve. Sometimes a little thing that becomes a habit is really bugging other people. Or even me. But they can only change and improve when you tell them.
However there are limits. As Roy Rapoport writes in The five Conditions for Improvement:
- do they accept the issue
- are they willing to work on it
- do they agree they are part of the issue
- can they plan to solve it and
- can they execute the plan successfully?
When they fail one or more of the conditions, you have a lot of work ahead. Showing and providing this type of feedback more often can help. They might however also choose to not work for you anymore when they simply don’t agree.
Going forward Link to heading
The biggest learning for me was being confident to provide difficult feedback. I can and will use this going forward more directly and promptly. It proved to be an invaluable tool to developing people and leading teams. My experiences in the last year made me understand and learn this new skill. Awkwardly I’m looking forward for more of those conversations.