Re: Negative Feedback (was: percentage raises at salary review time)

[Candace Bamber <cbamber -at- CASTEK -dot- COM>]

I'm interested in following up the comments about negative feedback because I've
just had an incident where an employee isn't work out. When he was told that his
performance was unacceptable and we were going to impose a Performance
Improvement Program, he claimed to be "blown away", because no-one had ever told
him he was doing anything wrong.

The environment I work in is very positive and upbeat. As the reviewer (and
manager and coach), my style has always been to mix positive statement with
suggestion and coaching: "I like what we've done with this graphic, especially
the way it shows the relationship between these four key concepts. Now that
you've included it in your book, the next step is to revisit the description of
the graphic in the text and make those relationships as clear in the text
description as they are in the picture. How do you think you should approach
that?". I work really hard to keep my suggestions for improvements either
neutral or positive. I could have said "the analysis is too superficial - you
need to look in more detail at relationships between the key concepts."

The employee missed two key things that I can see are implied rather than
overtly stated: My comments, though phrased as suggestions, are really
requirements; and any comment that says change, fix, improve, follow up, write
more etc, is actually negative feedback.

Is it the employee's fault that he missed the sub-text? To be fair, maybe not -
especially since my reaction to poor performance was to escalate the
positive/suggestion/coaching approach rather than trying something different.

The positive/suggestion/coaching approach works almost miraculously well with
the rest of my team. Although they are still pretty junior, they are doing some
truly outstanding work (which I'm really excited about!!) and have made
tremendous progress as professionals over the last year, and show no sign
slowing down.

I'm interested in learning what other people do, or what their managers do, (or
what they wish their managers would do) about offering feedback with the message
"you need to improve". Where is the line between being putting things in a
positive light and being dishonest, or if not being entirely dishonest, at least
doing someone a disservice? Any tips or ideas would be appreciated - people
management is an area I'm working hard at getting some growth in, so I'm eager
to hear what people have to say.

As always, thank you in advance for your insight!!

Candace

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Candace Bamber
mailto:cbamber -at- castek -dot- com

Castek
--Putting the Future Together
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