Giving Feedback

A couple of recent events have gotten me thinking about feedback.

The first incident was an offhand comment that a friend in management made to me while we were talking about something else. In mentioning that he'd just had a one-on-one with a staff member, he casually tossed off the fact that it had gone very quickly "because that person is doing a great job." That got me thinking about how we sometimes perceive meetings with employees as being issue-driven. In other words, a manager might consider that her only responsibility in a one-on-one is to respond to anything that the employee brings to her attention. To be sure, that's part of it: if someone who reports to me expresses concern that he doesn't have the equipment that he needs to do his job, has a conflict with a co-worker, or demonstrates a desire to get training in a particular area, then it behooves me to take that information away and do something about it. That's what I tend to think of as the reactive aspect of management. Any manager who doesn't pull off at least that much of the role is really hurting (in more ways than one) and should consider either stepping up his game or moving to a less-senior position in the company.

But less obvious to some is the proactive part of people management. Going back to the example above, someone who's "doing a great job" is every bit as deserving of feedback as the employee who's got a beef, is visibly struggling or has been causing problems for others. The reality, of course, is that often the "great job" folks don't get much attention from their managers because they don't represent the proverbial burning fire in the way that the more reactive situations do. While that may make some logical sense - at least to those of us who've been in management and experienced the "crisis du jour" scenario in all its glory - it's also kind of ass-backwards, if you think about it. After all, here are the stars and superstars of your organization, and they're the ones that you basically leave to their own devices, while you focus all of your attention on everyone else. It can certainly be a tough trick shot to pull off, but what's really called for in that situation is that the manager spend a non-trivial portion of her time providing morale-building feedback on those areas that her best performers are excelling at, as well as coming up with new goals and challenges that will excite, inspire and motivate them to grow even further.

And if you can do that, then it's unlikely that any one-on-one get-together will ever be particularly short!

The other recent trigger for feedback thoughts was the time I spent earlier this week reviewing a draft copy of Mike Cohn's next book. This is something I've been doing, on and off, since late last year. I'm a big fan of Cohn's previous works, as well as a two-time attendee of his Agile Estimating workshop series. Because of that, I was more than happy to set aside some time to provide feedback on a selection of chapters within his upcoming Succeeding with Agile book.

Despite having no professional experience whatsoever in the field of editing, I happen to think that I'm pretty good at it. (That could, of course, be entirely delusional on my part!) For material of this sort, what Mike usually gets from me are comments that fall into the following broad categories:

• booboos: typos, spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, wrong words used
• flow problems: poor transitions, leaps of logic, unsupported conclusions, contradictions, wandering points
• missing bits: unaddressed concerns, partial lists, problems with no solutions
• suboptimal choices: examples that seem weak, repetitive wording, sentence structures that sound wrong if read aloud
  
• positive reinforcement: places that really worked, humourous parts that made me laugh, sections that especially resonated with me

In each case, I give specifics (pg #, some piece of text that can searched on easily, and whatever point I'm trying to make) because I want him to at least understand what I'm saying... whether or not he agrees with it, is up to him. It's an easier relationship than the manager one that I wrote of up above, because there's really no onus on me, in this case, to convince Mike to change a single thing in his draft. That's not my role here, as he's not working for me and I'm not in any way responsible for the contents of his book. But that still doesn't mean that I should take the task of giving feedback lightly (which I don't), or that I should simply throw a bunch of vague, generalized observations his way and let him make of them what he will.

As someone who's recently been on the receiving end of review feedback (not just once, but twice!), I know first-hand just how valuable it is when it comes in the form of specific, clear communication. I was pretty lucky in that regard, but then again I chose my reviewers fairly carefully. In general, I'd strongly recommend that if you're ever asked to provide that sort of thing in the course of your travels, simply put yourself in the other person's place, and then give the kind of feedback that you'd consider the most valuable were you receiving it. (That old Golden Rule just turns out to have so many applications, doesn't it?)

By the way, if you'd like to similarly review some of the chapters of Mike's book, you can do so here.