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Management Material
Welcome to Management Material.
My name is Catherine Van Der Laan. I started my career at the bottom as an assistant and worked my way up to become the boss’s boss in 8 years. If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that what got you to where you are now won’t get you to where you want to be.
This podcast is for top performers who want to be amazing managers. I’ve coached lots of talented people to get them from entry-level to recognized top performers to new managers to seasoned executives. I challenge deeply held beliefs and change how people see the world.
Management is all about leadership. The best managers were developed leaders long before they had any direct reports.
Here's one thing that most people won't tell you: Management is a skill. Management is a skill you can learn, just like the hard skills that got you to where you are now.
Management Material is about developing you into the best manager you can be. Let’s turn YOU into management material.
Management Material
Mastering the Art of Feedback: A Leadership Journey to Support and Success
In this episode, we cover the fine-tuned art of giving feedback so it's received well.
It's not easy to give feedback. Most of us have had at least one experience with giving feedback and seeing it blow up in our faces.
If you like to avoid conflict, like me, it might seem like giving feedback to a colleague is a lose-lose situation.
Let's turn giving feedback into a win-win situation.
This podcast episode puts the "sandwich" method where it belongs (in the trash) and dives into what it takes for your feedback to be received well and acted on.
Let's make you a better leader - a leader people want to follow. Let's turn you into management material.
Book a complimentary management coaching conversation at https://calendly.com/catherine-vanderlaan/free-60-minute-leadership-consultation
Email me at catherine@managementmaterialcoaching.com to ask a question or get in touch.
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Find out more about Management and Leadership Coaching at https://managementmaterialcoaching.com/
well, in order to have your feedback received, you have to be open to getting feedback too. So ask for feedback, receive it well, make some changes. Show that you are faithful, available and teachable. Show that you are willing to grow, because if you're not willing to grow, nobody is going to want to take your suggestions to grow, because then people will just peg you as somebody who is demanding and self-centered and all that stuff. If you want to start this process, start it with yourself. Start it with getting feedback, growing yourself, becoming more of a team player, and then you can follow this model and give feedback. Welcome to Management Material. My name is Katherine Vanderlaan. I started my career at the bottom as an assistant and worked my way up to become the boss's boss in eight years and, man, I love management. Welcome back to Management Material.
Speaker 1:This is the podcast that helps you become a leader people want to follow. Today we are discussing an interesting topic. It's one of the crucial topics for being a leader. It's how to give feedback. How to and not just any feedback how to give difficult feedback that will help the other person and be received well by the person you're giving feedback to. You might guess by now, but I learned this piece of advice through some really tough situations. Nobody I know is really good at giving feedback right off the bat. It's not something that we learn that well in families maybe your family okay, maybe you're not like me at all Maybe you learned this in your family and you went out into the workforce. You rocked giving feedback. Everybody wanted to listen to you. You went into the workforce with an A plus an MBA in feedback giving. Well, that's not that many people that I know, most people that I know, most people that I coach, most people that I have mentored or been a guide for in any capacity needed to learn how to give feedback. That was well received. It is a skill that leaders need to learn, because leaders leaders that people want to follow develop the people around them, develop the people around them, and in order to develop the people around them, they need to give feedback and work with people so that it is received, so that they are developed, so they're improved and so that they improve the company, the project, anything that they're working on.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you a little story. This is how I learned it right when I was a new sort of leader actually not quite a leader, yet I just wanted to be one. I had to learn quickly how to give feedback without creating just the worst team environment on the planet. Honestly, I didn't want to address what was going on in my team. I really didn't. So I talked to my boss, hoping that my boss would talk to this other woman's boss. Right, does that sound familiar? You talk to your boss and say, hey, go talk to this person's boss and solve my problem for me.
Speaker 1:I wanted my feedback to trickle down to the coworkers that I was working with and well, to cut this story short, well, not really. I'll just give you some cliff notes. That didn't happen. That didn't happen. My boss talked to the coworker and she told me to go talk to her about it. So I did. So. My boss did the adult thing, the mature thing, and said you know what you go solve this problem, you know what you're talking about, you know the feedback you want to give and so go give it. Know what you're talking about, you know the feedback you want to give, and so go give it. It didn't go well. It did not go well.
Speaker 1:I gave some feedback to this coworker, and I'm not giving you too many details because I don't want to out somebody. If you know me, I don't want you to know who I'm talking about but I gave feedback to this coworker about communication, about basically how she was doing her job, and that I didn't appreciate it. Now I did not give too many improvement suggestions beyond a vague improve your communication. This is how I'm receiving it. I don't like working with you. Basically is how it was received. I don't like working with you.
Speaker 1:And when somebody receives feedback like that the I don't like working with you kind of feedback, somebody receives feedback like that the I don't like working with you kind of feedback how well do you think that's going to go? Most people say that is not well, it will not go well. And you're right, it will not go well. So here's what I learned, and I'll tell you a different story in a moment. But here's what I learned when you are giving feedback to a coworker, to anyone you are working with, you have to follow a model and before that, you have to show that you care about the person.
Speaker 1:People's ears are not open to receiving feedback unless they know that you care about them first. Okay, and let me say that one more time for the people in the back. Nobody is going to receive your feedback about them unless they know that you care about them as a person. Unless you care about the person you're giving feedback to and they know it, they will not receive the feedback from you. And it's because there are a lot of people in this world with really bad motivations for life. They want things just because they want them. They want things for themselves and don't care about the people around them.
Speaker 1:As soon as people understand that you care about that person as an individual, you care about that person as an individual. You care about that person's mental health. I mean, don't go out and say mental health, but you care about that person and what they care about. You're putting that other person's needs ahead of your own. Then you're going to be able they will, in fact, be much more likely to listen to you.
Speaker 1:So here's how to give feedback that will be received. First, you show that you care. All right, because you do care. You do care about that person, and if we get into the nitty-gritty, I'll get into it in a moment, but this is really our show that you care. Make it situation-based. So here's what happened, here's the behavior that I experienced and here is the impact. It's called the SBI model. And then make some comment, a question and ask what can we do? What can you and I do together to improve this? If they say I don't know, I don't care, then you know what? Come back later and say I would love to know when we can have this discussion. All right, so make those suggestions, give feedback and own it. Now let's get into some of the nitty-gritty here, because it's very broad. What I just said and I want to make sure that this is applicable to you and helpful to you as you are becoming a leader people want to follow.
Speaker 1:There's a model out there. It's the radical candor model. I'm wondering who created it. I know I learned it from Adam Grant and he's an organizational psychologist. I really appreciate him.
Speaker 1:And there's this four by four that you can find online about caring about somebody personally is up at the top, right. So it's a grid right. So X-axis, y-axis. On the Y-axis it's caring about, about somebody personally, and up at the top you really, really care about them. Down at the bottom you don't care about anybody but yourself, all right. And in the middle right there is just that middle ground of you. You kind of care halfway right and then you have the x-axis, so the horizontal line, and to the right, that is challenging people directly. So really being blunt. And up at the to the left is being indirect and and kind of silent right, so not bringing things up at all, being extremely avoidant, being akeeper, somebody who doesn't want to bring up where people can improve.
Speaker 1:Now this ends up making four different personalities that fit within these quadrants. So you have, let's say you have somebody who's silent, who really, really cares about people. That is called ruinous empathy. So that's called feeling a lot Like you really care about people, you feel their feelings and you don't want to rock the boat, you just want to be a peacekeeper. You're not making suggestions, you are not bringing anything up, you are probably covering up for people's mistakes. That's ruinous empathy. That is what that hurts people, and it hurts people because then they can't improve, they're not seeing their blind spots.
Speaker 1:Now, on that same side of silence, you let's come on down the Y-axis where you have people who absolutely don't care at all about anybody else and they're silent. That quadrant is called manipulative insincerity. That is when you're silent, you don't care and you are silent because you just want them to ruin themselves. So that is manipulative insincerity. Those people do exist. They tend to be few and far between, as far as I can tell, but manipulative and insincere people absolutely exist and you can find more of them in the corporate world than I have found other places, except for some mom groups. But anyway, we won't get into that.
Speaker 1:Another quadrant is when you challenge directly but you don't care about anybody else. Now these are your loud, obnoxious people in the office that will be bold and blunt and have no empathy. They will come up and just say, hey, you did this and I think you're wrong and here's why, and this is what you should do instead. Now, anyone who gets feedback like that is not going to receive it, are they? They absolutely won't receive it. Those are the jerks. All right, they're obnoxious. It's the obnoxious aggression quadrant. So they're obnoxious, they're aggressive. They might be brilliant, but they bring down morale and those are not people you want in the office. Those are the people you want on your team and those certainly are not leaders that people will want to follow. Now, people might follow the ruinous envy because they're silent, they corrupt people's mistakes and they care. People will definitely follow those people for a little while, but they won't get great results because they burn themselves out.
Speaker 1:Where you want to be is in that radical candor quadrant where they care personally and challenge directly. At the very beginning of this episode, I talked about how you have to establish that you care about the person before they are open to feedback. Well, it's not good enough just to establish it. You have to continue to care. As you're giving feedback, it's to couch it, and I don't like the term couching it because you're not really couching it. It's not a sandwich that we were all taught in elementary school. If you are a Gen X, a millennial or even Gen Z, you're told to say something nice and then say something direct and then say something nice again. No, no, no, no. Ridiculous. All that does is make people think that when they hear something nice about themselves, they're going to hear something that they need to improve on later. So they tend to not trust that nice thing.
Speaker 1:Because most of the time, people made it up have this radical candor that people will eventually want to follow. And I'm going to give you a little bit of a caveat here, because even with pouching it, even with having empathy and caring about people five to 10% of people are going to take that feedback and absolutely throw it in your face, absolutely get defensive. They will look at that and say not me, I don't need that and I didn't ask you for feedback in the first place. 10% okay. They usually come around.
Speaker 1:At almost every place that I've worked actually, every place that I've worked, I try to embody this radical candor and my colleagues end up in this tight knit, beautiful team that all also exhibit radical candor. So all they need is an example and maybe a little training. I used to give corporate trainings on this, so you're not seeing my corporate training on this. Maybe I will make that and put it on YouTube, but it's so valuable because without this, your team ends up just storming and never, ever norming or performing. So you have to learn how to give feedback and take feedback. That's another podcast episode. Let me just give you an example.
Speaker 1:I had a guy on my team who was not doing his job all that well. We were doing a market development project and he was taking a long time to follow up. He wasn't saying the things that I thought he should know about the products. We were losing some momentum instead of gaining it, and if you are launching a product or developing one, you need a full support for marketing. You need to launch market development. I mean, if you want to develop something that people will want to use, you have to get people involved, right. So I had this team of people it was really me kind of driving it. We had marketing guys, we had market development One like half of a person. We had my assistants, project managers, who are developing the project. Everyone was involved. I'll just say that everyone was involved, even sales and technology. They were all involved in this because I wanted them all to have a touch point with customers. It's important to develop great products. People need to know who their customers are, what they want and their future.
Speaker 1:And so we were launching this thing and or developing it pre-launch and we were losing momentum, mostly because the customers were not being talked to, they were not being communicated with. So I went up to it and, if you know me at all or have worked with me at all, I get kind of mad when people aren't doing their jobs. I just get a little angry. Like you said said you were going to do this. I don't see any reason you can't. Let's do it, just do it. That's my attitude, but that's not really terribly helpful. And I care about the people on my team. I absolutely do. I care about them as people. I mean I have, when people have injuries and they're nearby, I've made meals and dropped them off, like I really and that's just one example. But like I really do care about people, I'm just super blunt too and I can fall in that obnoxious aggressor category because the way that I communicate doesn't always communicate that I care.
Speaker 1:So here's why I'm helping you and why we're going through this right now because I had to learn this. I had to learn to be nice and show that I cared, but also be straightforward. So I went up to him and I said, hey, I'm curious what's going on. I'd love to know, can we do a check-in? Do you have a moment, do you have 30 minutes in the next week where we can do a check-in? I'm curious on what's going on and what I can do to support you. And he he knew that he was behind in some of this work. He knew, because I had asked him for follow-ups for different things, that I wanted to know how to support him because I wanted him to do his job. So we scheduled a meeting and get this.
Speaker 1:So scheduled a meeting so that I knew that he would be receptive to feedback. He knew it was coming. We sat down and I said hey, can you tell me what's going on in your life, what is going on in your workload? I want to know how to support you and if your workload is too high, if you don't have the work-life balance that you want. So we went into discussing his life and some things that happened. Somebody in his family was getting sick and I trusted the guy. This is all real stuff, I mean. Eventually we were Facebook friends, verified absolutely. Somebody was getting sick and he was having to pick up some slack at home.
Speaker 1:So I asked him what can we do to support you? What part of this is too much? Where do you need to focus in your role and what would make you feel accomplished? Now, if your leader said something like that to you, how would that make you feel Really supported? Right, you'd feel super supported. Yeah, something is going on at home. Yeah, I am having trouble concentrating. Hey, if we schedule parallel working meetings, I think I can concentrate on work. Hey, if we do whatever the suggestion is, I'll be able to do my job a little bit better. So we did that. He needed a little bit of support. I come to find out that's called body doubling. It helps me too. So we scheduled meetings where we could work just alongside each other, silent. We were not talking to each other, we were not even working on the same projects. We were just sitting in a room working alongside each other. And when people go by and they see two people in a room working alongside each other, they think they're in a meeting so they don't bother. It was great. Here's the big point Be direct. I was direct in that meeting, said hey, we're missing some of the deadlines. I want to make sure that our customers are getting the support that they need. What can I do to support you so that we can make sure that this is happening? And he told me because he knew that I cared and I really did. It was a true caring and he saw that across the team too, and I'm sure he talked about it Now, whenever I am doing any sort of leadership coaching with people and they are trying to figure out how to get promoted, so they're in the promotion group or they're in leadership and management group coaching or I'm doing one-on-one manager training, whatever it is.
Speaker 1:Oftentimes we'll talk about this feedback because it's so crucial. Oftentimes we'll talk about this feedback because it's so crucial. It is so crucial and I get a lot, of, a lot of different responses that's not my job. It's never gone well before. I'm afraid to give feedback. So those are the people who are silent, but they care. I'm afraid to give feedback because I don't want people not to like me or the people who are obnoxious aggressors say it's never gone well before.
Speaker 1:Well, if you are listening to this podcast, you want to be a manager or at least a leader people want to follow. You need two things. You need the courage to bring things up. You need to use that SBI model so situation, behavior and impact. You need to show people that you care throughout the discussion and you need to be constructive and really put some action to your words. Support people when you ask how to support them, but don't be a doormat. So that means saying I'll take a little bit of this burden off your shoulders and we can source it from the rest of the team. It's not saying I'm going to do your job for you. That is a silent doormat right. Instead, it's saying let's figure out how we can do this and if there are other arrangements that we need to make, we'll make them. That doesn't mean, hey, I'm going to fire you or I'm going to report you to your boss. That just means we're going to figure this out together.
Speaker 1:Stay open to suggestions, understand and respond with empathy. When they tell you that something is going on, say, wow, that really sounds like it's tough. I would be really sad if I were in your situation. I can see that this is affecting you and I'm so sorry that you're going through this situation. So respond with empathy. Establish that you care, continue to care and work it through with that other person. That is how you give feedback. That and I'll tell you what 99% of the time, as long as they're open, so you've scheduled a time for it, right. 99% of the time, as long as they're open, so you've scheduled a time for it, right. 99% of the time, it will go well, maybe 98. It will go well. Now, if you don't schedule time for it, you have a much higher chance of it not going well. That's when you get to your 10% mark of people who are like yeah, no, I didn't ask for this. Follow those steps and it will go well.
Speaker 1:Now here's how you apply it. Let's say you are a marketing manager or product manager, or maybe you're in sales, somewhere where you work on a team. Right, you're not a lone wolf. You do work with other people, and that is by and far almost everyone here. Right, Everyone who's listening to this works on a corporate team somehow, or in a team in a nonprofit somewhere.
Speaker 1:Right, look at how you can improve yourself and ask for feedback. Ask for feedback from the people around you. And you know what? I'm sure, if you're listening to this, you're going wait. No, that wasn't the point. That's not what we discussed today.
Speaker 1:Well, in order to have your feedback received, you have to be open to getting feedback too. So, ask for feedback. That is your first step to being able to give feedback. Ask for feedback, receive it. Well, make some changes. Show that you are faithful, available and teachable. Show that you are willing to grow, because if you're not willing to grow, nobody is going to want to take your suggestions to grow, because then people will just peg you as somebody who is demanding and self-centered and all that stuff.
Speaker 1:If you want to start this process, start it with yourself. Start it with getting feedback, growing yourself, becoming more of a team player, and then you can follow this model and give feedback. Anyway, I hope this was helpful. I hope you learned a little bit more about how to be a leader People want to follow, how to become management material. Now go do it. Go do it. Get some feedback yourself, receive it, change how you work, become more of a part of the team and then be equipped with everything we just talked about to give feedback in a way that cares to give feedback with radical candor and not in an obnoxiously aggressive kind of way, not in a silent enabler kind of way, not with malicious insincerity, but with radical candor. All right, I hope this helped and I will see you in the next episode.