8 ms·

Five Second Feedback

152 points by mcrittenden 6y ago

fermienrico 6y ago
This blog post leaves a badtaste of hierarchical management regiments of the 80's office culture. I see my manager as an enabler, not some kind of a master I need to follow orders from. I give more feedback to my manager than the other way around. They're eager to know how things are in the weeds.
- derekbreden 6y ago
  I liked the specificity in your original post. For myself, the example in the blog post brings up a lot of feelings from previous complex relationships with managers and their managers. I have been in contexts where asking for a heads up on skip level feedback would have seemed reasonable. I have been in contexts where asking for a heads up on skip level feedback would have felt like retaliation. I’ve honestly been more fearful of saying anything at all in skip level 1:1 in recent years, from those previous experiences of feelings of retaliation.
  - loopz 6y ago
    Negative feedback is often narrow-minded, one-sided and even plain wrong. I find it better to ask as question about future action and start a dialogue. I find leadership monologue to be Waste.
mindhash 6y ago
I guess this can be extended to bein exponential backoff, where you increase time of interactions based on response. 5sec is too small window for someone to absorb, unless the feedback is something the receiver is aware of already.
rammy1234 6y ago
Feedbacks should be given in best interest of team not in best interest of you. Period.
- ggm 6y ago
  There is a school of thought that selfish actions are the most honest. I don't agree, but it's often said to me, and I see evidence others believe what they want, by definition is for the best interest of the team.
  - dstick 6y ago
    That’s the whole basis for democracy is it not? That if everyone votes in their own best interest, you’d get a result that best reflects the voting populace.
    - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
      To me democracy is more about society than yourself. Always voting in your own self-interest seems counter-productive for society.
    - ggm 6y ago
      If 51% want to slaughter the other 49% and appropriate their assets you'd be fine because "that's democracy" ?
      - Lionga 6y ago
        That would in fact be what we call "democracy" right now and the reason why "democracy" is not as good as the hype might make you believe
      - hnracer 6y ago
        Not to detract from your point but I think that's the point of constitutional republic over direct democracy. Statute and the judiciary constrains actions such as this which would require a supermajority to enact.
jolux 6y ago
I would find getting a "steady stream of rapid feedback" like this overwhelming, no matter how small the feedback is. Not all communication is criticism and I am really not sure that feedback needs to be given this often. Perhaps it's just me though.
- gabaix 6y ago
  I stopped reading business books like this when I realized most advice is either irrelevant or counter productive. You might as well read the opposite: “Feedback is the most important thing you can give to a team member. Count up to 5 before giving any feedback.” Unless backed by research, most books is intellectual posturing for career builders.
xyzelement 6y ago
This makes a ton of sense. For all of us, things that hold us back the most are ones we refuse to see in ourselves. Meanwhile they are obvious to other people - who assume they must be as obvious to us and thus don't say anything. What makes the quick and frequent feedback valuable is that it's easy and undramatic to give but can form patterns of irrefutable evidence about ourselves. If I hear once from one person that I did X and caused Y, I can dismiss it. If I hear something similar from lots of different in many situations - at some point I have to admit there's something to it and investigate. If that sounds weird, just think about this: if you literally stank, would you want to know? Would you want to hear it casually from 3 people in the morning so you can figure out that you had stepped into shit on the way to the office? Or would you want people to politely not say anything all day, sparing your feelings while every one of them thinks you smell like shit?
trabant00 6y ago
> Are you angry? If so, don’t give the feedback. > Are you focused on the past instead of the future? [...] If so, don’t give the feedback. Years ago, after my then manager has been caught multiple times lying to the team sets up a meeting to calm us down, me in particular. He says something like the above. "Let's forget about the past and focus on the future." I lost my temper and replied without even thinking "If I slap you right now can we forget about it 2 minutes later?". Was escorted by security out of the building. I was sad losing that team but it was a good career move looking back on it. The whole team resigned one by one in about 2 months.
- ex3ndr 6y ago
  Wow that's harsh! I actually have pretty much same experience. Company has done the very same mistake again and again and again and on the meetings i bring up issue to the team and often get "let's focus on the future", but yeah i was focused on the future to avoid wasting months of work again and again.
rawland 6y ago
'How to be an asshole in five seconds.' - the OPs honest title And now the constructive version: Take the time the receiving person and the topic at hand need. Thank you, for making the world a better and more humane place. Boom, not a robot with utility function based personality anymore.
mrmaloke 6y ago
> 1. Ask (“Can I give you some feedback?”) > 2. State the behavior (“When you X…”) Yes, please do this when giving feedback > 3. State the impact (“…the result is Y.”) Your conversation partner might hear an immediate accusation out of this. Your statement will never be objective. Rather talk about yourself as in "... this is how I perceive your behavior". > 4. Encourage effective future behavior (“Keep it up!” for positive feedback ...) Yes, it's great to get positively reinforced. > “Can you change that?” for negative feedback If you do this to me after 5 seconds of conversation, I will shut off and not take any advice from you. This is bossy. Tell your conversation partner what their behavior makes you feel like. Formulate a wish for the future. You're not entitled to "change" people. Tell them how you would like to be treated. If you want to change people, then give them positive reinforcement. If you try to "change" others by negative feedback, they will likely do less of everything and try not to be caught doing anything because it might be the "wrong thing". edit: formatting
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- flarg 6y ago
  You sound like you want to prolong the feedback into some sort of collaborative discussion, instead of getting to the point. Quick feedback is meant to be ... Quick ... To save both parties from too many negative feelings
  - tobr 6y ago
    You can’t end your feedback with “Can you change that?” and then think “Boom, done in seconds”. No, we’re absolutely not done? You just asked me to commit on the spot to something I potentially haven’t thought about before you just brought it up. I haven’t had a chance to reflect or even to respond. And you think we’re already boom, done? Edit: If you want to actually be done, you could end with something like “I would appreciate if you were mindful of this going forwards”. Then you’ve said what you need to say, and your feedback stands by itself regardless of how the other person reacts to it.
jaequery 6y ago
tldr; be assertive.
layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
Warning: don’t do this with your superiors.
- sz4kerto 6y ago
  I do this with my superiors all the time. They really appreciate it, because without this they'd be flying blind as managers. Useful, fact-based, clear bottom-up feedback is super-valuable.
  - LASR 6y ago
    > MY superiors The key is that this works with your superiors. But as a general statement, obviously not.
  - layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
    You must have some leverage over them, therefore they're not your superiors per se, more like your peers.
siquick 6y ago
Trying to distill a conversation that could have far reaching ramifications into a '5 second framework' is incredibly cold, and lacking any kind of empathy and awareness of the people on your team. I feel like I just read a training data set for an AI manager.
teekert 6y ago
This: Manager: Can I give you some feedback? Direct: Sure, boss. Manager: When you tell my boss bad news before me, even with the best of intentions, I end up getting in a lot of trouble for not knowing before he did. Can you try to tell me first, going forward? Is soooo American (or maybe more countries?). All this tells me is that the boss of the manager is a whiny micromanager and I feel like the boss of the boss needs to be informed, I mean why would you ever bring someone into trouble over bad news. Bad news are just facts. What's this trouble anyway?? It's such an hierarchical chain of events. If the nature of the bad news is such that the boss really does get into trouble, then it's time for some open and honest discussion on how to do things better from now on. Nothing negative about this imo. I mean the whole idea that you somehow need to discipline colleagues by giving them "trouble" is just ludicrous to me. Why not just assume that everyone around you is a smart individual with good intentions and that errors sometimes happen and we can bear the consequences together. Man this gets me worked up.
- darkerside 6y ago
  It's not a great example, but I do understand this, so I can share perspective. As a manager, you are hired to be an extension of your boss. Your boss may have 5 managers reporting to him, reach of which has 5 reports of their own. Your boss is tremendously busy and no longer has the time to understand all the details of all the work under their purview. If your report goes to your boss and starts presenting a problem, the report may have very little idea of how their problem fits into the other 25 problems that ICs may bring up, and yet is making a decision that this should be their boss' boss' (director) priority. If this happens continually, the direct manager is not doing their job, and the director will make sure they hear about it. More shortly, sometimes what you think is bad news as an IC is something your manager can solve without getting their boss involved. Especially with more junior reports, they may have trouble distinguishing the difference.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - teekert 6y ago
    Ok, I understand that, it's also exactly why my boss would say: please discuss this with your project manager ;)
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
I used to work for a Japanese company, and a big part of the corporate culture was “Don’t complain, unless you also have a solution.” This was basically a way to shut people up, and prevent feedback. It also resulted in really unsatisfactory, badly-thought-out “solutions.” "There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong." "The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake." —H. L. Mencken
gorpomon 6y ago
> When you tell my boss bad news before me, even with the best of intentions, I end up getting in a lot of trouble for not knowing before he did. Can you try to tell me first, going forward? I understand that this is a contrived example for a book, but I wish they would have taken time to contrive a healthier example. As a manager, I can't imagine ever admonishing someone for not knowing something before I did, and at minimum I would explore what's going on. While this might sound nit-picky, a book read by millions will in some small way create and enforce norms for managers, and do we really want to enforce that in this situation the feedback is for the low-level employee and not the senior manager?
Beefin 6y ago
whats the point asking for permission to give feedback? there is no denial for that request without looking looney.
- mehagar 6y ago
  "I'd prefer not to receive feedback right now. Could we discuss this next Monday instead?"
ksmith14 6y ago
This brief excerpt really does not do the Manager Tools' feedback model justice. All of the background has been stripped from it in order to fit in a pithy blog post and without that context it does sound jarring or shallow. Over the past 3.5 years I've used the Manager Tools "management trinity" (including their feedback model) with my directs and found it works extremely well. If you've got a professional relationship with a direct and have briefed them on changes before enacting them, it doesn't come as a surprise and it's not seen/received as a "drive by." I encourage folks to listen to a few of the episodes on feedback before judging it: https://www.manager-tools.com/2005/07/giving-effective-feedback https://www.manager-tools.com/2005/07/giving-effective-feedb... In addition to Managers Tools they have a second podcast, Career Tools, which is geared towards any working professional. I recommend that one as well.

152 points by mcrittenden 6y ago

This blog post leaves a badtaste of hierarchical management regiments of the 80's office culture. I see my manager as an enabler, not some kind of a master I need to follow orders from. I give more feedback to my manager than the other way around. They're eager to know how things are in the weeds.

derekbreden 6y ago
I liked the specificity in your original post. For myself, the example in the blog post brings up a lot of feelings from previous complex relationships with managers and their managers. I have been in contexts where asking for a heads up on skip level feedback would have seemed reasonable. I have been in contexts where asking for a heads up on skip level feedback would have felt like retaliation. I’ve honestly been more fearful of saying anything at all in skip level 1:1 in recent years, from those previous experiences of feelings of retaliation.
- loopz 6y ago
  Negative feedback is often narrow-minded, one-sided and even plain wrong. I find it better to ask as question about future action and start a dialogue. I find leadership monologue to be Waste.

mindhash 6y ago

I guess this can be extended to bein exponential backoff, where you increase time of interactions based on response. 5sec is too small window for someone to absorb, unless the feedback is something the receiver is aware of already.

rammy1234 6y ago

Feedbacks should be given in best interest of team not in best interest of you. Period.

ggm 6y ago
There is a school of thought that selfish actions are the most honest. I don't agree, but it's often said to me, and I see evidence others believe what they want, by definition is for the best interest of the team.
- dstick 6y ago
  That’s the whole basis for democracy is it not? That if everyone votes in their own best interest, you’d get a result that best reflects the voting populace.
  - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    To me democracy is more about society than yourself. Always voting in your own self-interest seems counter-productive for society.
  - ggm 6y ago
    If 51% want to slaughter the other 49% and appropriate their assets you'd be fine because "that's democracy" ?
    - Lionga 6y ago
      That would in fact be what we call "democracy" right now and the reason why "democracy" is not as good as the hype might make you believe
    - hnracer 6y ago
      Not to detract from your point but I think that's the point of constitutional republic over direct democracy. Statute and the judiciary constrains actions such as this which would require a supermajority to enact.

jolux 6y ago

I would find getting a "steady stream of rapid feedback" like this overwhelming, no matter how small the feedback is. Not all communication is criticism and I am really not sure that feedback needs to be given this often. Perhaps it's just me though.

gabaix 6y ago
I stopped reading business books like this when I realized most advice is either irrelevant or counter productive. You might as well read the opposite: “Feedback is the most important thing you can give to a team member. Count up to 5 before giving any feedback.” Unless backed by research, most books is intellectual posturing for career builders.

xyzelement 6y ago

This makes a ton of sense. For all of us, things that hold us back the most are ones we refuse to see in ourselves. Meanwhile they are obvious to other people - who assume they must be as obvious to us and thus don't say anything. What makes the quick and frequent feedback valuable is that it's easy and undramatic to give but can form patterns of irrefutable evidence about ourselves. If I hear once from one person that I did X and caused Y, I can dismiss it. If I hear something similar from lots of different in many situations - at some point I have to admit there's something to it and investigate. If that sounds weird, just think about this: if you literally stank, would you want to know? Would you want to hear it casually from 3 people in the morning so you can figure out that you had stepped into shit on the way to the office? Or would you want people to politely not say anything all day, sparing your feelings while every one of them thinks you smell like shit?

trabant00 6y ago

> Are you angry? If so, don’t give the feedback. > Are you focused on the past instead of the future? [...] If so, don’t give the feedback. Years ago, after my then manager has been caught multiple times lying to the team sets up a meeting to calm us down, me in particular. He says something like the above. "Let's forget about the past and focus on the future." I lost my temper and replied without even thinking "If I slap you right now can we forget about it 2 minutes later?". Was escorted by security out of the building. I was sad losing that team but it was a good career move looking back on it. The whole team resigned one by one in about 2 months.

ex3ndr 6y ago
Wow that's harsh! I actually have pretty much same experience. Company has done the very same mistake again and again and again and on the meetings i bring up issue to the team and often get "let's focus on the future", but yeah i was focused on the future to avoid wasting months of work again and again.

rawland 6y ago

'How to be an asshole in five seconds.' - the OPs honest title And now the constructive version: Take the time the receiving person and the topic at hand need. Thank you, for making the world a better and more humane place. Boom, not a robot with utility function based personality anymore.

mrmaloke 6y ago

> 1. Ask (“Can I give you some feedback?”) > 2. State the behavior (“When you X…”) Yes, please do this when giving feedback > 3. State the impact (“…the result is Y.”) Your conversation partner might hear an immediate accusation out of this. Your statement will never be objective. Rather talk about yourself as in "... this is how I perceive your behavior". > 4. Encourage effective future behavior (“Keep it up!” for positive feedback ...) Yes, it's great to get positively reinforced. > “Can you change that?” for negative feedback If you do this to me after 5 seconds of conversation, I will shut off and not take any advice from you. This is bossy. Tell your conversation partner what their behavior makes you feel like. Formulate a wish for the future. You're not entitled to "change" people. Tell them how you would like to be treated. If you want to change people, then give them positive reinforcement. If you try to "change" others by negative feedback, they will likely do less of everything and try not to be caught doing anything because it might be the "wrong thing". edit: formatting

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
flarg 6y ago
You sound like you want to prolong the feedback into some sort of collaborative discussion, instead of getting to the point. Quick feedback is meant to be ... Quick ... To save both parties from too many negative feelings
- tobr 6y ago
  You can’t end your feedback with “Can you change that?” and then think “Boom, done in seconds”. No, we’re absolutely not done? You just asked me to commit on the spot to something I potentially haven’t thought about before you just brought it up. I haven’t had a chance to reflect or even to respond. And you think we’re already boom, done? Edit: If you want to actually be done, you could end with something like “I would appreciate if you were mindful of this going forwards”. Then you’ve said what you need to say, and your feedback stands by itself regardless of how the other person reacts to it.

jaequery 6y ago

tldr; be assertive.

layoutIfNeeded 6y ago

Warning: don’t do this with your superiors.

sz4kerto 6y ago
I do this with my superiors all the time. They really appreciate it, because without this they'd be flying blind as managers. Useful, fact-based, clear bottom-up feedback is super-valuable.
- LASR 6y ago
  > MY superiors The key is that this works with your superiors. But as a general statement, obviously not.
- layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
  You must have some leverage over them, therefore they're not your superiors per se, more like your peers.

siquick 6y ago

Trying to distill a conversation that could have far reaching ramifications into a '5 second framework' is incredibly cold, and lacking any kind of empathy and awareness of the people on your team. I feel like I just read a training data set for an AI manager.

teekert 6y ago

This: Manager: Can I give you some feedback? Direct: Sure, boss. Manager: When you tell my boss bad news before me, even with the best of intentions, I end up getting in a lot of trouble for not knowing before he did. Can you try to tell me first, going forward? Is soooo American (or maybe more countries?). All this tells me is that the boss of the manager is a whiny micromanager and I feel like the boss of the boss needs to be informed, I mean why would you ever bring someone into trouble over bad news. Bad news are just facts. What's this trouble anyway?? It's such an hierarchical chain of events. If the nature of the bad news is such that the boss really does get into trouble, then it's time for some open and honest discussion on how to do things better from now on. Nothing negative about this imo. I mean the whole idea that you somehow need to discipline colleagues by giving them "trouble" is just ludicrous to me. Why not just assume that everyone around you is a smart individual with good intentions and that errors sometimes happen and we can bear the consequences together. Man this gets me worked up.

darkerside 6y ago
It's not a great example, but I do understand this, so I can share perspective. As a manager, you are hired to be an extension of your boss. Your boss may have 5 managers reporting to him, reach of which has 5 reports of their own. Your boss is tremendously busy and no longer has the time to understand all the details of all the work under their purview. If your report goes to your boss and starts presenting a problem, the report may have very little idea of how their problem fits into the other 25 problems that ICs may bring up, and yet is making a decision that this should be their boss' boss' (director) priority. If this happens continually, the direct manager is not doing their job, and the director will make sure they hear about it. More shortly, sometimes what you think is bad news as an IC is something your manager can solve without getting their boss involved. Especially with more junior reports, they may have trouble distinguishing the difference.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- teekert 6y ago
  Ok, I understand that, it's also exactly why my boss would say: please discuss this with your project manager ;)

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

I used to work for a Japanese company, and a big part of the corporate culture was “Don’t complain, unless you also have a solution.” This was basically a way to shut people up, and prevent feedback. It also resulted in really unsatisfactory, badly-thought-out “solutions.” "There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong." "The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake." —H. L. Mencken

gorpomon 6y ago

> When you tell my boss bad news before me, even with the best of intentions, I end up getting in a lot of trouble for not knowing before he did. Can you try to tell me first, going forward? I understand that this is a contrived example for a book, but I wish they would have taken time to contrive a healthier example. As a manager, I can't imagine ever admonishing someone for not knowing something before I did, and at minimum I would explore what's going on. While this might sound nit-picky, a book read by millions will in some small way create and enforce norms for managers, and do we really want to enforce that in this situation the feedback is for the low-level employee and not the senior manager?

Beefin 6y ago

whats the point asking for permission to give feedback? there is no denial for that request without looking looney.

mehagar 6y ago
"I'd prefer not to receive feedback right now. Could we discuss this next Monday instead?"

ksmith14 6y ago

This brief excerpt really does not do the Manager Tools' feedback model justice. All of the background has been stripped from it in order to fit in a pithy blog post and without that context it does sound jarring or shallow. Over the past 3.5 years I've used the Manager Tools "management trinity" (including their feedback model) with my directs and found it works extremely well. If you've got a professional relationship with a direct and have briefed them on changes before enacting them, it doesn't come as a surprise and it's not seen/received as a "drive by." I encourage folks to listen to a few of the episodes on feedback before judging it: https://www.manager-tools.com/2005/07/giving-effective-feedback https://www.manager-tools.com/2005/07/giving-effective-feedb... In addition to Managers Tools they have a second podcast, Career Tools, which is geared towards any working professional. I recommend that one as well.