Leading Geeks

emotion icon (Photo credit: Łukasz Strachanowski)

In my previous post, I talked about how to give negative feedback. In this post, I’ll describe the steps that I personally take when I have to give negative feedback to someone.

1. Do my homework. First I have to make sure that I know what I’m talking about and why I need to give the feedback.  This also gives me a chance to make sure my emotions aren’t leading the conversation. Especially with geeks, I’ve found that facts trump emotion every time, so making sure I have factual arguments rather than emotional ones is key.
2. Speak privately. Unless I’m giving negative feedback to a group, I always make sure my conversation is private. If I have a regular 1:1 and the feedback can wait until then, great.  Otherwise, I have to find a way to speak privately without interruption. This also means that I’m careful not to blindside my geek on the way to somewhere or in the middle of something – I have to make sure I have  her attention as well. Ideally, I also have Kleenex on hand just in case (although I don’t remember often making my geeks cry).
3. Say, “I wanted to talk about situation x. Can you tell me what happened?” I never start with my side of the story. I’m a huge believer in the idea that there’s my side of the story, her side of the story, and then the truth. So I need to get the geek’s side of the story in order to even remotely approach the truth (this is especially true when I have to give negative feedback about a situation that I heard about second-hand). Letting the geek go first helps me do the following:
   1. Understand how she saw the situation.
   2. Understand the reason behind why she took the actions she did.
   3. Understand whether she already feels bad about it – does she understand why the situation didn’t go well, or does she think everything is fine? I approach the rest of the conversation VERY differently depending on her current perspective.
   4. Find out whether she has already taken steps to fix the situation.
   5. Find out whether she knows what she should have done instead.
4. Base my response on where she is. If she doesn’t understand what went wrong, I talk about that so that she understands what was wrong about the situation. If she already knows and is sorry, I talk about how to fix it or move on.
5. Bring up what she did RIGHT in the situation. Rarely is an event all bad – it’s vital that my geek knows what she did correctly so that she can repeat it!
6. Make sure she knows how to handle this type of situation in the future. Quite frankly, giving negative feedback is completely useless if there’s no way to draw something positive out of the situation. And the most positive thing is to make sure that it won’t happen the same way next time.
7. Have a pleasant ending OR come up with action steps. Depending on how my geek assimilates the information, we’ll need to agree on what to do next. Either we move on and talk about pleasant things or we need to come up with next steps (e.g., regular check-ins or how to fix the situation if anything is fixable).

Honestly, I’ve had this blow up in my face once or twice, but trial and error have led me to this overall methodology.  I’d love to hear about what other methods work for you!

Block diagram for feedback (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have to admit that I hate the word “feedback”.  To me, it’s basically like saying, “I’m about to tell you just how much you suck, but I’m going to put it in business terms so that you can’t get pissed off or cry about it.”  (I may be exaggerating slightly.)

Nonetheless, no matter how I feel, I sometimes have to give negative feedback.  Here are the guidelines that I’ve figured out (mostly by doing things the wrong way):

• ALWAYS always always get their side of the story.  I can’t tell you the number of times someone reported something “bad” about a geek that looked very different once I had both sides of the story.
• Keep your emotions out of it. If possible, make sure you’re no longer pissed off before giving the feedback.  Sleep on it, drink on it, kvetch to your spouse about it – whatever you need to do to make sure that you’re not seething when you give the feedback, because, you need to…
• Make sure it doesn’t get personal.  There’s a big difference between saying, “That came across as harsh,” and, “You’re harsh.” This isn’t about who they ARE, this is about what they did or how they behaved in the situation.
• Be constructive. It’s not useful to tell them what they do wrong without telling them what they should have done instead. You want to help them learn? Guide them.  For example, one of my geeks once ended up on the floor of his office with a back spasm.  I happened to notice it when I realized all my other geeks were gathered around and making fun of him.  My feedback to them went something like this:

Remember when so-and-so was in his office on the floor with back pain and you were pointing and laughing?  Yeah. So, in the future, please first tell HR, then tell me, THEN point and laugh.  Got it?

• Make sure they hear you. Especially if you’ve forgotten to leave your emotions at home, it’s easy to say things that wound your geeks and cause them to tune you out or emotionally shut down.  Make sure they’re responding to you normally, but if they’re not…
• Let them go process it and then get back to you. You don’t NEED them to learn their lessons right away (or feel sorry or whatnot).  You need them, instead, to truly internalize what you’ve said in order for them to do things more correctly in the future. Especially if you’re managing introverts (which many geeks are), you need to give them feedback, tell them how you would have preferred things to go, and then let them go process it so that they can internalize it.  Always leave the conversation open so that they can come back to you with questions or arguments in the future.

This post is getting long, so I’ll leave examples to a future post.  However, what have I missed? What lessons have you learned about giving or receiving feedback?

Image via Wikipedia

If you’ve ever managed people and (like me) are somewhat empathic, you’ve had this experience: you walk into the office, and you can feel the waves of disgruntlement radiating from your staff. You’re not sure why or what happened, but they’re grumpy.  If it were just one or two of them, you could easily brush it off.  But instead it seems that the cranky fairy visited your department and liberally sprinkled his gift around.

So you pull someone (in my case, usually one of my managers or senior folks) into your office and ask.  Maybe said someone just glowers and says “nothing,” or maybe the conversation goes something like this:

Me: So what’s up around here?

Someone: I don’t think people are happy.

Me: Do you know why?

Someone: They’re not happy about <something you probably did, said, or asked them to do>.

The first time I had one of these conversations, I was honestly bewildered.  I had no idea why it seemed like my staff suddenly hated me.  Sure, there were some times that I did things to which a grumpy response was inevitable, but what I’m talking about here was boss-hating out of left field.  I’ve developed some theories as to why this happens:

• You (the boss) represent the establishment. If your firm or company is doing something that they don’t particularly like, you are sometimes perceived as the immediate representative of The Man.  I find this is more common with new direct reports or folks who don’t know you well enough to know your motivations yet.
• The “heart” of your department feels hurt. This doesn’t happen with every team, but there are often one or two employees who are the “heart” of the team (think Kaylee Frye on Firefly).  However this person feels is how the rest of the team will feel. And something happened to make this person unhappy.
• You did something wrong. Or at least you did something that made them grumpy and you didn’t realize it at the time you did it.

So how do you deal with these situations?

• It’s tough to be part of “the establishment,” but you can’t get away from that to some extent, since you are your team’s main point of contact for the Powers That Be.  If you realize this is going on, reassure your team that you’ll fight for their best interests, and work on building relationships with them so that they realize that you’re not The Man.
• It’s pretty easy to deal with your team’s “heart” if you get along well with him or her.  You can take him out for a cup of coffee, find out what’s going on, and address the issue.  If you don’t get along with him, however (and I’ve had both situations when I’ve been a manager), you’ll have to slog through more emotional muck before you can get down to addressing the issue.   It won’t be quick or easy, though, and you might have to just wait for the current situation to blow over before working on building your relationship with him.  I’ll bet you didn’t realize that you’d become part shrink when you became a manager, eh?
• I have a very simple formula that I follow when I’ve done something wrong or sub-optimal: own up to it, apologize for it, and take steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.  Trying to shift blame or defend your actions to your already pissed-off team will only exacerbate the crankiness and undermine their trust for you.  Find out what you did wrong, take responsibility, apologize, and fix it.

I realize that I’ve only scratched the surface here; what situations have I missed?  How do you handle it when your team seems to suddenly hate you?