It’s all about trust Link to heading
I came across this Julie Gurner quote today:
“People can take hard feedback if they know you are in their corner”
The first thing to note here is that praise needs to be a tool in your toolbox. If none of your feedback is praise, then you should read Radical Candor by Kim Scott asap.
Assuming that you’ve got that nailed down, sadly not all your feedback can be praise, but the trick to getting good mileage from the critical kind of feedback is a symptom of how much trust you’ve built in the preceding months and years.
If I’ve not yet built that type of trust, then I just try for as many of “Prompt, Direct, Private, and Humane” as I can manage:
- Prompt: Raise it immediately, the same day, or within a week at most
- Direct: Get to the point, don’t spend 10 minutes dancing around the issue
- Private: Have the conversation where nobody else can hear or see
- Humane: Your warmth (or lack of) will inform how safe they feel going forwards
If you don’t think you can get all of these into the next suitable opportunity for feedback, that’s fine, drop it into your notes for the next 1-on-1 you (or their line manager) has in the calendar.
They do have regularly scheduled 1-on-1s with their manager, don’t they? 👀