A guest blog post from a friend

My good friend Bernie has a blog. It's called The Practical Manager. We decided to swap blog entries - I wrote something for his readers (I think he's publishing my article on Monday) and he wrote something for you. It's about work, so put your serious hats on for a moment.

I'm kidding - I just did that to get a reaction from Bernie. Here's his post:

Feedback is the fuel of champions. Great bosses get good at giving feedback. But when it comes to giving unsolicited feedback to your boss my advice is Just Say No.

Giving feedback to your boss is a career-limiting move. Despite your best intentions and recent Human Resource efforts at 360 feedback, openness, and lip-service about people being the most valuable resource, giving feedback is hazardous and difficulty. It's hard to do well, it's uncomfortable for both parties, and fraught with emotional landmines.

Screw it up and you will poison your relationship with your boss, perhaps permanently. The first hazard is that you'll be perceived as "managing upwards". Your manager doesn't need or want to be managed by you. That's why she's your manager. The thinking goes like this: "You don't understand my job, my deliverables, the expectations that are imposed on me. Don't judge me and how I do my job."

Should a great boss be able to receive as well as give feedback? Certainly. If you're lucky enough to have one of those great bosses, with whom you have a trusting, safe, and open relationship, and you want to help them with an attitude of love in your heart (yes, I said it - love), then go ahead. Be careful, and follow these points:

1. Deliver What You're Supposed To - Giving feedback when you haven't met your own deadlines just looks bad. Are you making excuses and not taking responsibility for your own late, over-budget, or shoddy work? To give feedback you must first have a good relationship with the person you're giving it to. In this case, it means making your boss's life easier by actually delivering what's expected of you.

2. Understand Your Manager's Deliverables - Understanding all of your manager's responsibilities, goals, and expectations laid on her will help you appreciate why sometimes she gets a bit a grumpy. It will also help you place your opinion in such as way that it will help, and not detract, from everything she's trying to do. Your feedback might even take the form of an offer of help, improvement in an area that's important to her, or as a way to carry out a critical milestone.

3. Focus On the Positive - As a rule of thumb, a great boss will give three pieces of positive feedback for every corrective one. Positive feedback has the real power to affect change. Us humans always seem to go to negative or corrective feedback first. Why are we always focused on what's broken? Focus on works well means we get more of that, and less of the other. Focusing on the negative means we get more of the negative. Funny how that works, but people get what they pay attention to, and people tend to pay attention more to what might hurt them over what is going well.

4. Do It Behind Closed Doors - The last thing anybody wants to hear is how they screwed up. The last thing a manager want to hear is how they screwed up from one of their direct reports in front of the rest of the team. It can and will be seen as a personal attack, which is what it is. If you have critical, potentially emotionally charged feedback to give anybody, do it behind closed doors.

5. Say What It's Not - One of the risks of giving your manager feedback is that it will be interpreted as a lack of support. In order to avoid this, use a technique called contrasting. Say what your feedback is not. For example, if you have a concern about how your boss's meeting seem to always run late, start with how what you are not questioning how well she communicates, or the value of getting the staff together in one place. You just want to brainstorm about how to make things more effective and productive for everybody.

6. Be Supportive - Many times the decisions that you might have an issue with have already been discussed at higher levels, and resources and money are already being spent to make it happen. The choice has been made, the commitment is in play. Your perceived whining about it is just that: complaining about something that can't be changed, just because you don't think it's a good idea.Your boss needs to know that despite your misgiving, you're on board. Make sure she gets that message.

7. Stick to the Facts - Stick to the facts and consequences as you see them. Making judgments about somebody's emotional state, intentions, mental health, or attitude are unwelcome and usually wrong. Stick to behaviour (facial expressions, body language, tone of voice), numbers, risk mitigation, process improvement, deliverables, or whatever is appropriate in your context. Be as specific as you can.

Good luck!

Bernie May, B.Sc., PMP
Practical Management: leveraging people, productivity, and projects