Astonishing. Completely backwards. This article describes how to give feedback to your subordinates, not to your superiors. If your superiors are unable to process no-fluff information, regardless of whether it's feedback or updates, they have no business lording over anyone and will sink whatever function they have oversight of. If you find yourself working under such people, start polishing your resume.
The reason you fluff up feedback to your subordinates is because lower down the chain they tend to be insecure and don't yet have the experience to distinguish between actionable impartial feedback, and threats to their job security.
The reason you don't fluff feedback, or any information for that matter to your superiors, is described in basically every handbook on highly effective communication in organizations.
I think you’re ignoring the “without getting fired” part. The implication is that you’re in a situation where management is stubborn or even hostile to feedback.
Most organizations don’t practice “highly effective communication”. It’s often a nightmare riddled with politics and ego.
Another tactic I like to use is a riff on the authors suggestion #3: “Is there a reason you did (or did not do) X?” This works because it’s framed as accepting the decision and being genuinely curious about the rationale. Often the answer is: no, I never really gave it any thought. Other times there turns out to be a good reason that didn’t occur to me and it turns into a learning experience for me.
Another tactic that works for me is “Can I offer a suggestion?” The answer is almost always yes but it’s a sign of respect to ask.
This was one of the most exhausting aspects of working for a US company, especially as an H1B. Simply: just don't say anything, it wasn't worth it.
I'm from cultures where we bluntly call a spade a spade and pride ourselves on disdain for hierarchy. There's far less fear in raising concerns generally to anyone, but it's quite possibly because of the far better employment laws.
It's not just due to an employee being H1B. It's that 80% of your peers are Chinese and Indian H1Bs who bring that culture of deference to authority into the US.
I don't even feel like I'm working in the US when I'm working for any tech company these days. If I'm at ads for FB, I may as well be in Beijing. Some others, I may as well be in Mumbai.
It would be nice to work with Americans/westerners for once and actually be able to speak up about something without getting fired.
In my experience, Americans are much more likely to see criticism as a threat or an insult than in most European business cultures, where blunt feedback is common. I’ve seen many teams in different companies led by Americans where simply pointing out that a plan will fail in a public forum is tantamount to spitting in their face. It’s absurd, and it destroys teams.
Most of those examples (not giving enough direction, not training new hires enough, not being clear enough on priorities) are probably not going to be surprises for the person, and if you give feedback that shows you want someone to behave differently without having given some thought about why they aren't already then your feedback talks more about your own lack of experience and empathy than anything else.
To give good feedback to anyone you need to understand something about the pressures and challenges that they are facing. And remember that everything is a trade off. For example, perhaps they're incredibly busy, and would like to spend more time with new hires, but are struggling to find time because they aren't getting enough blocks of concentration time to work out clear priorities and they have been told they need to give their trusted colleague more opportunities to grow through delegation.
Most likely, if you think something is a problem then they do too. They don't need to be told that or criticised for it, they need help solving the underlying problem.
Image the difference between "I want to give you feedback that you aren't spending enough time with new hires" vs "I know you've been wanting to spend more time with the new hires, why don't you take them for lunch and send me to your status meeting over Tuesday lunch time this week."
As I started doing more leadership, I became aware that a lot of the things workers cite as predictable examples of leadership incompetence causing problems are not surprises to leadership. They knew that this choice of action would cause problems, the reason that they went ahead anyway was because they believed that the problems caused by the other courses of action available to them would be worse.
Of course, there are situations this advice does not apply, maybe the leader genuinely is clueless or evil or mistaken about the severity of a problem, but a good leader when presented with a problem elsewhere needs to start from a position of respect and learning and if you want to give advice to a leader you should start by trying to model good leadership yourself.
Leaders don't hold all the power. As others have said, I think this is a good approach for everyone - showing a bit of empathy and "you don't know what you don't know" when corresponding with people. In fact it's good leadership 101.
Edit: can anyone suggest any good (free) tools for eliciting 360 feedback? Potentially anonymously?
In aviation this is what Crew Resource Management is about, and in particular, how to make sure the monitoring pilot, who may be the least experienced one, can effectively supervise and review the actions of the other. Many crashes were the result of copilots' fear of speaking up.
Business life could learn from this. The person in charge is not a king, they're simply the person tasked with making decisions. There is nothing scandalous in having another person evaluate those decisions against a set of principles or common sense, and speaking up when something doesn't feel right.
I disagree with much of the premise and frankly don't think this person should be giving advice. Some of what's in there isn't bad like "be thoughtful about what you say". However, if you already feel something needs to be changed to the point where you're thinking something needs to be said but then you follow the article to force yourself to ask questions like
> “Can I live with this? How much does this bother me? Is it worth giving them feedback and what are my chances of success doing it?”
you are compromising with yourself at an early stage. This frequently leads to things escalating (the problem didn't go away and in fact got incrementally worse because there was no negative feedback) which makes it a much harder situation.
This article is also written with examples like, if you don't make small changes to your wording, you'll get responses like "You think I don’t know that I need to give new hires guidance? I obviously gave them guidance. GTFO." which clearly catastrophizes outcomes based on small nuances in your own already inoffensive language.
Feedback is like gardening. Take care of small problems early and gently but relentlessly. If there's a wolf in your garden you should probably do something about the wolf instead of working around the wolf and spending your life in fear, even if that means finding a different garden.
I will recommend the book "The Coward's Guide to Conflict" which helped me get a healthy perspective.
If you’re not on a visa and don’t have kids I’d recommend simply not caring if you get fired by insecure leadership. You’re better off elsewhere if they would do that.
Why on earth would someone deserve to be fired based on mere "feedback"? As long as it's not an outright offensive rant, it should be handled sensibly. But even if it is an offensive rant, firing should be a last resort. The amount of toxic subordination that's assumed to be normal is sickening.
The reason you fluff up feedback to your subordinates is because lower down the chain they tend to be insecure and don't yet have the experience to distinguish between actionable impartial feedback, and threats to their job security.
The reason you don't fluff feedback, or any information for that matter to your superiors, is described in basically every handbook on highly effective communication in organizations.
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