Read time: 5 minutes

👉 Why Read This Edition: You'll learn why the "nice" feedback you've been giving your team is hurting them, and what to do instead starting Monday.

THE PROBLEM

A manager I worked with last year had a direct report who was failing for seven months.

Seven months.

And every one-on-one, she told him he was doing great.

She thought she was being kind. She was being a coward.

When she finally had to let him go, he was shocked.

He cried in the exit meeting.

The firing itself was easy to take.

The real pain was that nobody had told him the truth.

He'd been working hard on the wrong things for over half a year.

The person who was supposed to guide him had been too scared to say a word.

Kim Scott has a name for this. She calls it ruinous empathy.

You care about the person. You don't want to hurt them.

So you swallow the hard thing. You smile. You nod. You say "great job" when you mean "that wasn't it."

And you tell yourself you're being a good manager.

You're a coward with a smile on.

Managers fall into one of three traps with feedback.

All three are pathetic.

The first type does what the manager above did. Ruinous empathy.

They care more about being liked than being useful.

They say "keep up the good work" to someone who's tanking.

They think they're saving the person's feelings. They're saving their own.

The second type goes the other way into what Scott calls obnoxious aggression.

They read one book on being direct and decide the fix is to be a jerk.

They rip people in meetings. They skip the care part.

They think being blunt is the same as being a leader.

People learn to avoid them.

The third type is the worst. Manipulative insincerity.

These are the managers who smile to your face and trash you to their boss.

They give you a glowing review and then block your promotion.

They can't be honest in the room. They can't be honest out of it.

They're politicians in bad suits.

All three fail for the same reason.

They think feedback is about them.

About how they feel giving it.

About how they look giving it.

About keeping things easy between them and the person.

Feedback is about helping the other person do their job.

That's it.

THE SOLUTION: THE CANDOR FIRST FRAMEWORK

Every broken team I've walked into had the same root cause.

Someone was failing.

Everyone knew it.

Nobody had the guts to say it out loud.

The manager hoped it would fix itself.

It never does.

Fixing that takes three moves. Do them in order.

Part 1: Care personally before you open your mouth

Scott is right on this one.

You can't challenge directly if you haven't earned the right.

You earn it by caring personally first.

Caring personally means knowing what each person on your team is working on.

What they want to get better at.

What they want out of their career.

If you don't know those three things about each person who reports to you, you have no business giving them feedback.

Sit down with each person this week. Ask three questions.

What are you trying to get better at this quarter?

What's the next move you want in your career?

What would a great year look like for you?

Write the answers down. Go back to them.

When you give feedback later, tie it to what they told you they want.

"You told me you want to be ready for a senior role by end of year. Here's the thing standing in your way."

That's a manager being useful.

Here's what to avoid.

Asking those questions once in January and forgetting them.

Mistaking small talk about their weekend for caring personally.

Confusing polite for invested.

Part 2: Challenge directly or go home

This is the part where managers fail.

And it's the part that matters more than any other.

When someone does something wrong, you tell them.

Same day. Specific. In private.

No sandwich. No softening.

No "I just wanted to share some thoughts."

Just the thing.

"The deck you sent to the client had three errors on page four. The client caught one of them on the call. That can't happen again. What happened?"

That's honest.

Honest is what separates the managers people grow under from the managers people drift under.

Andy Grove used to say the job of a manager is to increase the output of the people around them.

You increase output by telling people where they're falling short and giving them a clear path to fix it.

Hiding the truth does the opposite.

It keeps them stuck.

Here's what to avoid.

Saving it for the quarterly review.

That's an ambush.

If it was worth saying in April, it was worth saying in April.

I worked with a program director once who saved up her criticism for performance reviews.

Every year, her people were shocked.

Every year, she lost a good one.

She couldn't figure out why. I told her.

She was grading her people.

Managing them is a different job.

Part 3: Invite it back on yourself

Feedback frameworks stop at "care personally, challenge directly."

Scott goes one step further, and this is the step that makes the whole thing work.

You have to ask for it back.

If you want your team to take your feedback seriously, you have to show them you can take it too.

Actually take it. Not perform taking it.

At the end of every one-on-one, ask one question.

"What's one thing I could be doing better as your manager?"

Then stay quiet. Let the silence sit.

People will say "nothing, you're great" the first three times you ask.

Keep asking.

Someone will give you something real.

When they do, don't defend yourself. Don't explain.

Say thank you. Then change the thing.

The first time your team sees you take a hard piece of feedback and act on it, the whole dynamic shifts.

You become the person who's in the work with them.

Here's what to avoid.

Asking for feedback and then arguing with it.

Asking for feedback and then punishing the person who gave it.

I've seen managers do both.

Both kill trust on a team in one move.

THE REAL TEST

Ask yourself this at the end of every week.

Did I tell someone something hard they needed to hear?

If the answer is no, and you manage people, you failed at your job this week.

You may have worked hard.

You may have hit your deliverables.

The part of your job that makes your people better didn't happen.

The best managers I've worked with gave me feedback that stung in the moment and paid off for years.

The weaker ones told me I was doing great right up until they told me I was being laid off.

Pick one person on your team this week.

Find one thing they're doing that's holding them back.

Give them the feedback in a fifteen-minute one-on-one.

Care personally. Challenge directly.

Ask them what you could be doing better.

That's the whole loop.

Fifteen minutes. One conversation.

If you can't do that, you're decorating instead of managing.

CALENDAR

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If this helped you, send it to someone who could use it this week.

Until next time,

Justin

✍️ From the Desk of Justin Bateh, PhD
Simple tactics. Real results. No fluff.