The Three Conversations That Replace One Hard Feedback Talk

When you notice a direct report behaving in a way or doing something that you don't like and you let it go, even if it is small, this thing will likely happen again.

And if it happens again, like three dots on a chart, it becomes a trend line and likely a pattern. And so the third time that this employee does whatever they're doing that you don't like, you're probably irritated. By then, you're probably already carrying with you six weeks or so of unspoken frustration or annoyance, and you're bringing all of that into a 30-minute conversation.

And then it's pretty easy to predict that this pressure that has been building is gonna go somewhere when you talk to them. It goes into your tone, your body language, maybe even the words that you choose. Maybe you get to control them and you try to show up really understanding and empathetic, but the undertone will show.

In this episode, we're going to talk about how to handle situations when you notice a direct report doing something that you don't like, how to address it early so that it doesn't blow up down the road, and how to do it effectively so the behavior actually changes.

I'm gonna call out the patterns and the traps that so many managers fall into when they notice this that actually makes the whole situation worse. My name is Ramona Shaw, and I'm the host of The Manager Track podcast. There is a meta-analysis I will get to later covering more than 600 incidents of workplace feedback. And what it concludes is that feedback helps on average, but in over a third of the cases studied, it actually made performance worse. So today we're gonna talk about how to break up a feedback conversation into three conversations. So you're gonna talk to someone three times instead of just once, which is typically too much all at once.

So the first conversation takes no more than a few minutes, and it stops most performance problems from ever becoming performance problems. The second one takes about five minutes, and the goal of that is to stop patterns from sort of hardening and for habits to form that are not effective. And then the third conversation is the actual structure conversation.

You already know that you should be having that feedback conversation, but it works far better when the first two conversations have already happened. I'm gonna give you the exact language for all three of them, and the recovery move for when you have skipped the first two, and the review conversation or that feedback conversation is coming up in the next few days.

Plus, I'll share four research findings that explain why your team member may genuinely be surprised when you finally speak up, and why they didn't see this coming, which might come to a surprise to you. So let's start at the beginning. Silence is not neutral. Every week that you notice something and you say nothing about that, you are teaching your team member that it is acceptable. Whatever you're noticing, that behavior, that thing, is okay. Silence is not neutral.

Silence is acceptance. In my book, The Confident & Competent New Manager, I use a simple example.

Someone is late to four out of five meetings, let's say, and it drives you up the wall, even if it's just a few minutes, but you never really say anything. And from where they sit, being a few minutes late is entirely reasonable since their manager has watched it happen a whole bunch of times already and never made a comment.

They're not trying to hurt anyone. They think it's okay 'cause you never said anything. They're also not trying to be defiant. They are simply responding accurately, in a way, to the information, meaning the signal back, the non-response that you gave them, so this non-action. So silence is a decision that you made about someone without telling them.

On our side, when we watch this and we see people come late to meetings, as an example, we may think it's totally unreasonable, but people act in a way that makes sense to them in that moment. So their actions may not always be appropriate or effective or logical in our minds, but they are always reasonable inside of their head.

So your job is to work out what made it reasonable, and you cannot do that from distance and that means that if you wanna get in their head, it has to be pretty close to the event happening, not six weeks later when you refer back to, "Remember back then when you did so and so, what was going on?"

It's likely that they don't recall what was going on six week weeks ago. So to really understand, come from a place of curiosity, it has to be somewhat close to the event. So for example, if a client came to me after a performance review that went badly.

Let's say she had rated the direct report as not meeting expectations, and she had it fully documented, the dates, the examples, the downstream impact of those behaviors. On the facts, on paper, she was right. But his response was, "Hey, this is the first I'm hearing of any of this." Now, he was also right.

She had tracked the problem privately for months, maybe even looped in HR, definitely talked to her manager about it, but never once raised it with him directly and clearly. Not just like, "Hey, it would be nice if you could do so and so differently," but, "Hey, no, this is an issue. I am tracking it.. I need this to change. How will you go about it?" So in our coaching conversation, she wanted help handling his reaction of him being very surprised. But his reaction was not the main problem here, 'cause we didn't wanna optimize or learn a skill for handling a reaction that I'll hope she'll never be in a situation and to have to deal with again.

So we go back to what is actually the root cause here. So four months of silent documentation was the problem, and no amount of delivery skill or handling his objection was going to close that gap size or address this issue. So the alternative of all of it is far less dramatic, It's all about small observations said out loud to close the gap when it actually happens.

For example, "Hey, the budget figures in Tuesday's proposal seemed to be wrong. Can you tell me what happened there and how you calculated them?" Or, "Hey, I noticed that the market data in the report you sent was missing the regional data.

Can you walk me through your process of creating the report?" Or, " hey, I want to address something, even if it might seem small. In today's team meeting, you seemed more disengaged than you typically are.

What happened for you during that conversation? No preamble about how much you value them, no apology for bringing it up, no solution attached at the end of what they need to change. Just one observation, one question, and that's it. That's why I say these conversations won't take long, but they do show that you are paying attention and you will address very candidly and clearly when things come up that don't seem to serve the person or the team well.

If you did some math on this, it's basically saying, you mention that small thing on a regular Tuesday, and let's say you spend one unit of your social or political capital on it, but if you wait until the next, two months later, you now need to spend 20 units of your social or political capital on it.

It never adds up. Your credibility here with giving feedback and actually supporting people lives in that distance between when you notice something that's not working to when you say it and what you say. So we wanna make sure that we close that gap and address it quickly. And so this is what this very first conversation is all about.

The first time you see something, you say something, and you say it with curiosity rather than correction. In our leadership accelerator, our 90-day manager readiness program, we literally call this the see something, say something rule. This is not about feedback, and it's also not performance management.

It is one observation, one question. Within a day or two, if at all, of it happening. It can literally be as soon as the meeting ends and you immediately pick up the phone. " Hey, I might be misreading this, but it seemed like you were bothered by the proposal that John made in the meeting.

What was going on for you? That is the whole conversation. 90 seconds at the end of the call. Now while many managers totally miss out on that conversation and never have that, the see something, say something is not part of how they operate, the next thing that many managers miss is what happens once they actually did say this?

Ask the question, right? Observation plus question. Ask that question and then be quiet, not just making sure you're double-checking next time or no big deal, it happens. No solving it for them. "Oh, okay. Got it. I'll, I'll take care of that." Their answer is the information you came for and the reason why you ask.

Hey, maybe the template changed. Maybe they never got the CRM access that they needed to do whatever you were looking for. Maybe they are covering for someone who's currently out, and that's why they were late. Most performance problems die right here in the 90 seconds, and they don't become performance problems at all because you create that sense of alignment.

So observation and question, and then not trying to solve it, also not sugarcoating it, just being really clear, "Hey, I noticed it. It's something that's off of what I had expected. I want you to know that I'm noticing it, and I wanna also make sure that we know what the actual standard is and how you are going to make sure that you get there, and there's a good reason for why it didn't happen now and how we were gonna make sure that doesn't happen again."

One observation, one question, and then not sugarcoating it and saying like, "Oh, no big deal. No problem." No, we do wanna call out and say like, "Okay, that makes sense," or, "I understand where you're coming from.

I'm glad we talked about it so that we are on time going forward, or we're aligned on how to do this next time." That alignment is key right there. So this was conversation number one. Conversation number two is about naming the pattern.

So the second or third time that you see the same thing, we gotta stop discussing the actual incident, and you need to actually say and call this out as a pattern. And most managers don't have this conversation either, many managers jump straight from letting it slide to then having a formal sit-down, and that jolt, basically, is why the formal one, this formal feedback conversation, often lands so badly. So conversation two is the bridge.

So from, like, noticing something, an observation and a question, we're now going to the pattern. I want to name something. This is the third time this month that a report has come to me with missing data. I don't think it is a one-off anymore, and would rather now flag this as a pattern to make sure you and I can realign before it turns into a bigger conversation or issue down the road. So we wanna actually use the word pattern to really hone in that this is now a trend line here on the chart. We don't wanna soften it. We want to make sure that we're raising the stakes. Without raising the temperature quite yet.

Because when you do continue to talk about the incidents, there's usually a reason why. This other team was late, I was covering for that team member, I had this problem at home. There's often something going on that will excuse my behavior, and that is okay the first time. I, we actually do wanna understand that.

But when it turns into a trend or a pattern, now if you keep talking about the incidents, we're gonna have to address or defend our point against those circumstances. But that's not the point anymore. The point now is, like, hey, this is becoming a pattern. So abstract from the actual incidents and now talk about that bigger pattern.

Okay, that was conversation number two. Conversation number three is to address the gap. So if one and two did not land, now you have to structure conversation. If you can't do this in your regular one-on-one meeting, put that in a calendar, but let them know what it's about. For example, " hey, I put a 30-minute meeting on for us on Thursday. I wanna talk about quality standards on the client reports."

That one sentence removes the ambush that people might feel or the anxiousness when they think it might be a feedback conversation, but they don't know what's coming.

People who feel prepared and aren't negatively surprised by feedback, which then immediately triggers like an emotional response, will respond to the feedback way better. They will be way less defensive because you've already let them know this is what we're gonna talk about. They can think ahead of what was going on.

They can show up prepared for the conversation. They don't feel this ambush. They'll be a lot more calm. Now, in that conversation, you do wanna mention the gap with the specifics and clearly illustrating the impact for example, in the last two weeks, there were three different reports with errors in them. We had a missing contact information in the Johnson file, we had incorrect budget figure in Tuesday's proposal, and then incompleted data in the market analysis. Now, two came to me and one went to Priya's team, and the effect of it or the impact is that work is now being reviewed or re-reviewed downstream, and Priya's team lost a day waiting on numbers that they thought were final.

So what I did right there was clearly outlining what happened, what was the actual situation, and then what was the impact of that? The impact of this was the delay on Priya's team, them having to data.

But if I wanted to, I could also add that Priya's team may no longer trust us or trust them specifically with their work, which may mean that they're either gonna circumvent that person and go to someone else next time, or they're going to now have to double-check a few times, and that type of reputation is not a good one to build.

Or I could also mention that I'm now concerned with their quality, and I now feel like I need to step in and review things, And that's not a position I wanna be in. So for us to have a good working relationship, this needs to change.

So I can add, I call this, like, impact expansion. I can add more of the impact, the interpersonal impact as well as the business and technical impact of these situations.

Now after this, wanna invite ownership, which basically means I can't be the one who tells them what to do. If I say, "Now, this is the problem, here's how to fix it, here's what you need to do differently," I'm in charge. But in order for them to take ownership over their own sort of development plan here that we're talking about and course-correcting the situation, I have to be the one who's asking, and they need to be one who are answering. I can't fill in the answers for them.

I could ask questions such as, "What is your read on what is causing these to slip through? And what would need to change on your end or on mine so that these can get caught before they leave your desk?" And then we stop talking, right? Even if there's silence, we're gonna really, like, throw that ball back in their park and wait for them to pick it up.

Now lastly, you wanna make sure that you have something that you can go back to. So like I call these anchors that we wanna place. Anchors are commitments that we're making that someone else can come back to and say, "Remember when you made this commitment?"

But if my commitment is loose, it's a really sloppy anchor, not a really solid one. If someone said, "Hey, I will get better with paying attention to details," that sounds like a nice statement, and like thank you, I appreciate that. But it's not an anchor, because how do I know that they-- what that means to get better at, attention to detail?

I would need to know what that specifically means. Hey, in order for me to pay more attention to details, I will block out 30 minutes to review these reports without any distractions before I send them to you.

So that is my commitment. Now, next time, if there's still an error, I can pick this back up and say, "Did this actually happen? Did you actually block out the time? And if not, what happened? This was the commitment that you made that you will do now. Now we're having a different problem.

You're saying you're gonna do something, but then you didn't do it." Now we have an anchor. Now we can refer back to something that we both have agreed on and that's very specific.

While it sounds nice, it's really hard to be accountable to betterment. Betterment is not a term or not something that we, can specify, and it's fairly subjective as well.

Now, a fairly reasonable scenario here, and that is probably true for many of us, is that you, in one case or another, you're already at conversation three, and you didn't have conversation one or two yet. You've been quiet for months, and maybe that review is coming up next week.

Don't apologize your way through it, and do not pretend the first two conversations happened, right? You-- In those cases, you wanna name your own delay once very cleanly, and then move on. For example, you could say, "Hey, before I get into this, I wanna name something. I've been noticing this for a few months, and I have not brought it up, and that is on me. You should have heard this in October. That is my responsibility.

Now, we still have time to do something with it, and I wanna have this conversation with you now and get right on it so that we can make the best of it now." So that is giving a sense of ownership, right? And then you can go right into the specifics. You're not giving this version of, guilting yourself or softening the issue or taking on more responsibility and ownership than actually is yours to take, 'cause it's still the other person who did that behavior or missed the reports or deadlines or whatnot.

So in preparation for that performance review that might be coming up, here are four questions to ask yourself, and I suggest to ask those before any feedback conversation and to build them into your leadership system. Question number one: What did I actually see?

The behavior, not the interpretation of, that I have of that behavior. Question two: Have I said it out loud to them even once? Three, have I named it as a pattern? And.

In this conversation, how can I be asking them what to do and how to recover versus telling them what to do?

Those are four simple questions to ask yourself so you go into the conversation well-prepared.

Now, quick pause here. If this topic around feedback is resonating with you and you are someone who takes their career seriously and is ambitious, I wanna tell you about the Leadership Accelerator.

This is our 12-week program that we run specifically for new and first-time managers, people who are great at their jobs and now need to become great at leading people. We go deep into exactly this kind of thing, like naming a performance gap without these conversations having to escalate or creating accountability on a team and talking to someone in a way that doesn't get them defensive or go quiet on you.

The program combines coaching, on-demand training, and one-on-one support so that what you learn actually sticks and applies directly to your situation. If you are a manager whose feedback is not landing the way it should, or if you lead a team and want to build this capacity across yourself or even other managers, check out the link in the description.

Okay, back to the episode. So here is the research, and it might help you to not see your team member's response as a surprise. Number one, feedback fails more often than anyone admits. In 1996, Kluger and DeNisi published a meta-analysis, I was referring to that earlier, in the Psychological Bulletin covering 607 incidents of feedback conversations.

Overall, there were over 23,000 observations. And on average, feedback did improve performance, but in more than a third of the cases, it made performance worse. The main mechanism that they identified is the part that you can use. Feedback loses its power the further it moves away from the task and the closer it moves toward the self, meaning feedback about the work actually improves the work. Feedback that lands as a statement about who someone is triggers a defense of that self, of the ego, and then the task, the feedback on the task actually gets forgotten,.

Which is exactly what saving it up does to you, right? Three task-level observations that you spread over three weeks, they stay about the work. Like you have conversation one, two, it's all about the work and the actual behavior. But the same three conversations compressed into one meeting, let's say six weeks later, now you're so annoyed with this, it becomes a verdict on the person.

Now you have an emotional response on the person, and your emotional response to it is what kind of, in their perception, threatens the relationship.

The second research here is naive realism. Lee Ross and Andrew Ward described what they called naive realism.

Each of us believes we see the situation objectively, and that any reasonable person given the same facts would see it the same way. So when someone disagrees with our read, we conclude they're uninformed, biased, or being difficult. Now, in a performance conversation, that means you are not only confident you are right about their work, you're confident they should already know, and you are confident that they should already know that you are right. But that isn't the case. That is just your experience and your perception.

And then the last piece of research I wanna share is about selective attention. Simons and Chabris asked people to count basketball passes, and roughly half failed to notice that a person in a gorilla suit walked through the middle of the frame, this was on a screen, while the other people were playing basketball.

What you're looking for determines what you see. So once you have privately decided someone is a problem, you start to collect evidence for it and stop registering the exceptions to that pre-made judgment. So the clean report that someone delivers that has no errors in it might not even get noticed.

The reports that have errors in it, they blow up in proportion in how we perceive them because we're already looking for it, while the counterpart of this, the clean reports, the good reports, they're non-events. So we start to feel that we are building up evidence here and our case is airtight and complete.

But all those together is why we're in a situation when two people come to an event or a situation or meet in a room and they have gone through the same events, so we believe, but have very different accounts of what happened.

Both are convinced the other person is missing something obvious or is not thinking about this straight.

Now the way to bridge this in a situation like this is to always start asking about their experience, first. So when the moment we start to notice the disconnect, we may say, "Tell me how you experienced this. I wanna understand." And then after that, once they feel heard, that's when they're now actually open to hear our experience about this. So if you're in a leadership position, you gotta go the high road and have them share their situation and their, perception first before it is your turn. Then you start to look at where is the gap, how can we create alignment and move forward.

So the move here, and maybe a commitment you make from this episode is one that's deliberately fairly blunt. It's a 48-hour rule. Anything you notice gets said within 48 hours, or you let it go completely. Not privately noted, not filed away for the review down the road, but genuinely letting it go and never mention it again.

This may sound a bit harsh or unreasonable, but what you'll notice is that when it's up to you either saying something or forgetting about it, you're going to be very motivated to say something. This type of challenge is also where the shift from an individual contributor to a leader kind of shows up. As an IC, your job was the quality of your own output, But as a leader, your main responsibility is to build that type of clarity, is to develop and help your team grow. It also means to say the thing that everyone else is not going to say. No one's going to say someone else is dropping the ball over here.

They're not gonna toss their peer, their coworker under the bus, in front of you. they're gonna assume that you see it too, and you're going to have the conversation. This is going to be on you, and that is the difference between being an IC and carrying the responsibility of being a manager, or at least one of those differences.

So a few questions worth answering honestly before your next one-on-one. Which of your people is operating on information that you are holding but not sharing? Like, what are stuff that you haven't shared with them yet? And then when and how are you going to share that with them? What are you maybe calling or explaining to yourself as being patient, being understanding, being supportive, but actually if you were honest with yourself, it's avoidance of the tough conversation.

And when someone on the team isn't performing well and the performance review is coming out, Do you let them be ambushed, or are you going to be the manager who is going to prepare them for that conversation?

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Thanks for tuning in. We'll be back next week with another episode of The Manager Track Podcast. Bye for now.

If you enjoyed this episode, then check out two other awesome resources to help you become a leader people love to work with. This includes a free masterclass on how to successfully lead as a new manager. Check it out at archova.org/masterclass. The second resource is my bestselling book, The Confident & Competent New Manager, How to Rapidly Rise to Success in Your First Leadership Role. Check it out at archova.org/books, or head on over to Amazon and grab your copy there.