Delegating is not abdicating.
A couple of days ago, I talked about the importance of granting autonomy to your team members to make decisions. And part of delegating without fear is developing the skill of coaching your team members and having regular and meaningful conversations about their performance.
You’ll delegate decisions to them, and they’ll be responsible for the outcomes, but you don’t abandon them to do whatever comes to mind without any guidance from you.
But I know how stressful it can be to try to give performance-related feedback without communicating a lack of trust or triggering a defensive response. Most of the time, that negative response is triggered by surprise, by vague criticism, or by a less-than-blameless post-mortem after the damage has already been done.
To keep performance conversations clear, kind, and effective, here’s an amalgam of different tips that I found helpful as I led various engineering teams during my career:
🔵 Make your feedback frequent, timely, and mostly positive. Look for regular opportunities to comment on the likely positive results of people’s actions or decisions, and share that information as quickly as you can.
🔵 As simply as you can, describe what they did in terms of concrete, observable actions. Avoid arguable or subjective characterizations and any suspicion of motive or intention.
🔵 Describe the natural outcome of those actions. This isn’t about berating them or celebrating them for what happened in the past; it’s about helping them see the connection between actions and likely consequences.
🔵 Help them envision a positive future. If they’ve experienced negative outcomes, make it clear that you understand it wasn’t their intention, and invite them to identify different actions they can take in the future. If their actions brought positive results, encourage them to keep doing more of it.
Much of this information I learned from the Manager Tools podcast, which led to Mark Horstman’s publishing of the first edition of The Effective Manager, a book I’ve often recommended.
I’m also aware that knowing and doing are not the same thing. If you’d like help strengthening management skills and habits like giving clear, kind, and effective feedback, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.
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