The Atlas

If there is one thing that I get asked advice about more than anything else it is this: How do I give feedback to someone who may not have asked for it?

In other words: Tell me how I can tell someone they are making me crazy in a way that is both professional and doesn't make me feel like a schmuck.

The reality is that not everyone is open to getting feedback, and not all of our reasons for wanting to give it are as noble as we may try to convince ourselves. So before we go any further, I advice this: ask yourself why it's important to give someone feedback they are not requesting.

Of course, there are often plenty of reasons it can be necessary to give feedback. Work scenarios, in particular, can put people in this type of situation.

• Tensions rising between two people on different teams, and one of their managers is obligated to step in to calm things down to avoid a larger problem.
• A re-org moves someone to a new team and a company-wide performance process forces a conversation before that person and their new manager have had much time to develop a high degree of trust.
• While working on a cross-team project, a critical subject matter expert repeatedly alienates others with their behavior and risks the project's success without realizing that people are being offended by what he is saying.
• Someone with a very direct communication style is writing emails that often come across as hostile or belligerent, and the other people on the thread find themselves feeling chastised or criticised in each interaction.

Earlier this year, an article in HBR discussed the challenges of trust-building in a largely virtual working environment. The research discussed in that article is worth keeping in mind here:

[Researchers studied] more than 3,000 senior knowledge workers and identified two distinct kinds of trust that are essential for people to work together effectively. First, they need to believe that others will deliver and that the work will be high quality (competence trust). Second, they need to believe that others have good intentions and high integrity (interpersonal trust). To trust colleagues in both of these ways, people need clear and easily discernible signals about them — what they’re doing (actions), why they’re doing it (motivations), and whether they’ll continue to do it (reliability).

The real challenge, of course, is that trust isn't binary. Brene Brown often uses the 'marble jar' analogy to discuss the building of trust over time, and that's worth keeping in mind, since going from zero to sixty on the trust front can't happen instantaneously.

So before I launch into this type of conversation, I ask myself the following questions:

• What level of trust do we have, and will it help or hurt this conversation?
• What is the goal in providing this feedback?
• Is there a way to start small, and build up over time as I see how they react and/or we work on our trust?

The answers to the above may not change the requirement to have the conversation, but they can help craft the manner by which you have it. As with most things, keeping the real goal in mind is often the most helpful part.

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