do this every time you’re about to give feedback on a document
Cold (but true) take: Covid-19 reorganized the way we interact at work.
These changes have outlived the pandemic, and they affect us whether our teams are virtual, in-person, or hybrid. One obvious example is how much we now interact with our people via the documents they create.
Increasingly, I find clients asking for best practices of giving feedback on documents produced by direct reports. More and more, we lead via comments on a Google Doc, so I wanted to pass along a pair of questions I encourage all leaders to ask themselves before ever giving a piece of document feedback.
1. What is the single most important thing they need in order to improve? Always, your goal is to maximize your impact per leadership calorie expended. Thus it’s important that, before you leave a single comment, you identify in your own mind the highest-leverage piece of feedback you can give. This is doubly important because, in addition to (by definition) being the one piece of feedback that will most improve the document you’re looking at, you’re also creating an enduring mantra for teammates to repeat to themselves every time they sit down to create something similar.
As soon as you’ve clarified that for yourself, now it’s time to get inside their head and ask…
2. What is it that they want from me out of this feedback? Maybe they’re feeling insecure and are hoping for some affirmation. Maybe they’re set on the bigger picture of the document and are only open to hearing about minor tweaks. Or maybe they are unsure about the quality of the thinking and aren’t ready to begin considering the presentation or the writing. Whatever your teammates are hoping for, these wants are going to be shouting in their ears the entire time; you need to address these wants before your teammates will be open to hearing your bottom-line feedback.
How you deliver the thing they need depends on (your best guess of) what they want.
To be clear, these wants shouldn’t influence your bottom-line feedback — for instance, perhaps what they want is low-level writing feedback but what they need is to adjust the fundamental approach; you are still going to make that fundamental correction — but they should affect how you deliver this feedback. In other words, you’re never going to neglect what they need, but in order to deliver that you first must address what they want. How might that sound? Given the hypothetical just described, that could go something like, “Let’s first go line-by-line and talk through a few specific places where I had comments on the writing.” After doing that say, and scratching that itch for them, you could then say, “Great! Now that we’ve tightened the writingI have a big thought about the fundamental approach here. Can we chat about that?”
Note that the more accurately you can guess what they are hoping to get out of your feedback, the more quickly you’ll be able to address their wants so you can get to their need.
What a gift to be able to organize information for your teammates to act on! Doing this well, though, requires that you work through the wants in order to land the thing that they need.
-Ben
