There is a popular saying that does the rounds in management circles which is often rolled out when talking about delivering feedback and resolving conflict:
Focus on the problem, not the person.
The idea is that if you focus your feedback on the problem itself and not the person you’re speaking to, that the feedback will be better received. This is because the feedback won’t be taken personally and it leads to a better outcome.
Whilst well-intentioned and on the face of it, perfectly logical, I think it’s a flawed assumption to think that we can deliver feedback without it feeling personal at all.
I believe that ALL feedback is personal. And that it actually helps us as managers to start with this assumption, rather than try to pretend that it’s not there by focusing on something else.
The real question that you, as a manager, need to ask yourself is: just how personal is the feedback.
How personal is the feedback?
Now, there are definitely going to be times when you deliver feedback where it’s easier to focus on the problem than the person. For example, if someone has completed a piece of work such as a strategy document or a website audit which contains mistakes, you can focus on those mistakes and ask for them to be corrected.
The reason that this type of feedback can feel less personal is because objective standards can be set relating to what you expect from this type of work.
For example, it’s pretty straightforward and objectively fair to say that any written deliverables should be:
- Free of spelling and grammatical errors.
- Factually accurate including and data points that are included.
- Formatted correctly using branded documents/fonts etc.
If one of your team doesn’t meet these standards, then you can highlight when it happens and give them feedback on how to improve. It’s also quite easy to show them examples of what good looks like – you can show them exactly how to fix the problem with concrete examples of other deliverables.
There is a personal element to it, because at the end of the day, they’re the ones who have completed this work.
But it’s not actually about them, it’s about the objective standards that you set for them and all of your team.
In this example, it’s fairly straightforward to separate the person from the feedback.
Let’s contrast this with another example.
Let’s say that one of your team has given some feedback to a junior team member which has upset the recipient. When you ask what happened, it turns out that the person delivering the feedback was pretty direct and blunt, whilst delivering the feedback in front of some other colleagues.
You now need to speak with them about this and try to help them improve how they deliver their feedback in the future. You know that they are a nice person and didn’t mean to upset anyone, but that they have a tendency to say what is on their mind and to be very direct.
You can be pretty objective about the fact that they should avoid delivering negative feedback in a public setting – this is a standard that is concrete and easy to understand.
The directness and bluntness is just part of who they are. If you were to ask about it, it’s likely that they’d respond with things such as:
- That’s just who I am.
- Do you not want me to be honest and direct with people?
- I just wanted to help and give them honest feedback.
It’s hard to argue with the logic of any of these!
But this is the problem – giving them feedback on this topic is basically going to the heart of who they are as a person. It’s literally their personality that you’re giving them feedback about – this could be perceived as very, very personal.
Part of the solution here would be to encourage them to have some empathy when delivering feedback and to always be honest with someone, but to try and deliver feedback in a way that is as kind and empathetic as possible, without avoiding what you need to say.
If empathy is hard for someone, this is hard feedback to hear – and yes, I appreciate the irony here!
As a result, you’ll need to spend more time planning how to deliver this feedback because it’s far more personal than our last example.
And therein lies the point that you need to remember as a manager – you need to be able to identify just how personal a piece of feedback may be and then adapt how you deliver it.
How to adapt your feedback based on how personal it is
One of the easiest ways to adapt your feedback is to mentally categorise it into different areas.
Personally, I’ve always found the following framework and categories to cover pretty much any type of feedback that you’ll deliver:
If you deliver feedback about someone’s day-to-day work and deliverables, it falls into the left side of this scale which is more about the work that someone does, as opposed to them as a person.
Another way to think about this is to think about the scale of objective to subjective:
As you move towards the right, the feedback falls more into categories of someone’s career progression and how they behave. Therefore, the feedback is far more subjective and harder to set objective standards for.
Going back to our previous example, it’s hard to set an objective standard when it comes to someone’s personality!
A good rule of thumb is that the more subjective a piece of feedback is, the more time and effort that you should put into preparing to deliver it.
This is neatly illustrated here if we overlay the two charts above with a scale that shows time and effort:
It’s important to note that this doesn’t mean that you spend zero time and effort on objective feedback! It’s not a sliding scale that should nudge you towards:
- Figuring out just how personal a piece of feedback may be.
- As a result, how much time to spend preparing to deliver that feedback.
It’s not an exact scale, but it should help guide you along the way.
It also helps prevent the flawed assumption that you can focus 100% on the problem and not the person. Instead, working with the assumption that all feedback is personal, it’s just a case of how personal it is and adapting to it.
If you can be a manager that starts with this assumption and tailors your feedback accordingly, you’ll be far more effective than most in delivering effective feedback to your team.
