Your Boss Thinks You Suck. Now What?
When your 'areas to improve' sounds like a shopping list. Or more subtly, an afternoon is ruined when you get a little honest feedback on your performance. And what you should do next.
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers, and specific leadership advice.
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There are more fun topics than this one. I enjoy discussing promotions, or building trust, or setting reasonable goals. These are all exciting topics on how to take advantage of your good performance, and turn it into a great performance.
But there's another side of the career equation. A different type of challenge for people to overcome, in the opposite direction of a promotion.
I’m talking about receiving negative / corrective / bad feedback.
Perhaps it’s a small correction. It’s something which may or may not be a big deal.
Or you might be told that you’re underperforming, and you are on track to get a PIP (performance improvement plan).
This topic doesn’t feel the best. But it’s just as critical as those more fun topics. Perhaps more so.
Because if you sit with any random experienced employee, they’d love to share their career growth advice. It’s easy to ask growth questions because everyone’s happy to share and talk.
But it can be awkward (at best) to ask questions about how to handle bad performance feedback. It’s rare when someone wants to share that they’ve received poor feedback, and even more rare that they could find someone willing to share their advice on how to handle it.
I’m usually optimistic in my articles. I like to talk about accelerating your promotion path, or how to grow to the next level.
This is different. It’s entirely possible that your management team has taken promotion off the table. You might be on a path to be fired if things don’t change.
This article is all about pragmatic advice. I won’t be telling you, “Oh, you can totally recover from this!” because it’s entirely possible that you can’t. And I want to be as honest as possible with you.
The goal of this article is to help you react as best you can to a potentially bad situation. Or at least an uncomfortable one.
What type of feedback am I referring to?
There are many ways to refer to this type of feedback. But the overall idea is that it’s about you not doing well. This might be specific feedback on a task or behavior. “That email was pretty bad. You should be able to write your emails more clearly.” Or it could be a generalized bit of feedback. “You keep doing your work too slowly.”
It’s feedback about how you didn’t meet their expectations for your performance.
This is different from positive or negative coaching feedback.
Let’s say I said the following to you (negative coaching feedback).
"Hey, I think this doc needs more data. It's light on facts. Could you look up relevant metrics to back up your conclusions?"
That didn’t sound bad, right? I hope you wouldn’t cringe hearing this suggestion. Because if you’re working with others, it’d be great if you receive these regularly. They’re a great way to grow.
I, as your manager, made a judgment call that the document you wrote needs to be changed. I didn’t make a performance statement. I didn’t say that you disappointed me, or that I expected more. You will hopefully learn from this coaching recommendation, and improve your documents in the future.
Imagine instead that I said this.
"Hey, this doc is missing data. You've made conclusions without data to back it up. All the documents from you that I've read recently have had the same issue. This is a concern, because I feel the need to review your documents before we present them. For someone of your level, I need to be able to trust the quality of your documents. In your next one-on-one, we will discuss this more. For now, please update the document."
You probably recognize that this is more painful. Ouch!
That is a relatively clear statement that you’ve done poorly on a task. My feedback was related to your performance, in comparison to my expectations for your position. That’s a clear example of negative performance feedback.
At this point, it’s not just about coaching you, it’s also about ensuring you know that we expect more from you. Expecting more from you generally means (if you’re not aware) that you need to eventually improve things or your job will be at risk.
Listen carefully.
See how clear those two examples were? I think they were textbook examples of giving coaching vs. performance feedback. I carefully thought through realistic (but clear) ways of phrasing each. But we have a big problem on our hands.
Many (most?) managers are bad at giving negative performance feedback.
I’m not saying they’re bad people, or there is some conspiracy to not give you feedback. I just mean that many humans are bad at giving other humans feedback to their face.
If the management job was talking about you behind your back, they’d do fine. But that’s not the job.
Why are they bad at giving this type of feedback? A few major reasons.
They're afraid of a negative emotional reaction from you.
Most of us feel empathy for other humans. This means that saying words which hurt another human feels bad. You literally feel emotional pain. It’s probably the hardest part of being a good manager. Thus, the “ouch” statement above. It really is ouch for most of us. It takes time for managers to be good at pushing past these feelings to give honest feedback.They're afraid you'll disagree.
Management is tricky in ways that non-managers frequently don’t realize. When you hear about someone’s performance, you get conflicting input from multiple sources. You also often don’t directly observe instances of underperformance. And often, it’s not 100% clear that something was, in fact, done poorly because the quality of someone’s work is also a judgment call. When a manager provides feedback, they often have a nagging worry in the back of their head that this feedback is unfair or incorrect.They're afraid you'll leave.
Managers often want their team members to stick around. Perhaps you’re in a highly competitive field. Or it’s just hard to fill positions if you leave. When employees receive negative performance feedback, the result is often that people leave to find a new team (or a new company). If you're a manager and have an acceptable (but not great) employee, it can be tempting to skip or soften the feedback to keep them around. Even if they're not a great employee, someone is better than no one. This is personally safer for the manager, even if it’s a bit unfair to that specific employee. Because that employee could grow more (or improve their skills) if they received feedback.
They’re afraid that this was a temporary thing.
What if the employee already knows they need to do better? What if that was a temporary blip in performance, but they’ll do better next time? If the manager rocks the boat by providing feedback, it’s possible the employee won’t like them, or will leave the team. Either way, there’s a lot of downside for the manager, when the employee might do better next time even without feedback.
There are numerous lessons in these above bullet points, but as the employee, what does this mean for you?
It means that managers are reluctant to give any performance feedback. If they do try to give feedback, they’re almost certainly understating how poorly they think you’re performing, and how serious the feedback is.
So what do you need to do? Always listen carefully to what’s being said, and the safe thing is to assume that it’s understated.
Manager: "By the way, could you make sure you ask for a code review next time? I noticed you've promoted code without asking for them a few times lately."
Manager: "Are you almost done with that work? I think you said you were going to have it done earlier in the week?"
Both of those statements could sound fairly innocuous. But behind the scenes, it’s entirely possible that your manager told HR and their manager that they’re giving you “strong” feedback, and that they’re giving you “one more chance” before giving you a PIP. Seriously. I’ve seen it repeatedly.
How can you tell if those are casual questions, or if it’s negative performance feedback? How can you tell if they're trying to tell you that you're underperforming, rather than just some constructive advice? How can you tell if you’re on your last leg with them, or if they love having you on the team?