Why Do I Have To Wait To Give Feedback? - Part 1

0:00Welcome to Manager Tools. This is Mike. And I'm Mark. Today's cast, Why Do I Have to Wait to Give Feedback? Part 1 of 2. As always, our content has been crafted by humans and we are certified by Proudly Human. The questions this cast answers are, why do I have to wait to give feedback? Why can't I start giving feedback right away? I like the model. And what are the benefits of waiting to give feedback. Well, if you want answers to these questions and more, keep listening. Here we go. When every manager in your organization manages differently, performance becomes unpredictable because consistent results require consistent behaviors.

0:47Manager Tools delivers the effective manager conference to your entire leadership team, onsite or virtually, giving everyone the same tools, the same language, and the same behavioral system. So performance improvement is measurable and sustainable. Guaranteed results. For more information, email Maggie at customerservice at manager-tools.com. Well, this has got to be one of the most frequently asked questions we get about feedback, right? Yes. And I was shocked that we didn't have a podcast specifically for it when I went looking. And folks, it's so important that I came back to the Man of Tools podcast just so we could record this particular cast.

1:32It's that important. Yes. Folks, I'll tell you the real story. The real story is that it is September of 2026, and we are incredibly busy. And next week, we're at the M Conference, and there's still slots if you want to sign up in Los Angeles. We highly recommend it. It's our favorite event of our year. And Sarah is traveling this week, presenting in Atlanta. And then next week, we're all in Los Angeles for the M conference. And just because of timing and my schedule and Sarah's schedule, we couldn't record this. And she actually, Mike, I don't know if you know this, She was going to ship her microphone to LA to allow us to record a podcast.

2:22For those of you who don't know it, at the M Conference, every year since starting last year, it was such a big hit, we're going to continue doing it. Mike and I get on stage and record a podcast live. I'm thrilled that people like that idea. I find it uninteresting, but every time we've done it, we did it once in Silicon Valley, we did it at the M Conference. People just absolutely loved it. So I'm right in that cast now. And Sarah was shipping her recording equipment so that we could record it using her recording equipment. And then she sent me an urgent text message day before yesterday and said, take my box of stuff that was going to LA off of the front porch because you and I have to record manager tools this weekend when I get home.

3:11And I said, okay, fine. and I thought, okay. And then she said, well, we'll have to check luggage to do the recording. I don't think that's true, but regardless, that's what she was planning because now that we weren't shipping her recording equipment, we would have to take it with us to LA. And I said, well, why don't Mike and I record it? And she said, oh my gosh, it's been so long. I completely forgot that that was a possibility. Yes, please go right ahead and put that box with my stuff back on the front porch. I'm like, okay. You're kind. She probably said, Mike who? Yeah. So yeah, you're right, Mike.

3:54Sorry for the segue, guys. But you're right that we get this question a lot. And we're going to explain why we get it a lot and what the concern is and so on. But the fact is, it's really dangerous not to wait. and we have data that says it works better to wait. And so we're going to tell you what our data say. Now, look, if you're new to us and you don't know, before Manager Tools ever began, our predecessor company, Horstman & Company, my management consulting firm, and Mike as an executive at MCI, the telecommunication company, was one of my clients. And this was part of the Manager Tools origin story where you and I continued our conversation, lasting over 30 years about we should do something together because the work we did for you was fairly successful.

4:48And what we did at Horstman and Company was, as we'll get into, we taught what we call now the Mandator Tools Trinity. We didn't call it the Mandator Tools Trinity. We didn't call it the Trinity, one-on-one's feedback, coaching, and delegation. And when we first started teaching, we did not teach managers to wait to give feedback and it was a disaster yeah and i find the whole thing fascinating you're to get you're going to get into the why i'm i'm sure well i am sure because i have the show notes and if you're a licensee you have the show notes too and you know but i find it very fascinating because this turns out to to happen all over human life which is you have two good things, one-on-ones and feedback, and you do them at the same time, and you get bad results, right?

5:44Yes. It's very fascinating to me. Yeah. Well, it's not like cookies and milk. It's not like Oreos and milk. Yeah, no, no. It's not like scotch and cigars. that's more like it's not oranges and peanut butter oh separately they're awesome together not so much so anyways okay so this is the uh oranges and peanut butter cast that's what i'm gonna refer to it from now on yeah so i've got three points in the outline first we're gonna tell you what to do we're gonna give you a little bit of history then we're gonna tell you what to do so that those of you who are IDs and can't wait to hear the whole story, you can bail after our first item.

6:28Here's what to do. Second, you and your directs can only learn one thing at a time. That's the point you were making. And feedback without trust is not trusted. That's what our data show. Okay, so let's get into it. Here's what to do. First, we want to explain something because I think it caused all kinds of consternation. And probably 30 % of the time people ask, why do I have to wait? I don't want to wait. I can't wait. Oh, they don't. Oh, they can't wait. They have to. Yeah, they can't. They can't. They can't. I explain to them what we mean. And they're like, oh, oh, okay. That solves my problem.

7:08So I want to explain what we mean. And particularly for those of you who might be new to our guidance, our present guidance says, you conduct one-on-ones for 12 weeks before you start using our feedback model. It's pretty straightforward. If you're a longtime listener, you've heard that a thousand times. Okay. It's part of the Trinity rollout model. And we tested that at Horstman and Company years ago. And, uh, it is linked to our podcast about how to roll out the Trinity is linked to in this cast along with our cast about one-on-ones and feedback, so on. So, if you're a licensee, you can read this cast, and also in this cast, there are links to the other cast, and since you're going to be reading them online, most likely, or, you know, if you've asked them to be emailed to you, you can just open the email, click the link, and go to any of the podcasts that we reference in this guidance, okay?

8:06So we recommend you wait 12 weeks. Only then do we recommend you start giving performance communications in the form of the manager tools feedback model. The problem that this created is that if you're listening to our guidance in our manager tools basics podcast, or you've come to one of our public conferences or even a client conference at your company, you'll learn all four parts of the manager tools, Trinity one-on-ones feedback, coaching, and delegation. Sorry, that's slightly incorrect. We've taken coaching out of the client day. So if you're getting this, getting our guidance from your company, when we come and visit you on site, we only do one-on-ones feedback and delegation.

8:50Okay. If you're like most managers, you've never been exposed to these basic principles and behaviors that effective managers engage in, even though they may not use our model at all. What happens then is you learn these new tools. By the way, Mike named the company. It's why we call it manager tools. And they're wonderful. You think they're wonderful. Most people when they're listening go, I think this will work. I like this. And I would argue, Mike, that they don't really know how well they'll work, but they're just super glad to have a repeatable framework to engage in around the major parts of their job, just something.

9:33And then, because they're wonderful, to your point, Mike, people who listen, people who come to our conferences, they want to apply them all at once. And the problem with this approach, applying them all at once, is that it doesn't work. We know this. We tried it. We tried it 35 years ago, and it didn't work. And the advent of email and the advent of text messaging and social media and iPhones and Android phones does not make it more likely that this will work. It won't work. And please, if you're in Silicon Valley and you think you're new and you're different and we're like other human organizations, you are just like every other human organization and this won't work for you either.

10:26Yeah. Try go building a house and building the foundation and the top floor at the same time. It's going to be a disaster. Yeah. Folks, we know we've tried it. We saw it happen. Managers were pissed at us. And we'll explain about what we know about that in a minute. But again, before we get to the rationale for giving feedback, let's cover what we recommend you do actually do regarding giving feedback. And the answer is really simple. And actually, if you're listening carefully, although most people do tell us in our conferences, it's information overload. If you're listening carefully, we always say this when we're presenting rolling out the Trinity.

11:09Once you start doing one-on-ones, even though you know our feedback model, because you've learned it from us, continue doing whatever you have been doing regarding performance communication. Which for a lot of managers, it's really easy because they're not doing anything. Okay. Yeah, exactly. Well, we'll get to that. You're stealing my thunder there, partner, but you're right. Now, look, that might sound like a contradiction because we're telling you on one hand not to give feedback and on the other hand, to keep doing what you're doing. But it really isn't a contradiction. Let's put it differently.

11:45When we tell you to wait to quote-unquote give feedback until after you've done 12 weeks of one-on-ones, what we mean is do not attempt to use the manager tools feedback model until that 12 weeks is up. We do not mean that you should stop giving whatever performance communications, even if you called them feedback, that you have already been using. That's the mistake that I think people make. But again, even if they don't make that mistake, they're still so enamored of the feedback model that you can give positive and negative feedback in 10 seconds. And that all feedback is about the future. And since you're only encouraging in the future, positive behavior, all feedback, negative or positive is by definition delivered in a positive tone with a positive belief that your direct will do it positively in the future.

12:39If it's positive of feedback, you want them to do it again. And they're going to feel praised and appreciated, and they'll likely do it again. You can lock in the win. And if they're doing it wrong, you're going to give them encouragement to do it differently and hopefully better next time. That's all it is. There's only one model for feedback. So, while you're rolling out one-on-ones for the first 12 weeks, do whatever you've always done. If you have not given much praise or criticism, keep not giving praise or criticism. Even if you think we've convinced you that feedback is great, and if your boss would give you feedback this way, you would absolutely love it.

13:22And many of our people do. They'd say, oh my gosh, my boss gave me feedback this way. You got to teach me this model. I said, just listen to him or her do it. There's nothing fancy about it. It's four steps, it takes 10 seconds, okay? If you have been giving a little bit of positive or negative feedback, keep giving a little bit. Keep doing what you're doing, even if your positive and negative feedback are very different. Even if your negative feedback is a little rough around the edges because you think putting a little fear into the minds of your directs will motivate them in the future. Folks, it doesn't work.

14:00Or if it in fact changes their behavior, it will be under duress. More importantly, you'll destroy any trust you have with the direct and trust is the ultimate underlying thing we want to get as managers. Yeah. That's the foundation I alluded to, right? The trust. Got to have that first. Yeah. So literally we're telling you, if you start doing one-on-ones and you know about our feedback model and you want to implement the feedback model before 12 weeks of one-on-ones, Don't do it. Do what you've been doing before. Even if you're one of those managers that gets mean-spirited when he or she gives negative feedback, I don't care.

14:34And as Dark Mark would say, 12 more weeks of you not doing a good job talking about performance isn't that big of a deal. Okay? You can suck for 12 more weeks. It's not a problem. Because if you try to do both, you're going to suck at both of them and destroy all the trust and have to start over later and you won't like it. And it'll be harder. Yeah, once you've messed this up, it's really hard to get back. Absolutely, it'll be hard. It doesn't matter whether you think your way of talking about performance is ineffective. I've already told you, you're probably being ineffective, particularly if you're being negative-toned when you give negative feedback.

15:10And take it, by the way, from two guys who know how to give negative-toned negative feedback. We were in the Army, for heaven's sakes. Really good at that. Right? Mike had a career long before. I'm sure he wasn't an angel when he gave negative feedback. You know, I've never asked you about that on air, dude. Was I an angel? Of course. No, no, no, no, no, no. I know you weren't an angel, but what would you say to people and how would you say it before I started teaching you one-on-ones and feedback? In the Army? I don't think I can really share that here. This is a family. You two people out. Oh, yeah.

15:47Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not all the time, but if I, yeah, 500%, I, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I do that. Yeah. I try not to do that anymore. I've gotten, and I've gotten more effective as a result of that. Thank you. Well, actually, one of Mike's lessons about giving feedback is either its own cast or it takes up a significant portion of one of our casts about giving negative feedback where Mike shared, if he can't chuckle when he gives feedback. negative feedback, he doesn't give it. And the reason for that is if he can chuckle, then he'll be in the right tone, the frame of mind and tone of voice to deliver negative feedback with an encouraging tone.

16:32He's monitoring his own mental state. And that's something that's become a lot more popular in the last five years, socially and professionally. He's keeping track of his own mental state and realizes, I need to, I really do need to tell this person I want them to do it differently next time, but I'm not of the right mind to do it. I learned that lesson from him. Yeah. Awareness of one's issues are a good thing. Yeah. Look, again, it doesn't matter whether you think your way of talking about performance is ineffective, okay? If you've done it poorly, whatever. Keep doing it. It's not a problem, okay?

17:10We'll focus on the next thing the next time, once we're done with one-on-ones. Most managers, frankly, aren't effective giving negative performance communications, mainly because no one ever explained what the purpose of the feedback was. Look, guys, if you're struggling with this, you're normal. Those faces you see around the room that everyone seems placid and calm and good to go, they feel this, so does yours, by the way, to them. They feel the same way you do. They don't know what they're doing. Nobody taught them. I've said this before on air, and I'll say it again. I was at USA training all of their managers, thousands of managers.

17:47And there was a young guy that I had taken interest in. He was a really good guy. He worked in the call center, and he wanted to become a manager, and I coached him a little bit, and I knew his boss, and I helped his boss get him ready, and he got promoted. And when he got promoted, his boss said, hey, here's your stuff. And he handed him about a foot high pile of personnel folders on his directs and handed them to the guy. And he pointed to the corner of the room and said, your team sits over there. He was never given anything about management. And he was not in the management training I was doing because he was a brand new manager.

18:32They hadn't figured out yet that you have to train people before you give them the job. And that was okay. We did that afterwards. So he said to me, I don't know what to do. I said, yeah, it's okay. Well, why is that good? I mean, they taught me how to be a call center rep. I mean, I took calls and we went to training all the time about how to handle different products and how to handle different objections, overcoming objections and so on and high levels of service and say please and thank you and having the right tone of voice. I said, yeah, that's right. Yeah. He said, but I'm not getting any training now.

19:07I said, yeah. Welcome to management. Yeah. Yeah. I've said this before. I'll keep saying it probably once every few months at Manager Tools and Executive Tools. I am sitting at my desk at home. Mike is sitting at his desk at home. We're recording. We're on a Zoom call. We've been doing this for 20 years. and there is an original of a Wall Street Journal cartoon that I love that I had the artist send me and it's a picture of a man behind a desk with some bookshelves behind him and a woman sitting across from him, clearly a professional setting and he is saying to her, and this is the only cartoon I have around my desk, It sits right below a picture of Winston Churchill to give you an idea of how important it is.

19:58At this point in your career, your only possible promotion is to management, where you will stop doing the work you love and use a skill that you don't have and we don't teach. That literally sums up in a nutshell. This cartoonist just nailed it in one picture and what, 50 words maybe? And this guy, I said, dude, just call me tonight and I'll walk you through it. And the first night I walked him through one-on-ones in about 45 minutes on the phone. And he says, really, this will work? I said, yeah, it'll work. And it's what I'm training other managers at USA on. And he called you a month later and said, you won't believe it.

20:44I did what you said and it worked. And it worked. Yeah. And then, by the way, and then we did feedback. Okay. All that matters in this situation that you're in is that you don't try to do both, establish one-on-ones as the foundation of your managerial behaviors and start using a new technique for talking about performance. And it doesn't matter whether it's our feedback model. If you came across another one, there's not another good one guys trust me there's not i'm constantly looking for them they all suck okay um it doesn't matter what model you use if you try to introduce another model when you're just now introducing one-on-ones and you try to do both you try to learn one-on-ones yourself and your direct learns one-on-ones and then you introduce feedback it will be a train wreck yeah i mean this would apply for almost any management model you want to introduce you introduce two at the same time it's probably not going to go well but feedback people's performance like their addiction to food shelter and clothing could you pick a worse one to do at the same time yeah it's really bad you're trying to build trust and then you're thinking i'm really going to rush to get to feedback to be clear be honest everybody that's what you really want to do is you want yeah that's exactly you're not aching to get to it to give positive feedback you want to tell them when they're messing up.

22:10Almost every manager I've ever talked to, and that is hundreds of thousands, I'm sure. Well, maybe it's hundreds of thousands who have listened to me and you and Sarah and Kate. And I've probably talked to a hundred thousand myself. They all think that the silver bullet of management is figuring out a clever way to give negative feedback. They don't understand that if there is a silver bullet, it's one-on-ones, and you have to build trust. Imagine taking two groups of managers and teaching one how to give negative feedback without building trust, and the other one say, just go build trust. The building trust group would outperform the negative feedback group almost instantaneously, and the negative feedback group would never.

22:58Yeah, it'd be an order of magnitude, and it would be long-term improvements. And that just proves how little managers know about managing. When they say feedback, they mean negative feedback. That's what they mean. Absolutely. Why would you give them something positive? They're just doing their job. Yeah. Saying that all feedback is negative is the same thing as saying there are only positive numbers in the world. There are no negative numbers. Well, no person who's been through, I don't know, eighth grade math, sixth grade math, would ever think that. There are negative numbers, right? They didn't know about them 10 centuries ago, but they know them now.

23:38So, look, to be honest, our experience and our data show that almost no managers give any kind of performance communication before they learn our techniques. That's what you were alluding to earlier, Mike. If they do, it's general praise and some form of decidedly negative and mildly abusive corrective commentary. this in fact is one of the reasons many managers most managers don't feel they're doing a good job and why most directs agree with them this is why there is a pointy-haired boss in Gilbert this is why the both tv shows the office the british version with ricky gervais and the american version with um steve carell playing michael scott this is why the punchline is always the manager.

24:31The average manager is not respected because the average manager doesn't know what he or she is doing. That's why manager tools exist. Our mission is to make every manager in the world effective. And it's not that hard. We're just doing it one at a time and there's millions and we're only reaching, well, we're reaching millions, but not the tens of millions we need to reach. And so the beauty of that statement, the average manager doesn't know what he or she is doing when it comes to performance communications is actually a benefit to you now, because that means you're not alone. Okay? So, if you're not alone with a whole bunch of lack of knowledge about this stuff, let's pay attention and let's do it right.

25:12And the rightness we're trying to get across here is you cannot introduce two changes to how you manage people at the same time. They will fail. And we're going to say it one more time before we explain the rationale, which, by the way, our rationale is my favorite part because it took me back. I had to unearth some old records to get to this. But for the record, guys, when we say don't give feedback while rolling out one-on-ones, we mean only to not try to use our manager tools feedback model during that time. We encourage you to keep giving whatever performance communications you have been doing, whether it has been effective or not for you in your mind.

25:51That's it. So you don't have to wait. That's a contradiction maybe to the thing. You don't have to wait to point out an error somebody made. You don't have to wait to point out something good that they did. You don't have to suspend all performance communications. You just have to not introduce a new one. And by the way, we always said, wait to give feedback. Well, what we meant was using our feedback model because the vast majority of managers, when they talk about it, don't say feedback. They say, well, I have to have a conversation with somebody, or I have to give him a pat on the back, or I have to correct him.

26:29Because managers don't think feedback about positive and negative, because most managers think feedback is just negative, which it's a bit like asking engineer, hey, look, I want you to build a bridge. Okay. And he builds a bridge using soil rather than concrete. He sweats the soil down, it's kind of sticking together, so it's probably good. Well, no self-respecting engineer would do that. You would use concrete for your abutments and so on, or some other material, but not just loose soil, right? That's the kind of knowledge, and nobody drives their car across a bridge thinking it was made out of loose soil.

27:13They drive across it because they know it was made out of concrete and it was designed to work and bear the loads it's intended to bear. And it's too bad. And we probably haven't helped by saying, don't give feedback. What we should have said is don't use our feedback model. And I commit to doing that better going forward. But I still think it was pretty simple to figure out. Hiring someone great isn't enough. You need to hire someone great for your specific team and role. The same candidate can thrive in one environment and struggle in another. The Effective Hiring Manager Conference teaches managers how to define what success looks like for that specific role and build behavioral interview questions that surface exactly the right evidence for that definition.

28:04Available in person or virtually. Register now at manager-tools.com forward slash E-H-M-C. All right, folks, that's it for this week. We'll finish this up next week. In the meantime, have a great one, everyone. By the way, Mike, can I just say before we go, feel like a little bit of dark Mark came back into the mix today. A little bit. I ranted a little bit I got a little heated it was kind of fun yeah it was good it was fun it was fun to revisit Defy to reintroduce that guy I got you know I started to sweat a little bit you saw me take my towel and go across my forehead I was like okay alright just don't just don't just don't let it out too much please just contain it alright dude we'll see ya see ya

29:02Thank you.