Why Do I Have To Wait To Give Feedback? - Part 2

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 2 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 get feedback. Well, if you want answers to these questions and more, keep listening. Here we go. Manager Tools is coming to London. And if you're a professional anywhere in Europe, November 24th is your date. The Effective Manager Conference, the Effective Communicator Conference, and the Effective Senior Manager Conference are all coming to one of the world's greatest cities for three days of extraordinary world-class training.

0:56No transatlantic flights, no scheduling around US time zones, just proven tools, an international community of professionals in London. Register now at manager-tools.com forward slash London. Okay, now let's move on to your statement about our directs can only learn one thing at a time. Yeah. This is the why behind our guidance, guys. As we mentioned, when our predecessor, Horseman & Company, that's my last name, if you just know me as Mark, it was my company. When we first started creating and learning about these tools, and we created them and learned them on our own without any help from anybody else other than our clients who were using them and telling us this one works and this one doesn't, we didn't know how well they would work.

1:50We're figuring it out. It might surprise you to learn, even though we've said it in a society many, many times over the years, every component of the Manager Tools Trinity, one-on-ones, feedback, coaching, and delegation, has been changed based on new data we got from managers using it in their jobs, not in a test simulation, in their jobs, many, many times. I think we're on version 13 of the feedback model, and we're easily on more than the 15th version of one-on-ones. Guys, the first one-on-ones I ever taught, the manager went first. We thought more communication was better, and that's true.

2:33That makes no sense. A kindergartner kind of figured that wouldn't work. That's funny. Yeah, I mean, I didn't know any better. So I told this guy who was my client, I'm going to train your guys and some of them are going to do one-on-ones and some of them are not. And we're going to compare the results. And if the one-on-ones work, we'll train more of your guys on it. Well, the first one-on-ones were supposed to build trust because I knew by then that trust mattered. Partially because of my experience in the service, but also because of some I work at Procter & Gamble and elsewhere. Anyway, so we're going to train them.

3:09And we said, let's have them talk to each other. once a week. They need to get to know each other. Build trust. By the way, at this time, I did not know that the way you build trust with another person, this is not me. I didn't make this up. This is psychology one-on-one. The way you build trust with another person beyond just being trustworthy and doing what you say is talking to them about things that are important to them. So we told managers, do one-on-ones. You get the first 15 minutes because you're the manager and let your directs go second and they get the second 15 minutes. Well, that didn't work.

3:41It was a massive failure. And by the way, that's a really bad business model for me. Cause I told my clients, if the stuff I teach you doesn't work, you don't have to pay me. So there were a couple of lean years there in the early days. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Thank you for that. Well, what do you think happened in those manager tools? One horseman and company one-on-ones, the first ones when the manager went first? Yeah. The manager talked for the majority amount of the time. Oh, and then when they direct got their time, they talked more about what the manager just suggested they want to hear about.

4:14Right. Well, look, it actually was, it was not quite that. The data showed that the managers took on average 28 minutes of the 30. And then they all looked up and in shock. And they said, I'm sorry, I've been talking too much. Do you have anything for me? Well, what do we think every intelligent direct would say about a meeting that was supposed to be 15-15 that the manager talked for 28 minutes? The direct would say, no, I'm good. And do we think any trust was built? Oh, hell no. Definitely, definitely not. So again, guys, one-on-ones, feedback, coaching, and delegation have all been works in progress based on things we saw in the field.

4:52Okay. But when one-on-one started working for our corporate clients, now remember, this is only corporate clients because there was no way back then for individual managers to learn about them because we didn't have public conferences yet. We didn't have podcasts back then. So once we started doing one-on-ones, teaching one-on-ones and they started working, they came to us and said, hey, do you have more guidance? And it really sounded like, hey, this stuff, meaning one-on-ones really works. Have you got more stuff? And what's funny about that is they didn't have any framework. They didn't have any idea of what management was.

5:32They just wanted more, quote, stuff, unquote. They didn't know. Now, the answer at the time was, yeah, we did, but only in raw form. okay? We didn't have a fully-fledged feedback model. I knew a little bit about coaching, and I had roughed out a model, but I didn't want to plant my flag on it until we tested it. But in order to test it, we had to teach it to people who were supposedly going to pay us money for it. But our clients were hungry, and we tried to share as much as soon as we could, So we shared what we had. And as I've said now three times, I'm going to regret this. I know people are going to say, yeah, I heard about your first thing as a manager consultant, Mark.

6:21It was a disaster. Yeah, it was. It was a disaster. We only learned after we started teaching more than one thing at a time that the vast majority of managers and directs can only learn or incorporate one new managerial skill at a time. As I say in the field often, if you're learning a new thing and doing it with your directs, your directs are learning it too. So there's a lot of learning going on. And therefore, the more learning that's going on, the slower things are going to be. When we taught one-on-ones and feedback, these were the first two of the Trinity, when we taught them together, improvements in trust and results and retention basically went away.

7:05it was as if they didn't do one-on-ones or didn't give feedback we got no improvement none because you give with one hand and you take away with the others yes i mean i'm glad see that's that's my been my strategy success wait for you to make all the mistakes learn improve it and then come to my organization teach what i don't know 600 people whatever it was this stuff and it worked perfectly. It was awesome. It was the best thing I probably ever did there, hiring you to do this stuff. So I just want to send my thanks to all your former clients. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. It's great. I think there's a song about this to all the men or women you've loved before, right?

7:50Yeah, there you go. There you go. That's my song. If I could sing. I think Taylor Swift redid it, but I think Julio Iglesias did it first, if I'm not mistaken. But here's the thing. My clients back then were still happy with us. They loved it. They loved one-on-ones. And once we figured it out, they loved feedback too. They were like, this is the best thing ever. In fact, speaking of best thing ever, I played in a charity golf tournament yesterday, which is rare for me in the middle of the week. I played in the charity golf tournament with my friend, Matt Wright of Monterey Jet Center and Del Monte Aviation.

8:26Good guy. Yeah, Matt's a good guy. And we were talking to a friend of his who was in our foursome, actually. We only had a threesome, which is bad in a scramble. And the other guy, Matthew, who went by Matty, so I was playing golf with two Matts. Matty said, what do you do? And so on. So I was telling him about what I do. I've heard of Mark Mark before, but not Matt. Yeah, Mark Mark. That's right. So Matt Wright says to him, oh my God, you've got to listen to this guy's stuff. Totally transformative. Matt is a big fan of our podcast. That's how we became friends here on the Monterey Peninsula.

9:10And we play golf pretty regularly, maybe once a month. And the guy, Matty, said, really, is it that good? And Matt Wright goes, I'm not kidding you. get the book, listen to the podcast, do whatever you have to do. It will transform your life as a boss. He said, don't you have like six or 10 directs? And Matt, he says, yeah. He says, you've got to do this. And I didn't pay him to say it. Matt and I had known each other for years. He's not, he's just a gigantic fan and he didn't know what he was doing. And he was a manager for 20 years before we ever learned our stuff. So our clients are happy. Managers who do our stuff are happy.

9:50I mean, we've been, we've become friends with hundreds of Manager Tools listeners over the last 21 years, particularly that group that came, the groups that came to the first few podcasts, first few public conferences. I'm thinking of Rich Rue. Right. Steve Holden. Steve Holden, all those guys, just incredible. Okay. So all that value, when you do one-on-ones and feedback together and try to do them at the same time, both manager and directs learning them, all the value went away. Based on numerical analysis, when we interviewed thousands of managers and their directs about what was happening, their comments took two forms.

10:33First, they said, we can't learn and do both of these things at the same time. They found that changing two things about managerial behaviors and directs behaviors, because they were involved in them, was just too much. In other words, they found that it was not only hard on them, it was hard on their direction. Lots of people liked learning two things at once. They didn't like what happened when they tried to apply two things at once. They were happy to learn all kinds of stuff all at once. The second thing they said was perhaps even more worrisome to me. It came primarily from the directs. These one-on-ones are clearly just cover to allow my boss to start giving more negative feedback.

11:22See, there you go. That's the worst thing possible. And by the way, they're saying this right in the midst of you doing one-on-ones to build trust. So I can see why this went poorly based upon that feedback. Yeah. In other words, the value of one-on-ones, what we started them out to do, trust building, was negated by superimposing feedback on top of them. Now, for the record, and I alluded to this earlier, we did go back to all the clients that were affected, and we retaught at no charge the models one at a time. And then we started to learn. We can teach them two at a time at the same day or in the same morning, for instance.

12:06We do mornings where we do one-on-ones and feedback together rather than having a full day. And then we said, but don't you dare start using the feedback model until we tell you to. And in this case, what we would do is we would be following managers. I would have a team of people. They didn't call themselves data scientists back then, but that's what they were. and we would interview managers and their directs and we would specifically ask directs, has your boss given you feedback? And we would validate with the boss, have you given feedback? And a couple of times the managers wanted, they gave feedback and they told the directs, don't say anything.

12:42And that wasn't good, but we sniffed them out sooner or later. So during this time was when we measured how long a manager had to wait before one-on-ones were learned enough and enough trust had been built to allow feedback to be introduced. We started at six weeks. That did not work. We went to 10 weeks. That didn't work. But we started getting traction at about 12 weeks, three months. That's where we got the 12-week timeline. Yeah. This advantage of measuring stuff. Yeah. You actually find out what's going on. Exactly. And folks, if you pay us enough money, you can get the original D-Base 2 database that has all this data.

13:30Oh, yeah. You got to be RAH to get that joke. There's nobody listening who could afford to buy our archive, to buy all the data. Now, you may have noticed something interesting in something I said a couple of minutes ago. in the comments from directs that one-on-ones were just cover to allow their bosses to give negative feedback. When managers were taught the two skills together with no pacing of the rollout, just do both one-on-ones and feedback, they immediately started giving negative feedback because that's how they defined feedback. That is why our rollout timeline starts feedback with only positive feedback before adding in negative feedback after eight more weeks.

14:21Why do we come up with eight weeks? Yes. We tried four weeks and that didn't work. We tried six weeks, it didn't work. Finally, when we went to eight weeks of one-on-ones for 12 weeks, eight weeks of positive feedback with the positive feedback model, and then start adding in negative feedback. And I'll tell you something else that a friend of mine shared with me, not Matt Wright, but somebody else, shared with me recently. He said, Mark, you know, I've never heard you say this in a podcast, but you should because it's true. If you will wait to give feedback after 12 weeks of one-on-ones and for negative feedback, eight more weeks of positive feedback, it will go so well.

15:00You will give so much feedback for the rest of your managerial career in a way that is easy to remember, quick to deliver, and appreciated by your directs. You will give so much feedback. You will more than make up for any lack of feedback you had in your career before that. Yeah. I was like, he's totally right. He's totally right. The problem is that 80 % of the people listening right now think that going eight weeks with giving nothing but positive feedback is literally impossible. It cannot be done. Yeah. Well, there are tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of manager tools managers who have done it.

15:38So if you think it's impossible, you're the one with a problem. It's like that thing about if you're at a poker table and you can't figure out who the fish is, you're the fish. Yeah. I don't know where fish came from, but I assume it's the guy who loses all of his money at the end of the night. I don't gamble, but yeah, that's the... Yeah. I don't gamble. Implied by the thing. Great teams succeed through consistent management practices. With a Manager Tools license, your whole team learns the same proven approaches to leadership and execution. Discover our group licensing options to give your people the tools to achieve stronger results.

16:18Create a common management language. Email us at customerserviceatmanager-tools.com for more information. Okay, so let's go on to the next one. feedback without trust isn't true okay so you got you're gonna have to explain that because even me is like feedback without trust isn't trusted yeah well yeah look the simple fact here is that giving feedback to directs who don't trust you doesn't work so the point of that if you don't have trust with your directs they won't trust your feedback and because it's a seminal event for them positive or negative feedback because there's risk associated with particularly negative feedback and even in some ways positive feedback because now they've established a new standard they have to meet all the time.

17:10If you haven't developed some trust with them, they won't believe you and you will begin to destroy the trust you've already built with one-on-ones. The combination of your role power and all the previous bad bosses or no bosses your directs have had makes them discount your performance communications. This is true whether you use our model, your own style, or whatever pops into your crazy head at any given moment when you want to talk about performance. If you haven't built trust, they're not listening. It's like not turning on the transmitter but talking into the microphone. You can talk to the microphone all you want, but if the transmitter's not on, if the recorder's not on, nobody's hearing you.

17:53Yeah, you got to talk about the... Performance communications and this idea. I don't know where this model, I have no idea where this model came from, but the sandwich technique. Oh, this is so good. Great example of the sandwich technique. We're going to define it for you, even though we hate defining it because somebody might go, I kind of like that. That's kind of good. The sandwich technique is the devil, folks. It's literally embarrassing. It's rude. It's unethical. And it's easily untrusted by people who receive it. The sandwich technique basically recommends that when giving negative feedback, only negative, by the way, a manager should mention a good thing about the person and then mention the behavior you want changed and then end with another good thing.

18:40The good things are usually general, even generic, and make up the bread of the sandwich and the behavior you want changed is the meat of the sandwich. Think about that for a second. The sandwich technique intentionally obscures the real reason for the conversation and attempts to hide what you really want between two things that aren't really relevant to the conversation, but we're going to put them out there just to make our direct feel better. This is deceitful. Yeah, you said, like Bobby Boucher, that's the devil. Yeah, exactly. And really, all you have to know about this crappy technique is that there's no application of it for positive feedback, even though the purpose of all feedback, positive or negative, is the same.

19:29It's just like the technique now about feedback dialogue. You should have dialogue with your directs. We have an entire podcast about feedback dialogue, and feedback dialogue is only for negative feedback, meaning there are millions of people who believe that feedback is only negative. It's just, it's ludicrous. It's elementary. And you wait so long to give feedback that you have to have like a 30-minute conversation about it. Yes, exactly. Okay. Because every manager has 30 minutes to give for every time he needs to give or she needs to give negative feedback to one of his directs. Sit down and have a 30-minute conversation about the why and help them understand better, swim upstream, hopefully changing their mind in some key way.

20:14so this behavior will never happen again. Ludicrous. And if you measured that model, if the people that were recommending this measured it, they'd find out that it doesn't work. Yeah, they'd find out. Because the overhead is just too much. You know what? I bet even if they did, they'd probably only publish the positives because they're publishing such crap. But in addition, the one thing they would know they would not want to measure is trust. Because if they measured trust, they'd see it decline. And you could, you know, You can have your people believe your negative feedback, but if you do that at the expense of your trust, you're doomed.

20:50You know, like the sandwich technique, really, we talked, it's so bad. I'm sure we have another podcast where we're talking for 20 minutes about how bad it is and all the things bad that can happen. But it is so bad and so prevalent out there. I cannot tell you how many hours and hours we had to spend days and days and weeks to get our chat bot right to not mention the sandwich sandwich our chat bot only mines our stuff yeah oh yeah it's so baked into the ai models that are out there just it was so so frustrating yeah so just because there's prevalent ideas out there they're not all good the vast majority of them are not good at all.

21:37Well, none of them are good except ours. I'm sorry. All right. I'm going to use an old fashioned analogy that I used to use 30 years ago because we brought up stuff from 30 years ago here. Giving feedback without having built trust is like trying to drive a car without gasoline. It won't go anywhere. No offense to Tesla and Rivian and all the electric car companies. All right. This went on much longer than we thought, Mike, but I'm going to summarize. Yes, folks, we recommend waiting to use our feedback model until after you've rolled out one-on-ones for 12 weeks. You have to build trust first.

22:17You may continue to do whatever you're doing as it relates to feedback, positive or negative, I hope it's positive, for the 12 weeks you're doing one-on-ones. We too would like the ability to go faster, but all of our data support waiting to roll out a new tool until then just keep doing whatever you've been doing whatever you've been doing hasn't lost you your job so 12 more weeks is probably just fine well standing thanks dude thanks for having me on the podcast i appreciate the opportunity it's really yeah it's old old home week here yeah lots of fun old time like old times like old times thanks everyone that's it for this week and uh we'll see you next time and no dark mark we're putting dark mark we're putting our dark mark away yeah you can't you can't cage him you can't cage him i'm a peacock you gotta let me fly oh my god that's awesome all right thanks for having me back on manager tools it's been fun my pleasure partner all right so long everybody

23:28We'll be right back.