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The management staff in my department decided we should solicit feedback via anonymous surveymonkeys this year. My team gave very negative feedback on me such as: interferes with discussions, is very argumentative, sometimes people don't want to come to work because of tension on the team, plays favorites and fear of retaliation. My manager used this feedback against me on my review. Needless to say I was shocked and devastated, as I did not recieve any feedback of this kind from my manager or my team members throughout the year. I also felt that the feedback was based on isolated incidents throughout the year and that my overall performance as a manager (helping people with their work, getting them the training they need, pushing for them to get good reviews, promoting them) was completely overlooked. I now feel like I can't trust my team members or my manager. I'm om pins and needles a work all day worrying that I might jump into a discussion uninvited or appear to be argumentative and playing favorites. I've been having one-on-ones with me team and they now seem happy but I am miserable. My manager doesn't seem to care, he only listens to the feedback from my team. If they told him I tortured a small animal he would believe it and use it against me. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.
Firstly, are you doing O3's
Firstly, are you doing O3's with your team?
Negative feedback from team
Hi Tim,
What are O3's? I'm doing bi-weekly one-on-ones with each team member. Are O3's something different?
Best regards,
karen
This is an opportunity
I think there's a podcast that can help you with this, but I don't recall exactly which one. Perhaps it's Handling 360 Degree Review Input. I'm sure there are other podcasts and examples about taking criticism and negative feedback, too.
First, own and admit the survey results in front of your team. Your team was involved in the survey, so they know how they responded (at least individually). You don't want to give them any impression that you are sweeping the survey results under the rug. By discussing these results at a staff meeting, you can show them that you want to improve how you deal with them. Encourage them to provide examples so you can identify the behaviors they have problems with. (Have them deliver those examples in your one-on-ones instead of turning your staff meeting into a pile-on-the-boss session.) Make clear to them than you want to identify the problems and improve your performance -- and make clear that pointing out your behaviors will not be used against them in any sort of review or work assignment decisions.
How many people are on your team? You may want to look into moving your one-on-ones to a weekly schedule and work on open communication with each of your team members -- if you are doing things they don't like, you want them to let you know early, rather than bottling it all up and letting it out in a survey that makes you look bad to them, to yourself, and to your boss.
This is an opportunity for you to build a new openness and trust between yourself and your team. You don't want to be seen as argumentative, vengeful, interfering, biased, etc., and you can work with your team on these perceptions to improve the team's environment. You'll be uncomfortable during this process (I don't think anyone's truly comfortable receiving any kind of negative feedback), but you can lay groundwork here that will pay off for years to come. Focus on behavior instead of characterization and see this as a chance to learn how to do better.
Have you done the DISC assessment? Some of these complaints (interfering and argumentative, for example) may be signs of mismatched communication styles. Re-examine your team and see what you can figure out about their styles and how you can adjust to work better with them.
Taking this approach can help defuse the tension and "fear of retaliation" your team has. Part of your job is to help them do great work, and you can enlist them to help you see where and how you are dropping the ball in their eyes.
flexiblefine
Houston, Texas, USA
DISC: 1476
O3s
O3s are weekly One-On-One (hence O3, OOO) between you and your directs. There are a number of related podcasts on MT about O3s. They form part of the management Trinity of O3s, Feedback, Coaching and Delegation.
O3s have a number of purposes but a big one is to help build trust and facilitate communication between the manager and the managed. They may help with your issue of negative feedback from your team by building trust with them, helping you to cummunicate and providing a forum for them to discuss how things are going at work for them and therefore air any issues they have. The better the communication between yourself and your directs and the more trust there is between you the less likely you are to cause problems for each other and the easier it will be to deal with any issues that arise.
Your post does raise one of the issues I have with annual reviews and how they tend to be done. You do something that, unintentionally, causes a problem but don't get to hear anything about it until too late to do anything about it by which time a minor problem that could be solved with a small change in behaviour or an explanation becomes a major PROBLEM that needs some serious work to resolve. In the casts around feedback Mark and Mike often talk about how feedback is about timely small course corrections not about major course corrections.
If you haven't already I would recommend listening to the first cast about O3s (two parter dated 07/03/2005 at the bottom of the above linked page) and look at rolling them out to your team, there's a 4 part cast (covers the full Trinity) for that:
Build your relationships with your team, build trust.
In the short term all I can really think to suggest is spend a little time reflecting on your behaviour and look at how it could have lead to that feedback and look at if you have already changed that behaviour or if you need to change it now. You say that you feel that your performance has been good overall through out the year and this feedback is based on a few isolated incidents. As human beings we tend to remember the exceptional, the different from normal, and we also seem to tend to remember the negative more easily than the positive. This is a problem with annual reviews when they are not backed up by regular communications and checkpoints (feedback, O3s and quarterly mini-reviews) through out the year. The reviewer may only remember the bad things that happened and forget most of the good. It doesn't help that most performance management systems seem to be oriented to detecting and punishing errors rather than highlighting and rewarding successes.
Stephen
--
Skype: stephenbooth_uk | DiSC: 6137
"Start with the customer and work backwards, not with the tools and work forwards" - James Womack
Upward and Onward
Excellent feedback and advice from flexiblefine and stephenbooth_uk. Thank you so much for taking the time to help me. I am going to change my bi-weekly one-on-ones to weekly (funny, my manager suggested I should scale back). I will also do the DISC assessment and listen to all the podcasts on the manager tools trinity.
Focus on the future
Focus on the future not on the past. It doesnt really matter what generated the feedback. Negative feedback is hard to take. I find that the best way to take it is actually to acknowledge and to accept it. It definetely seems like it is a comunication issue, you say One think people perceived another. Take a look at the book. Crucial conversations. If your people seem happier now with the o3 it seems like they just needed more attention. Think whether you were not focusing tôo much on the work and not enough on the people. Finally dont be tôo hard on yourself this is a good thing. There is also a good material "when managers should shut up", Google it and you will find it. NeXT time you have a comment to make to your team think whether it will really improve the work substantially. Sometimes we have comments that improve the idea only 5% but take the motivation out by 50%, these comments we should keep to ourselves.