Five Second Feedback

&gt; 1. Ask (“Can I give you some feedback?”) &gt; 2. State the behavior (“When you X…”)<p>Yes, please do this when giving feedback<p>&gt; 3. State the impact (“…the result is Y.”)<p>Your conversation partner might hear an immediate accusation out of this. Your statement will never be objective. Rather talk about yourself as in &quot;... this is how I perceive your behavior&quot;.<p>&gt; 4. Encourage effective future behavior (“Keep it up!” for positive feedback ...)<p>Yes, it&#x27;s great to get positively reinforced.<p>&gt; “Can you change that?” for negative feedback<p>If you do this to me after 5 seconds of conversation, I will shut off and not take any advice from you. This is bossy.<p>Tell your conversation partner what their behavior makes you feel like. Formulate a wish for the future. You&#x27;re not entitled to &quot;change&quot; people. Tell them how you would like to be treated.<p>If you want to change people, then give them positive reinforcement. If you try to &quot;change&quot; others by negative feedback, they will likely do less of everything and try not to be caught doing anything because it might be the &quot;wrong thing&quot;.<p>edit: formatting

&gt; Are you angry? If so, don’t give the feedback.<p>&gt; Are you focused on the past instead of the future? [...] If so, don’t give the feedback.<p>Years ago, after my then manager has been caught multiple times lying to the team sets up a meeting to calm us down, me in particular. He says something like the above. &quot;Let&#x27;s forget about the past and focus on the future.&quot; I lost my temper and replied without even thinking &quot;If I slap you right now can we forget about it 2 minutes later?&quot;. Was escorted by security out of the building. I was sad losing that team but it was a good career move looking back on it. The whole team resigned one by one in about 2 months.

This:<p>Manager: Can I give you some feedback? Direct: Sure, boss. Manager: When you tell my boss bad news before me, even with the best of intentions, I end up getting in a lot of trouble for not knowing before he did. Can you try to tell me first, going forward?<p>Is soooo American (or maybe more countries?). All this tells me is that the boss of the manager is a whiny micromanager and I feel like the boss of the boss needs to be informed, I mean why would you ever bring someone into trouble over bad news. Bad news are just facts. What&#x27;s this trouble anyway?? It&#x27;s such an hierarchical chain of events. If the nature of the bad news is such that the boss really does get into trouble, then it&#x27;s time for some open and honest discussion on how to do things better from now on. Nothing negative about this imo.<p>I mean the whole idea that you somehow need to discipline colleagues by giving them &quot;trouble&quot; is just ludicrous to me. Why not just assume that everyone around you is a smart individual with good intentions and that errors sometimes happen and we can bear the consequences together. Man this gets me worked up.

&#x27;How to be an asshole in five seconds.&#x27; - the OPs honest title<p>And now the constructive version:<p><pre><code> Take the time the receiving person and the topic at hand need. Thank you, for making the world a better and more humane place. </code></pre> Boom, not a robot with utility function based personality anymore.

This makes a ton of sense. For all of us, things that hold us back the most are ones we refuse to see in ourselves. Meanwhile they are obvious to other people - who assume they must be as obvious to us and thus don&#x27;t say anything.<p>What makes the quick and frequent feedback valuable is that it&#x27;s easy and undramatic to give but can form patterns of irrefutable evidence about ourselves.<p>If I hear once from one person that I did X and caused Y, I can dismiss it. If I hear something similar from lots of different in many situations - at some point I have to admit there&#x27;s something to it and investigate.<p>If that sounds weird, just think about this: if you literally stank, would you want to know? Would you want to hear it casually from 3 people in the morning so you can figure out that you had stepped into shit on the way to the office? Or would you want people to politely not say anything all day, sparing your feelings while every one of them thinks you smell like shit?

This blog post leaves a badtaste of hierarchical management regiments of the 80&#x27;s office culture. I see my manager as an enabler, not some kind of a master I need to follow orders from. I give more feedback to my manager than the other way around. They&#x27;re eager to know how things are in the weeds.

I would find getting a &quot;steady stream of rapid feedback&quot; like this overwhelming, no matter how small the feedback is. Not all communication is criticism and I am really not sure that feedback needs to be given this often. Perhaps it&#x27;s just me though.

Feedbacks should be given in best interest of team not in best interest of you. Period.

&gt; When you tell my boss bad news before me, even with the best of intentions, I end up getting in a lot of trouble for not knowing before he did. Can you try to tell me first, going forward?<p>I understand that this is a contrived example for a book, but I wish they would have taken time to contrive a healthier example. As a manager, I can&#x27;t imagine ever admonishing someone for not knowing something before I did, and at minimum I would explore what&#x27;s going on.<p>While this might sound nit-picky, a book read by millions will in some small way create and enforce norms for managers, and do we really want to enforce that in this situation the feedback is for the low-level employee and not the senior manager?

Trying to distill a conversation that could have far reaching ramifications into a &#x27;5 second framework&#x27; is incredibly cold, and lacking any kind of empathy and awareness of the people on your team.<p>I feel like I just read a training data set for an AI manager.

This brief excerpt really does not do the Manager Tools&#x27; feedback model justice. All of the background has been stripped from it in order to fit in a pithy blog post and without that context it <i>does</i> sound jarring or shallow.<p>Over the past 3.5 years I&#x27;ve used the Manager Tools &quot;management trinity&quot; (including their feedback model) with my directs and found it works extremely well. If you&#x27;ve got a professional relationship with a direct and have briefed them on changes before enacting them, it doesn&#x27;t come as a surprise and it&#x27;s not seen&#x2F;received as a &quot;drive by.&quot;<p>I encourage folks to listen to a few of the episodes on feedback before judging it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.manager-tools.com&#x2F;2005&#x2F;07&#x2F;giving-effective-feedback" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.manager-tools.com&#x2F;2005&#x2F;07&#x2F;giving-effective-feedb...</a><p>In addition to Managers Tools they have a second podcast, Career Tools, which is geared towards any working professional. I recommend that one as well.

I used to work for a Japanese company, and a big part of the corporate culture was “Don’t complain, unless you also have a solution.”<p>This was basically a way to shut people up, and prevent feedback.<p>It also resulted in <i>really</i> unsatisfactory, badly-thought-out “solutions.”<p><i>&quot;There&#x27;s always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong.&quot;<p>&quot;The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.&quot;</i><p>—H. L. Mencken

I guess this can be extended to bein exponential backoff, where you increase time of interactions based on response.<p>5sec is too small window for someone to absorb, unless the feedback is something the receiver is aware of already.

Warning: don’t do this with your superiors.

whats the point asking for permission to give feedback? there is no denial for that request without looking looney.

tldr; be assertive.