Why you might not have any feedback for your report

There’s plenty of research to support the critical importance of feedback to the success of professionals, their teams and their leaders. If you’re a manager and you’re actively trying to educate yourself about how to grow and become better at this job, you probably know that the art of giving feedback is both challenging and fundamentally essential to your role.

But you might still be struggling to find any meaningful feedback for some of your reports. When you challenge yourself to give them feedback, or when they do the challenging, you find yourself telling them that they’re doing great and they should just keep at it. While reassurance that one is doing well is universally needed, it is no substitute to actionable feedback, and your reports are right not to be content.

Something is preventing you from being the boss they wish for: someone who can help them be better aware of their current limitations, and push the envelope. There could be many reasons, but I’d like to share a few of the pitfalls I’ve personally found myself in.

You’re not present enough to know what they could be doing better

Every one of us could be doing better at our jobs, or be better prepared for our next job. Your report might be a solid performer, but if they’re hungry to take their game to the next level, they need to know where they have room to grow. If you don’t know, it’s possible that you’re not there to see it, in some sense. You might literally not be around to spot a missed opportunity where they could have handled something better, but things still sort of work OK and it's never brought to your attention (more on that later).

Or, your mind might not be on it. You're so busy with the subject matter (in my case, the software development) that you don't take a step back to observe the manner in which things are done, or the occasional missed opportunity to do more, or to do better. As a manager, part of your job is to assess the work that is done, and not just its products. This requires both presence and presence-of-mind throughout the process.

You’re afraid to acknowledge what they could be doing better

We all want to be nice to each other. We strive to see the best in people and we're uncomfortable in noticing the less than ideal. The first obstacle, therefore, in sharing with others what they could be doing better, is acknowledging it to ourselves.

The second obstacle is admitting our dissatisfaction to our reports. If you want to learn more about this inhibition - and what you can do to overcome it - you might want to watch this talk by Kim Scott (and then maybe read her book, Radical Candor).

I really don't think I can add a lot more on top of Kim's invaluable insights, but I do wish to call out one important and unfortunate implication. Some people in our work places are at risk of being treated unfairly because they don't conform to the stereotype of the role: the older engineer, the lawyer of color, the LGBTQ+ enterprise salesperson. Those same people are also at most risk of not getting valuable feedback because their manager is afraid that their valid criticism might be labeled as unfair and discriminatory.

If this manager is you, my advice is two-fold. On the one hand, it is absolutely your responsibility educate yourself on the unconscious biases that pervade your social and professional environment, and how they impact your judgment. On the other hand, humbly remember that you are human and fallible, and that despite meaning well you will make mistakes, especially if you haven't had much experience working with others who are different from you. How you take responsibility for your mistakes and learn from them is more important than whether you make them in the first place, and you cannot become an ally to members of underrepresented groups on your team if you don't find the courage to engage with them honestly.

They don’t have the opportunity to fall short

It's much easier to spot incidents that could have gone better when things aren't going very well. It can be scary to give reports more responsibility than you're certain they can handle, and it's very important to balance what work we assign to an employee with their skill and confidence levels. That said, the ideal balance is such that challenges and stretches the worker to a noticeable extent. When you let people fail on occasion, or at least attain less than optimal results, you're providing a learning opportunity. In such cases, it's at least obvious that something could have been handled better, and you can work back from the end result to identify what went wrong, or what opportunity was missed.

Frequently, the report can independently identify the shortcoming, or you can guide them to the conclusion by use of probing questions, without spoon-feeding them your perspective. When the learning originates internally, it is less likely to provoke a defensive response, and more likely to be applied in future scenarios. In addition, the report will be practicing the meta skill of reflecting and learning from their own mistakes.

Keep in mind that you never have absolute knowledge of a person's capabilities and their limits, and so if you never take the risk of over-burdening them, you are bound to consistently err on the side under-challenging. Take that risk whenever you think they might be up to the challenge, as long the cost of the failure is not too high. Consider both the cost to the team or the organization, and the cost to the report's reputation and confidence.

Try to always give your reports the benefit of the doubt, and hold them to the highest reasonable expectations. Even if you aren't able to find a stretch goal to assign them, you can set the expectation that they will deliver outstandingly on a task that's well within their already demonstrated skill level. High expectations are a significant motivation factor, and assessing people against a high bar makes it easier to spot instances where they could have done an even better job.

And finally, expect people to continuously grow and develop, and to deliver beyond what they have been able to accomplish in the past.