Ask HN: How to give formal feedback to my manager?
It's everyone's favorite time of the year again.
This year, the company I work for is implementing a long list of questions I have to answer about my manager. This is new to me, as my prior experience with performance reviews has been entirely downwards. I'm not sure how to approach this.
Truthfully, I don't have any complaints for my manager. When I tell them I have a problem, they usually fix it, and they do a good job of preventing it from getting to me in the first place. I hate that HR is forcing people to come up with something negative even if they don't want to.
Usually I try to be vague as RK suggests[1], but I don't think that's possible this time because they all ask for specific examples and are asking me to quantify the negative effects the manager had on the company.
[^1] https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2021/02/19/perf/
Do you have significant ownership in the company? If not, I don't see any reason for you to give frank feedback.
You can't know for sure whether the information will reach them, nor whether they will be able to infer who provided the feedback.
The best possible outcome for you if you have no ownership is...senior management is better informed on what employees think of this manager. You don't know what they'll do with this info.
The worst possible outcome for you is that the manager is able to infer it was you that provided certain feedback, and that they are upset by this feedback. This could result in you losing the job eventually (they could make your life difficult, claim you're not performing well etc. etc.)
It probably makes the most sense (assuming you're primarily concerned with remaining employed to provide for your family) to maximize the level of positivity in all of your feedback.
It's easy enough to come up with meaningless fluff:
Joe is great at unblocking me on day-to-day issues, but should spend more time developing the longer term roadmap for our product.
Joe is great at developing the roadmap for our product, but isn't always available to assist with day-to-day issues.
Joe is an expert on our current technology stack, but should research and introduce new technologies that could reduce our time to market.
Joe spends a lot of time researching new technologies and visions for our product, but isn't always able to deliver tactical fixes on a tight timeline using the technologies we have today.
Joe helps everyone on the team with day-to-day tasks and directions, but could spend more time working on career development and helping us network with other areas of the company.
I'm sure you get the theme... everyone's job is a tradeoff between many priorities, so it's easy enough to formulate unoffensive feedback about being great at one side of the tradeoff, but should do more of the other side.
Surely you can say your manager had nothing concerning to report, list the specific examples as "none" or "N/A" and quantify it as 0% negative impact, no?
I usually redirect it at a teammate I don’t like.
“They don’t require accountability on the part of X”
You have no problem describing your teammates like that in a formal review? I am not sure how that would go here, I haven't tried. Like I said, so far every company I've worked for either didn't do formal reviews at all or it was entirely assessed by your manager without any conversation.
A lot depends on the context.
I was/am on a team that underperforms, so they are already primed to blame someone. They have already fired people (poorly) over the failures.
So they are looking for someone to blame already.
Is the firing poor or are the people poor?
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