Sophia is brilliant, talented and incredibly nice. That last part can get her in trouble as a manager.
She wishes Nathan, a member of her team, brought more initiative and consistency to his job. But rather than criticize him, she hopes he’ll gradually get better, and she tries offering polite praise and encouragement to nudge him along.
But Nathan continues to underachieve, and other team members now resent him for not carrying his load—and resent Sophia for letting him get away with it.
Eventually, a frustrated Sophia hires a new person, whose duties include some of the things that Nathan isn’t doing well. He sees this as a grave injustice and an obstacle to getting a raise or promotion. While Sophia mulls whether to quietly reorganize Nathan’s job out of existence, he is taking his complaints to HR.
Feedback that’s delivered in an honest, ongoing fashion is essential to an organization–and to … [+]
How did poor Sophia get into this mess? Nathan might have failed in some aspects of his job, and he might have deserved an unpleasant fate, but that’s not entirely clear. What is clear is that Sophia abdicated a core aspect of leadership: The duty to provide clear feedback to team members.
Harry Kraemer, a longtime business executive and professor of management and strategy at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, says this isn’t merely a duty but an act of decency.
“Good managers know that honest feedback is a gift to their employees,” Kraemer says.
The irony is that, by being too nice to question or criticize Nathan’s work, Sophia was in fact unkind. She withheld the gift from him.
Like Nathan in this scenario, many under-performers “aren’t bad people, they’re just in the wrong place—the wrong job or the wrong company,” says, Kraemer, who is the former chairman and CEO of Baxter International Inc. and the author of two bestselling books on values-based leadership.
But how can people even begin to discern that they’re in the wrong place for them if they don’t get the data they need?
“You use open, honest, continuous and transparent feedback,” Kraemer says, “to help figure out someone’s best fit—in their particular job or in the organization.”
Feedback may even be a misnomer. “A colleague once said, ‘It should be called feed-forward,’” he says.
This approach also prevents surprises. Have you ever known someone who was suddenly fired or demoted from a position? It’s possible that they may have “deserved” it. But in a better world, they wouldn’t have been caught off guard, because they would have been receiving open, honest, continuous and transparent appraisal of their performance.
“It should never be a surprise,” Kraemer says, “and someone shouldn’t find out five years later that there was, for instance, a ‘communications issue’” on their part.
Why is it so hard for leaders to give good feedback? Kraemer says that it’s because of that most common of human traits. “We like to be liked,” he says. And so we avoid anything that resembles conflict. But he argues that this natural compulsion needs to be trumped by higher values: “If you like to be liked, the chance of being respected is extremely low. However, if you start off focusing on being respected [for your honesty and candor], you have a chance of being liked.”
The most difficult part of such difficult conversations, of course, involves the messy prospect of having to step up and fire someone. But as a result of putting his philosophy into practice, Kraemer actually avoided that scenario most of the time.
“In my years at Baxter, I rarely fired anybody,” he says. “I gave people feedback that helped us find the right place for them.”
Go back to Sophia’s struggle to call things what they were regarding Nathan’s performance. It only made a hard situation worse. She unwittingly set both careers up for failure; but with a different mindset, she could have set herself and Nathan up for success.
The manager’s mentality, according to Kraemer, should always be, “My agenda is to help you.” And that help can’t be delivered without candor and honesty. For leaders, that’s the difference between niceness and true kindness.
