As a manager, delivering constructive criticism is a necessary and difficult part of the job. It can be emotionally tough to say something to someone else that you know they don’t want to hear. In addition, when talking to younger employees, you may be concerned about deflating their confidence.
Lots of people (including me) have commented on the problems with the “sh*t sandwich” strategy in which you embed a criticism in between a couple of—often half-hearted—compliments. So, what can you do that is more effective?
My colleague David Yeager provides a great basis for understanding how to deliver good constructive criticism in his new book 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People. He points out that when delivering criticism, you have to navigate a difficult line. You want your employee to feel valued and that you believe they can succeed. You also want your employee to have the tools they need to be successful.
The problem with most constructive criticism
Many types of criticism fail at one or more of these objectives:
- If you just tell someone that they tried hard and their effort was noticed, you highlight that you don’t think they are currently capable of achieving difficult things.
- If you tell them that they need to do better, you are giving them a goal without any instruction—the work equivalent of throwing someone in the deep end of the pool and hoping they will swim.
- If you do the task for the employee or give it to someone else, you leave them with the sense that you have no confidence in what they can accomplish.
A more effective strategy
Instead, Yeager suggests you want to adopt a “mentor mindset,” in which you have empathy with the difficulties someone has with a task, but at the same time you want to have high standards for them and push them to improve. There are several ways you can do this.
Rather than starting your criticism with a compliment, start by saying that you are going to dig into ways that your employee can improve their performance and that you’re giving this direct feedback because you know that with the right guidance they can improve.
Then, before launching into a long discussion of your view of what happened, ask them for their opinion. Do they think things went well? If not, what do they think was the problem? Not only does this make your employee a partner in the critique, but it starts to provide them with an internal dialogue they can have with themselves in the future so that they can begin to improve their own performance.
Emphasizing collaboration
When you do identify something that needs corrected, ask what support they need to help them get better. Let them know that everyone needs to learn new skills, and that you value a willingness to learn more than a capacity to do a particular task—because eventually everyone hits a wall where they are asked to do something that goes beyond their current abilities. Then, develop a plan to enable your employee to get the assistance and training they need.
This collaborative mentoring approach to constructive criticism demonstrates to your supervisees (particularly those early in their careers) that you care enough about their development that you are spending the time to work with them. It also communicates clearly that you have high expectations, but that you believe that they can meet those expectations in the future. This also helps you to feel better about your interactions with your direct reports, because the criticism is given in a context of being helpful, rather than in a context of tearing someone down.
Once you master a mentor mindset for criticism, you can toss the sh*t sandwich in the trash.
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