Chapter 26. The Slide
They don’t want to hear it. They don’t. It is legit good feedback. It is substantive, and it is 100% true, but they do not want to hear it.
How do you know this? You’ve provided the feedback several times. Three different variants of the critical feedback, and each time the response is one of these:
- “I know, I know. I’m working on it.”
-
They are not working on it.
- An immediate, abrupt topic change
-
What?
- Twisting the feedback and making it about you
-
This one is my favorite, and it’s impressive.
Someone whose response to feedback is one of those three is not a bad employee, not a person incapable of changing, and the situation certainly may not be an adversarial one. They just don’t want to hear it.
Not a Trick
I have a move. It’s not a guarantee, but if you’ve tried the obvious approaches, if you’ve tried straight talk, and if you’ve made no progress, I offer the Slide.
The Slide has these prerequisites:
-
You’ve tried a couple of approaches to giving the feedback. The person has heard it, but they have not acted on it.
-
You have high confidence that if they actually absorbed the feedback and acted on it, they’d attempt to change. Somewhere in the back of their head, past the denial, you know they’d get it.
-
You’ve had to learn the same lesson in your professional career.
I cannot tell you when to deploy the Slide. The opportunity will present itself when the person who needs the feedback, once again, complains or otherwise comments on the by-product ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access