Honesty

Honesty and judgment are two extremely valuable traits that you need to possess as you develop your style of management. With that said, one of those needs to be tempered when giving feedback and the other needs to be ruthlessly released.

You can't have too much honesty in business. Most CEOs would love to know exactly what's going on at an operational level, how their staff feel about the senior leadership team, what their customers think of them, and so on. But how often is that level of honesty used? Many times I've seen someone in another team underperform throughout the year only to be completely destroyed by an end of year appraisal that they didn't expect to go so badly.

Fill in the following matrix with examples of managers you have worked with in the past or even who you work with now:

Very honest, not well respected	Very honest, very well respected
Not very honest, not well respected	Not very honest, very well respected

You probably noticed a link between people who are honest and who are respected. You can also conclude that as managers, they get good results. So, if a member of staff underperforms or needs to receive some feedback, for everyone's sake, take a deep breath and get on with it, however uncomfortable it may be. In my experience, a difficult conversation is a bit like a toothache; it rarely goes away on its own.

Given that this section is about the use of judgment, we'd better address that topic too. What I mean by judgment in this context is passing a verdict on someone—summing up their total and entire worth using a few all-encompassing words.

Examples of this would be words like:

• Good

• Bad

• Great

• Poor

• Excellent

• Atrocious

While the positive words here are nice to deliver and nice to hear, using any of the preceding has a fundamental drawback—how on earth do you act on them? Whether you are remarking on performance that should be repeated or changed, the preceding words are too vague for the receiver to internalize and either change or repeat.

Their use, I suspect, harks back to childhood tellings-off by parents or teachers; after all, being told that something was "atrocious" is pretty powerful. With that said, as adults in the workplace, we can provide more useful and actionable words for improvement.

Examples of judgmental feedback include:

"Your timekeeping is awful; you're a bad example to the new starters in the team."

"That last report you wrote was utter rubbish. It was boring, messy, and rambling."

"You have performed very poorly this quarter. You're an embarrassment to the department."

Examples of non-judgmental feedback include:

"You've been late on three occasions this week."

"Your figures in the previous report had two errors that would have given an inaccurate picture of the business this quarter. I was annoyed that I spotted them and you didn't."

"Despite the one-to-one time that you and I have invested this month, you didn't meet all of the objectives that we agreed. I'm disappointed with that."

You may notice that I've included some emotive words in the last two examples to explain how I'm feeling. This is not casting a judgment or putting a label on the receiver because the words are about how I'm feeling. In this way, I can be honest about performance and how I feel about it without saying things to damage someone's self-esteem.

It's a subtle difference, so here are some examples to make it explicit:

"I feel disappointed." (About my feelings)

"You are a disappointment." (Judging or labeling someone)

"I feel embarrassed by the results that we are discussing right now."(About me)

"You're embarrassing." (Giving them a label or a judgment)

Feelings are extremely powerful tools, so use them wisely and own your feeling statements; feedback, after all, is about improvement, not injury.