What to do with a gift you can't return

Photo by George Dolgikh.

Perhaps you're someone who loves this time of year. Crowded malls. Shiny paper with a lifespan shorter than the average fruit fly. Merriment and the possibility of more merriment to come. And, any time there's Christmas music playing in any store, our youngest yelling, "Was this one also written by Jews??" Simply magical.

We are not particularly festive people. But all it takes is one family member who is super into the holiday spirit and then you don't really have a choice anymore. If you point out the crass commercial bits, people call you a grinch. So best to play along and accept your fate as secret santa.

If you've been a willing or unwilling secret santa, you know how this part goes. You do your best to get something the person will like. But with a limited working knowledge of what those things might be, you fall into tropes. And if you've ever been on the receiving end of secret santa, you know what it's like to have someone hand you a package with your name on it, only to open it and find yourself reduced to a hallmark trope. A pair of slippers. A razor. A mug. Not necessarily offensive. But not particularly thoughtful either.

Not all feedback is a gift

That sad, not particularly thoughtful gift with your name on it? That's how many people experience performance review season. A few weeks ago, we talked about how bosses can make that process better. For themselves and for their teams.

But we didn't really talk about what to do if your boss hands you crappy feedback in your own review. And, to be clear, crappy as in crappy. Not crappy as in thoughtful, well-constructed, negative feedback. Crappy as in, "I'd love to see you smile more." Crappy as in, "You're not ready for that promotion but keep doing what you're doing." Crappy as in, what is this gift that I am stuck here holding and does the person who handed it to me expect me to say thank you?

The Feedback Is A Gift people would say yes. You are expected to greet this crappy feedback with curiosity and gratitude. All feedback is an opportunity to learn and improve. And if the person who's responsible for your growth and development is trying to tell you something about how it's going, your job is to show up open and receptive.

But if the sum total of prep your boss did before your review was to speed-read Thanks for the Feedback and Radical Candor? Well, you can end up with some hot garbage tied up in a bow. This is the core problem with a lot of business wisdom that sounds good on paper. Specifically sounds good on 250 pages of paper sold at an airport bookstore. The framing is getting at a real thing. But assumes a level of competence that most bosses just don't have.

Is the juice worth the squeeze?

The key difference between a secret-santa gift and end-of-year feedback is that only the secret-santa gift is guaranteed to be non-toxic. We have whole regulatory and inspection regimes devoted to making sure your Ferrero Rocher pyramid is free of poison. There is no equivalent in most workplaces.

So we can talk about how to get to the essence of some piece of feedback you've received. But first we need to spend a minute on whether that's even a good choice. There is plenty of toxic feedback out there. Full of prejudice, bigotry, and the worst kind of pattern-matching about who does, and who doesn't, deserve to have certain opportunities. Even worse, this shittiest-of-all feedback is often delivered as though it's a favour to you.

I shouldn't say this but...

Your work is great you're just a bit too loud.

You should try to fit in a little better with your colleagues.

Have you ever heard the term RBF?

Let us say, in the fullness of the holiday spirit: fuck that noise. There are essentially only two kinds of feedback bosses should be giving you about your work. Feedback about the expectations of the role and your growth within the org. And feedback about the values of the organization and how they're reflected in your work. Those two categories are generally in-bounds, and they are what we pay your boss to assess and deliver. That doesn't mean the feedback will be good — it may still be hot garbage! But feedback outside of those categories is almost certainly poison and not worth the heartache to understand.

And still. Sometimes the feedback you've gotten is about work. It is about the expectations of the role and your performance. It could maybe be the start of something really nourishing and helpful it's just a little... uncooked. This feedback can still be full of bias in a million ways, of course. Women still systematically receive less specific feedback than men, for example. But when you have a sense that there's real, valuable feedback hiding in there instead of just poison, there are things you can do about it.

Doing your boss's work for them

Every leader we've worked with can recite SBI in their sleep. Situation, Behaviour, Impact is a mnemonic framework for structuring feedback that someone can actually do something with. It's not the only framework out there, but having some system for organizing thoughts around feedback is essential. And our hunch is, if you're getting rambling, nonspecific feedback, your boss doesn't have one.

When you have a sense that unhelpful feedback is rooted in something real, you can do your boss's work for them. You can sort of reverse-engineer how the feedback should have been delivered. Is it fair that you should have to do this? Of course not. But if you want the information hiding within their feedback, it's pretty straightforward.

Most of the time, unhelpful feedback focuses only on Behaviour. It can land like someone telling you to be a different person than you are.

You're too quiet.

You're too loud.

You asked the client X, but you should have asked them Y.

You should be more like Brett.

Often when we talk to folks, they have no idea where this feedback is coming from. If you're in that spot, start by nailing down Situation. You want to get specific about where your boss has formed this impression, so you can recognize what was going on for you.

Over the last few weeks, when has this been the most obvious?

When is the most recent time you noticed this?

Is there a pattern to where you see this happen?

This can sound defensive if you hammer on it too much, but if you come from a place of genuine curiosity they will usually play along. They're responding to something. Before you decide whether you want to take the feedback or not, you need to understand what's driving it.

With some specific situations in hand, it's time to pull Impact out into the light. Well-intentioned-but-incompetent bosses often know what the impact is, but fail to spell it out. Sometimes because they feel like it's obvious. Sometimes because they haven't really given it much intentional thought. But either way, you need to know.

What's the key difference you see between my approach and Brett's and why is that important?

Help me understand why asking X is a problem, or why Y gets us to a better place?

What's the core impact you see when I don't speak up in the team meeting?

Untrained bosses are often skittish about giving feedback. They are braced for you to fight, or resist it, or yell. The energy in a lot of performance conversations is like a spring-loaded gate, ready to slam shut the moment there's pushback. When you take the feedback, and ask earnest follow-up questions to understand it better, the change in mood is palpable. It changes from a robotic and procedural delivery into a collaborative conversation about how to get better at a thing. Not always, but enough of the time that it's worth a try.

And, like, in an ideal world you wouldn't have to do any of this. Work shouldn't be some weird brain-teaser where you try to trick your boss into revealing how you're actually doing. You shouldn't have to carry the emotional load for someone with more power in the organization than you have, while also doing 40% of their job for them. We're working as hard as we can to make that better.

But in the meantime we know that many of you still live in a world of under-equipped management, vague feedback reviews, and secret santas. If the unwanted gift on your desk this morning is a magnum bottle of Drakkar Noir, we can't help you. And if it's toxic, send it straight to the trash before it stains something. But if that gift is some poorly structured feedback with something useful tucked inside, well, that might be recoverable.

- Melissa and Johnathan