motopascyyy's picture Submitted by motopascyyy on
in

Forums

Career Management

Hello All,

Our management team recently got back their results from the annual employee "pulse" survey and my boss specifically has been singled out as having really poor results. This annual survey measures employee satisfaction, and he scored poorly in work life balance, diversity and inclusion, being treated with respect and being fairly compensated/recognized for the work.

He's now asking for feedback on how he can improve and my natural instinct is to try and help, but here's what's holding me back:

  1. Boss is a High I and slightly high D, meaning he rarely lets people finish their ideas before interrupting and talking about himself.
  2. He's often dismissed employee feeback in the past and said whatever behaviour he was doing was correct and won't change
  3. Most importantly: Management Tools has been very explicit about not providing feedback to your manager (i.e: the feedback model).

For those more experienced, what have you done? Do you stay with status quo and keep your mouth shut or is his asking for feedback the exception to the rule?

Thanks

Kevin1's picture
Submitted by Kevin1 on Wednesday June 21st, 2017 11:54 pm

Hi Motopascyyy,

Yes, be wary of giving any 'help'.  There be dragons.   On the other hand you could use feel felt found and say something like.

'I can understand how you feel about not knowing what you need to do to improve. I would feel the same if I were in your shoes.  I wouldn't know where to begin when it comes to managing others but I have found that undertaking a DISC behavioural profile test helped me to better understand myself and how others perceive my actions.  If you like, I can let you know where you could do such a test for under $40' 

Of course, leave out the feel and felt if you aren't supposed to know he got a poor pulse survey result.

Does that help?

Regards

Kev

motopascyyy's picture
Submitted by motopascyyy on Thursday June 22nd, 2017 7:03 am

Thanks. He's shared the results with me, and he's often said negative things about behavioural profiles in the past, but the feel felt found approach might work so the approach you're giving makes a lot of sense. Might try encouraging him to get feedback from his peers and managers rather than hoping his directs will open up.

Thanks again

SDGabriel's picture
Submitted by SDGabriel on Friday July 7th, 2017 3:49 pm

Hi motopascyyy,

I would consider the kind of relationship you have, how much you trust him/her and if there is a risk for you when giving feedback.

I think it's great that your natural instinct is to try and help. Depending on how professional your boss is, this could backfire, though. I know that when I started out as a manager, I was very annoyed when a direct gave me feedback about something I did - I guess I was still very insecure and felt it questioned my authority.

Now I use our performance reviews twice a year to ask my directs about feedback and I am actually able to hear and appreciate it. But it took my a while (and Manager Tools) to get to that point.

When you do decide to give feedback, I would recommend to only giving one piece of feedback (when I was very junior, my boss once asked me about feedback on presentation he gave, and I started to list all the items that I thought were not perfect. He appreciated the first thing I mentioned, but I noticed he went increasingly sour. Luckily, he was a good boss and never held it against me).

Regards, Susan

motopascyyy's picture
Submitted by motopascyyy on Friday July 7th, 2017 5:27 pm

I fought my instincts this time around and it looks like it was a good call. He's reverted to his old behaviours and ultimately, it would have hurt more than helped if I'd given him feedback. As they often say on the podcase, communication is what the listener does, and if I can't communicate the information effectively to my manager for any variety of reasons, there's no point in it.

 

Glad I reached out to the community. Helped me work through the decision process.