Tag: Feedback

The day my boss said: Not one of your best performances?

My boss called me in after a significant misstep. He asked one question: “Not one of your best performances?”

I didn’t need to answer. He knew I knew.

That question (which wasn’t really a question) did something the explicit never could. It said: You’re intelligent. You have agency. You know exactly what happened here. We don’t need this conversation.

If he’d catalogued what went wrong and walked me through what I should have done differently, he would have said something else entirely: You lack the judgment to assess your own work. You need me to explain it to you.

The implicit respected my intelligence. The explicit would have insulted it.

This matters especially with perfectionists. They already know. Making it explicit forces them to experience their failure twice.

The implicit can be mercy. The explicit can be cruelty, even when delivered with kindness.

Of course, the implicit can also abandon. The same restraint that respects can also withhold what someone needs to hear.

My boss could have walked me through what went wrong. He could have been thorough.

He asked one question instead.

I’ve never forgotten it. I’ve never forgotten what it said about what he thought of me.

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photo by Tobias Keller

The Manager’s README: A Practice in Radical Honesty and Leadership Evolution

The Document as Mirror

The Manager’s README, sometimes called a personal user manual or leadership charter, has gained popularity as a transparency tool. But its true power lies not in the words themselves but in the accountability framework they create. When you articulate who you are as a leader, your preferences, and your values, you’re informing your team… and you’re lso creating a reference point against which your actions will inevitably be measured.

This isn’t documentation for documentation’s sake; it’s the creation of a mirror you cannot hide from.

Consider what happens when you write, “I welcome new ideas and constructive challenges to my thinking.” This statement, seemingly positive and progressive, carries significant risk. You’ve now established a standard by which your team will evaluate your reactions. Each time you interrupt a challenging perspective or dismiss an unexpected proposal, you create a dissonance between your stated values and your observable actions.

This dissonance of the README process is precisely its purpose.

The Data of Dissonance

Most leadership discourse frames feedback as something managers give rather than receive. The Manager’s README inverts this dynamic, creating a structured invitation for your team to reflect your behaviors back to you.

When a team member musters the courage to say, “You wrote that you value creativity, but I’ve noticed you tend to focus on potential problems whenever new ideas are shared,” they’re providing invaluable data about the gap between your self-perception and your impact.

This moment represents a critical juncture. Will you defend your intentions (“That’s not what I meant” or “You’re misinterpreting my questions”) or will you engage with the reality of your impact? Your response in this moment speaks volumes about your capacity for growth—far more than any carefully crafted value statement.

The discomfort of this feedback is a feature (not a bug). The Manager’s README creates a structured space for precisely this type of productive tension.

Visible Evolution as Trust Currency

Trust is built on demonstrations. When your team observes a disconnect between your README and your actions, they don’t immediately lose faith, but they’ll be watching what happens next.

Do you acknowledge the gap? Do you make visible adjustments? Do you follow up to check whether your changes are addressing the concern?

Trust is built on visible evolution. When your team witnesses you actively working to align your actions with your stated intentions, they experience something rare in organizational life: a leader whose growth happens in plain sight rather than behind closed doors.

Consider the manager who, upon receiving feedback about interrupting team members, acknowledges the behavior and also institutes a new practice in meetings: “I’ve been told I sometimes cut people off. If you notice me doing this, please say ‘I’d like to finish my thought.’ This will help me be more aware.” This visible commitment to change, and the vulnerability of making it public, creates far more trust than any aspirational statement about valuing all voices.

The Authenticity of Imperfection

Perfection is not a leadership goal. A leader who never makes mistakes, never has off days, and never shows frustration comes across as performative rather than real.

The Manager’s README shouldn’t aim to portray an idealized version of yourself, but rather to create a framework for understanding your real patterns—including your limitations. The document might include acknowledgments like “I tend to become more directive under tight deadlines” or “I sometimes need processing time before responding to unexpected proposals.”

These statements are context that helps your team interpret your actions more accurately while also holding you accountable to manage your tendencies.

The paradox is that acknowledging your imperfections makes your strengths more credible. When you admit to struggling with certain aspects of leadership, your team is more likely to trust your competence in other areas. Selective vulnerability creates space for authentic strength.

Intrapersonal Competency: The Meta-Skill

Leadership development typically focuses on interpersonal skills: communication, influence, delegation. The Manager’s README process highlights a more fundamental capability: intrapersonal competency. Your ability to evolve yourself intentionally.

This meta-skill encompasses:

  • Self-awareness: Recognizing your patterns, triggers, and impact
  • Feedback receptivity: Taking in potentially uncomfortable information without defensiveness
  • Intentional adaptation: Making targeted changes to align actions with intentions
  • Progress monitoring: Checking whether changes are having the desired effect

The Manager’s README documents who you are and it also creates conditions to develop who you’re becoming. The gap between your written intentions and your lived behaviors is the productive tension that drives growth.

The Practice, Not the Product

The value of the Manager’s README is in how it evolves. A document created once and left untouched becomes a monument to aspirations never realized. The README should itself evolve as you do—updated not just with new preferences but with new awareness gained through feedback.

Some managers track how their README evolves, noting shifts based on feedback. It shows a commitment to growth.

The Invitation

The Manager’s README represents an invitation to a different kind of leadership, one defined not by certainty but by curiosity. It challenges the notion that leaders should have it all figured out, offering instead a model where figuring it out happens collaboratively and continually.

This practice won’t eliminate the gap between who you aspire to be and how you actually show up, but it will make that gap visible, discussable, and addressable. And perhaps this is the most powerful leadership stance of all: not “I know the way” but “I’m on the way, and I welcome your help in getting there.”

Your README says who you think you are. Their annotations say who you really are. Which version is more accurate?

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Let’s get rid of the performance review

Samuel Colbert says that

a one-side-accountable, boss-administered review is little more than a dysfunctional pretense. It’s a negative to corporate performance, an obstacle to straight-talk relationships, and a prime cause of low morale at work. Even the mere knowledge that such an event will take place damages daily communications and teamwork.

His solution? Performance previews:

reciprocally accountable discussions about how boss and employee are going to work together even more effectively than they did in the past. Previews weld fates together. The boss’s skin is now in the game.

In my experience,  the workplace is not that dialogical. I side with Lucy Kellaway at the FT: few managers talk or think like that. Yet. Among other things because they have to take part in the same process themselves.

 

Reacting to decline, dissatisfaction and dilemmas

I discuss in class the five ways in which people will react when faced with an ethical dilemma:

  • Exit
  • Voice
  • “Loyalty”
  • Neglect/Sabotage
  • Whistle-blowing.

The first three I paraphrase from a book by Albert Hirschman. The other two I picked up from research sources, as well as, sadly, my own experience.

The challenge for managers is to identify the behaviors and events that are symptomatic of these reactions, and to establish that said reactions are their cause.

The subtle art of conversation

It works best when you share the spotlight, taking turns talking and listening: Shut up and listen.
Seriously. Shut up. That means more than just quieting your mouth. It means more than simply waiting your turn to talk. It means quieting the noise in your head so that you can really hear what the other person is saying.

Now prove you were listening.
That’s right. Show me you care. Ask genuine questions that send the conversation in new directions. Talk to me about what I’m talking to you about. Otherwise, we’re just making noise.

Don’t worry, you’ll get your turn.
It’s not likely that anyone will listen to you, if you don’t listen to them first. Because when you really pay attention, and you show it, you build trust. You build rapport. You get a reputation for being smart, and thoughtful even, no matter that you’ve said very little. And suddenly people will want to hear what you have to say. (tiny gigantic)