Manager feedback from direct reports

This post is spe­cif­ic to NITAS, but I’m post­ing it as a blog for ref­er­ence and in case oth­ers have some in­terest.

This year, I’ve set a goal of im­prov­ing NITAS man­age­ment prac­tices. Man­age­ment is some­times a dirty word to sci­ent­ists and en­gin­eers, but I’ve come to view it as a core cap­ab­il­ity. The pur­pose of man­age­ment is to mag­ni­fy the im­pact of a col­lec­tion of in­di­vidu­als. Good man­age­ment is about be­ing able to do that in a way that is pos­it­ive and pro­duct­ive for all in­volved. The bet­ter the man­agers in NITAS, the bet­ter we can all be.

To this end, we are ask­ing all dir­ect re­ports in NITAS to provide feed­back about their man­ager’s skills. Here’s how this will work: Car­ol will send every­one a stand­ard form via email. You should fill in the form with re­spect to your man­ager, then send the form to a spe­cified con­tact in HR.HR will take the res­ults of the form, pre­pare a sum­mary, and send the sum­mary to the man­ager in ques­tion and to their man­ager.

It’s im­port­ant to all in­volved that as­sess­ment provided be done hon­estly, thus the sur­vey is an­onym­ous. Someone in HR will know who provided what in­form­a­tion be­cause they are sum­mar­iz­ing the data, but will not pass that in­form­a­tion along to any­one in NITAS, in­clud­ing me.

The form asks about 30 ques­tions about man­age­ment, lead­er­ship, val­ues, and be­ha­vi­ors. Here are a few ex­amples: Builds teams and ar­tic­u­lates com­mon pur­pose and goal? Makes dif­fi­cult de­cisions? Listens at­tent­ively? Sets clear pri­or­it­ies and ob­ject­ives with cor­res­pond­ing ac­count­ab­il­ity?

Each ques­tion is answered on a scale of 1-5, with 1 mean­ing “a short­com­ing”, 3 mean­ing “does ok”, and 5 mean­ing “a strength”. There is also room on the form for ad­di­tion­al free-form com­ment­ary. The man­ager will be giv­en a col­lec­tion of sum­mar­ies of the nu­mer­ic­al res­ults. The com­ments will be passed along ver­batim.

Why are we do­ing this and what will hap­pen with the res­ults?

I’m do­ing this for sev­er­al reas­ons: To help man­agers learn where they are already ef­fect­ive and where they need to fo­cus to im­prove. To get a baseline sense of NITAS man­age­ment cap­ab­il­ity so that I will know where we as a group most need to im­prove. To provide as­so­ci­ates with a mech­an­ism to provide both pos­it­ive and neg­at­ive feed­back in a pro­tec­ted pro­cess. (Mul­tiraters are not an­onym­ous.)

We’ll carry out this sur­vey a few times this year. The first time will be in March & April. We will do this for all groups in NITAS ex­cept for those that are so small that it’s not pos­sible to an­onym­ize the feed­back.

Thanks much to HR for help­ing with this im­port­ant pro­cess, and thanks to all NITAS as­so­ci­ates for par­ti­cip­at­ing and provid­ing open and hon­est feed­back.