My manager direct feedback

In a pre­vi­ous blog, I de­scribed the Dir­ect Re­port Feed­back pro­cess - a pro­cess for get­ting feed­back from dir­ect re­ports about their man­ager’s skills.

Be­fore run­ning this for all the man­agers in NITAS, I asked all of my dir­ect re­ports to go through the pro­cess and to provide in­form­a­tion back about me. I did this to de­bug the form and the pro­cess – and also to learn from the data and find out what it felt like to be on the re­ceiv­ing end of the as­sess­ment. Con­sist­ent with the pro­cess, I took the res­ults, ana­lyzed them, and dis­cussed them with my man­ager, the COO of NIBR.

I thought those of you who filled that form in, or who have re­cently done so for your own man­agers, might find it in­ter­est­ing to hear what I learned from hav­ing been the guinea-pig for the pro­cess.

Re­gard­ing the pro­cess it­self: The in­put form worked ok, but some of the mech­an­ics need work. We fixed some of those for the lar­ger re­lease and have more to do. The sum­mary form needed a bit of tweak­ing to provide use­ful ana­lys­is. An­onym­ity is in­deed es­sen­tial. Go­ing through HR to provide that ef­fect­ively. People do provide use­ful com­ments in the com­ment field.

I’m not go­ing to pub­li­cize the ex­act num­bers or com­ments that I got back; I don’t feel that would be ap­pro­pri­ate for this audi­ence or re­spect­ful of those who provided in­put. I will sum­mar­ize, how­ever:

  • The num­bers over­all were very pos­it­ive, which, hon­estly, was nice to see.
  • The areas where I was rated the strongest are:
    • Is ac­tion ori­ented.
    • Speaks ef­fect­ively, hold­ing peoples’ at­ten­tion.
    • Is good at de­vel­op­ing re­la­tion­ships.
    • Chal­lenges the status quo.
  • The areas I was rated the weak­est are:
    • Keeps people well-in­formed.
    • Makes him/her­self avail­able and ac­cess­ible for the needs of as­so­ci­ates.
    • Spends suf­fi­cient time man­aging pri­or­it­ies, pro­cesses and people.

The com­ments were very help­ful. The most pos­it­ive were about my be­ing ac­cess­ible, resolv­ing is­sues, en­joy­ing the work at­mo­sphere in NITAS. The most crit­ic­al raised con­cerns about my not spend­ing enough time with dir­ect re­ports and not del­eg­at­ing enough.

As I worked my way through the form, I kept track of my own re­sponses to the num­bers and com­ments. This was quite in­ter­est­ing.

Some gut-re­ac­tions: “Do I really want to look at this? Ok…. hmmm. Ok, over­all, not bad, agree with that… hey, ouch!“

I felt a strong com­pul­sion to find out who said what so that I could put the com­ments in con­text. Be­cause of the way the pro­cess was done, I was not able to do that. This re­in­forces both that an­onym­ity is im­port­ant and that the pro­cess is work­ing to provide it. The num­bers vary con­sid­er­ably. It’s bet­ter to draw con­clu­sions from the ag­greg­ate than from any single col­lec­tion of re­sponses. Some of the com­ments and num­bers are in dir­ect op­pos­i­tion.

Clearly there are very dif­fer­ent per­cep­tions out there. It’s help­ful to see where there are huge vari­ations. It’s nice to read the pos­it­ive num­bers, and I see those align with my areas of em­phas­is. Ini­tially when read­ing some of the lower num­bers, I was dis­ap­poin­ted, and then I came around to be­ing in­spired to put more ef­fort in those areas. I found my­self agree­ing with most of the com­ments. Some have been ad­dressed already, but on oth­ers I’ve got work to do.

So, what does this mean?

First, the dry-run on me was suf­fi­ciently use­ful to af­firm the pro­cess and de­bug the form.

Second, with re­gards to my own ac­tion plan as a res­ult of the as­sess­ment: None of the res­ults in­dic­ated a prob­lem. I am treat­ing this as in­put in­to where to fo­cus rather than as a fire to put out. I agree com­pletely that I don’t make enough time avail­able to my dir­ect re­ports and as­so­ci­ates and that I need to in­crease del­eg­a­tion. This is, in large part, due to hav­ing way too many dir­ect re­ports.

I star­ted to ad­dress this in part this year by cre­at­ing the role of Glob­al Head of Op­er­a­tions. Brent star­ted in late March and is already help­ing to make a dif­fer­ence in this area. I’m also look­ing at oth­er areas to im­prove or­gan­iz­a­tion­al band­width. In ad­di­tion, since car­ry­ing out the sur­vey, I’ve mod­i­fied my stand­ing cal­en­dar to in­crease the fre­quency of one-to-one meet­ings with all of my dir­ects. I feel like I put a lot of work in­to keep­ing people well-in­formed, but clearly I can im­prove. I’m go­ing to try to in­crease the fre­quency of blogs and email, will con­tin­ue to have site meet­ings when I’m vis­it­ing vari­ous sites. I also sus­pect this is not just about me, but about NITAS in gen­er­al.

I will en­cour­age all of the rest of the man­agers and groups in NITAS to share im­port­ant in­form­a­tion more widely. (That should help with the del­eg­a­tion score as well. :-) This will im­prove as we be­gin to straight­en out our web site strategy, which is be­ing led by Omega (for the fu­ture) and Train­ing & Com­mu­nic­a­tions (for the present).

My take-home from this:

  • Fo­cus on or­gan­iz­a­tion­al & pro­cess changes that im­prove the speed of the or­gan­iz­a­tion.
  • In­crease del­eg­a­tion and coach­ing.
  • Keep com­mu­nic­at­ing. More.

Thanks to all who con­trib­uted their in­put and to Jonath­an Sing­er in HR for cop­ing with all the forms.

Fi­nally, to those of you who we have asked to fill out this form about your man­ager – please an­swer with your best as­sess­ment. Your hon­est in­put is im­port­ant so that we can work to im­prove the or­gan­iz­a­tion.

Cheers,
-r’m