"Is That What You Want” - Not Recommended

In rolling out the Manager Tools Trinity, you start with One On Ones, to build trust. The vast majority of managers who try them love them. Trust gets built, and that speeds up work and improves quality. Trusting relationships are the foundation of great management success.

Once you’ve gotten comfortable in your One On Ones, the next tool in the Trinity to roll out is Feedback. We recommend you start giving feedback after 12 weeks of One On Ones. You start first with positive feedback only for 8 weeks, and then gradually add in negative feedback. When you follow this path, the fears that most managers have about giving negative feedback prove unwarranted - directs who have a trusting relationship with you, and have gotten plenty of positive feedback are fine with getting negative feedback.

Once many managers have reached a steady state with both positive and negative feedback, they feel confident enough to begin departing from the scripted nature of how we teach feedback. And this is usually a very good thing!. The more relaxed and natural you are when delivering feedback, with positive tone for both positive and negative feedback, the more positive response you’ll get from your directs.

But some times, managers get a little too creative, and their improvisations, while good in theory, don’t work in practice. One such “custom” change to the negative feedback model is rather than saying, in step 4, “Can you work on that”, or, “Can you change that?” Is this one: “Is that what you want?”

This one really does not work. We don’t recommend it, ever.