I don’t think I need to lecture you on why clarity is important here in May of 2020; we’re all starved for it and are looking for it in whatever corners of our lives we can. What I want to do is call out a couple of ways that you can use an everyday manager process – providing feedback – in a way that improves clarity and helps your team operate more equitably.

Provide structured feedback

Providing corrective feedback is one of the skills that’s most important to develop as a manager, and it’s also one of the scariest for a lot of people, because it can feel like initiating conflict. It’s easy to convince ourselves that we don’t really need to tell people explicitly when they’ve done something that isn’t right or has caused problems; we may think “oh, I’m sure they know what went wrong and it won’t happen again.” We may think “I don’t have the full picture here, so I’ll just keep quiet rather than jump in where I don’t belong.” We may worry that the recipient will take the feedback personally. If we’re a member of a privileged identity group relative to the direct report, such as a white person providing feedback to a person of color, we may think “I don’t want them to think that I’m holding them to a different standard because of their race, so I won’t say anything.” Any of these thoughts can hold us back from doing the right thing.

One of the reasons corrective feedback is so scary is that we often aren’t sure how to say it in such a way that it will have the intended effect: allowing the person receiving the feedback to improve their work, while maintaining a sense of proportion about the impact of the mistake or errant approach. As author and management coach Lara Hogan puts it in her book Resilient Management, “[the] best feedback is specific, actionable, and delivered in a way that ensures the receiver can actually absorb it.” That last bit – ensuring the receiver can actually absorb it – can involve a number of different factors, including how quickly you deliver the feedback relative to the occurrence of the behavior, how emotional you feel about the behavior, the severity and scope of the behavior’s impact, and the broader context of your report’s general standing in relation to their job – if they’re new or already having trouble at work, a more minor mistake might feel like a big deal.

Having a consistent structure for delivering feedback, and providing feedback regularly, helps to avoid the pitfalls of conflict avoidance and unequitable approaches to criticism at work. I try to use a method that combines the one Hogan outlines in her book with the one outlined in Managing to Change the World by Alison Green and Jerry Hauser. By the way, this works for positive feedback too:

• Decide on the timing for the feedback. Is it urgent enough that your colleague needs to be made aware of it immediately? If so, reach out to them via chat or email first to say “Hi, let’s talk about X, because we need to make a plan – can you meet me in a video chat at Y time?” If it doesn’t require immediate attention to fix, could it wait until your next scheduled one-on-one so that you can integrate it into a consistent pattern of providing feedback? If so, add it to your shared agenda (which you’ve got, right?) so that they know to expect the conversation.
• Describe the behavior – stick to what you’ve seen occur, and avoid making assumptions or conjectures about why the behavior is happening. If you’re giving feedback about a pattern of behavior, have concrete examples of recent instances to refer to.
• Share the impact of the behavior – wherever possible, tying the impact to the goals that you’ve already set with the team and the individual, if not back to the mission of your organization as a whole.
• Request/recommendation and/or question – if there’s a specific action that you need to happen in order to rectify the issue, ask for it. Regardless, ask open-ended questions to make sure that you understand the context around what happened. Sometimes it’s appropriate to let your direct report come up with the next best action, but the question part is critical to establishing trust with them. Assume that you don’t have the full picture (you don’t!), and that there may be factors that you weren’t aware of causing the behavior or preventing the report from fulfilling the request that you’re making.

In addition to considering the best way to deliver the feedback so that the recipient is prepared to receive it, you may also need to think about how you’ll prepare to receive their response. If you’re feeling especially emotional – particularly if you’re feeling angry or frustrated – it may be worth giving yourself a bit of time to distance yourself from the immediacy of the event before discussing it with your direct report, so that you can be prepared to take their perspective into account and so that the meeting can stay focused on identifying what your report needs to produce the desired outcome, not on their fear of your feelings.

Use the feedback structure for everyone

I mentioned earlier that managers who are of privileged identity groups relative to their reports can sometimes be wary of providing feedback because of a fear of being seen as racist, sexist, etc. This fear harms both parties.

Not only does withholding feedback prevent your team from improving at its ability to achieve your mission, failing to give your underrepresented colleagues feedback that can help them grow and develop is a surefire way to keep them from achieving their growth potential and perpetuate the cycle that keeps underrepresented people out of positions of leadership and power. Withholding critical feedback sabotages their growth, and it is incumbent on you, their manager, not to do that.

Conversely, you might be a member of an underrepresented group relative to your direct report, such as a woman of color giving feedback to a white, cisgender man. In that case, you may be concerned about how to deliver the feedback in such a way as to ensure that you’ll be taken seriously. Holding to a consistent feedback structure like the one outlined above – maybe even making it a written company policy – can help you ground that feedback conversation in the impact to the organization, making it less “about you” and how seriously anyone takes you personally, and more about the team as a whole.

By keeping your feedback about the behavior, not the person, by using the same structure for corrective and positive feedback, and by making both part of a routine that everyone who reports to you can come to expect, you’ll be able to impart a little corner of clarity into your colleagues’ lives, and to do it in a way that supports equitable development across the team.