Feedback is not an event
The annual review is where feedback goes to become a surprise. Here is what to do instead, starting this week.
If somebody learns something important about their performance for the first time in a review, the review has failed and so has everything in the eleven months before it. Nothing said in that room is new information; it is only newly said.
The reason is rarely cowardice. It is that most managers have exactly one format for feedback — a formal, seated, consequential conversation — and reasonably decide most weeks are not worth one. So it accumulates, gains weight, and arrives all at once as a verdict.
The smaller format
Feedback works when it is small, close to the event, and specific enough to act on before it is forgotten. Thirty seconds, in the ordinary week: what you saw, what it caused, what you would like instead. No sandwich, no preamble, no meeting invitation.
- Close to the event. Within a day is a correction. Within a quarter is a grievance.
- About behaviour, not character. "You cut Marcus off twice" is workable. "You are dominant in meetings" is an accusation with nothing to do about it.
- One thing. A list is a performance review. One thing is a request.
Then make it survivable
A team only accepts frequent feedback if the frequent kind is not always corrective. If the only time you speak up is to fix something, your attention becomes a threat signal and people start managing your perception instead of their work. The ratio matters more than the technique.
That is the whole method. It is not complicated and it is not comfortable, which is why it is a practice rather than a policy.
