More Direct Feedback

“Dude, you have blood spatters on your shirt...”

That’s what I should have said as I entered the surgeon’s office last Friday for some minor surgery.

I didn’t.

Now, we all realize that surgery involves cutting. There is going to be blood involved. However, greeting your next victim with the previous victim’s blood still on you is quite next level.

He probably didn’t realize.

And... I didn’t tell him. Should I have? Probably, but in my defense I was quite surprised, and rather focused on the cutting that would be performed on me in the next few minutes. Also, this was not work time.

I could have given him feedback on these spatters, which probably would have lead to some level of embarrassment and changing of his shirt. I didn’t.

If I would have been afraid to give the feedback directly, I could have mentioned it to the lady at the front desk, who would hopefully have passed the message along. I didn’t.

Now, let’s say that I would go back to this surgeon later that day, for whatever reason. What should I expect? Should I expect a clean shirt?

At some level, you would expect so. I mean, come on, there’s blood on your shirt, everybody can see it. People will have told you, right? What reputation are you trying to create?

But is this a realistic expectation? Chances are high that later patients simply didn’t have the same observational skills as me, or also were too surprised, perhaps scared to mention it. Perhaps somebody mentioned it to the lady at the front desk, but she could have ignored it, or forgotten about passing the message along.

And so, our surgeon gets to be known as The Butcher.

It will be some time until he finds out, and by the time he does, it will be hard to undo.

While seemingly silly, this type of issue happens all the time. Everywhere.

We observe something: somebody acts in some way, or does something odd that we interpret in some (negative) manner. We don’t act, but do form sort of judgment. Perhaps initially, that judgment is purely internal. But then, in some context, this judgment comes out.

“Oh that surgeon? Yeah, we call him The Butcher.”

Is this fair? Should we do this?

I think we should operate under a simple assumption:

If I observe something related to you, but I do not tell you directly, I have to assume you do not know.

As trivial as this sounds, we humans don’t naturally think this way.

“Well, this should be obvious. No need to tell them this to their face.”

Are you really sure about that? Have you never been this surgeon?

“Hey, your fly is open!”

“Hey, you have spinach on your teeth.” (Although this may be virtue signaling.)

“Every time you talk about your team as if they’re perfect, you’re perceived to be a giant braggart.”

It may be obvious to you, but they may be completely oblivious.

“Other people probably told them.”

There are two reasons why this turns out to be shockingly rare:

1. The Bystander Effect is a thing: if you are in a large group, everybody will start assuming that other people will take action. As a result nobody does.
2. Other people, like you, don’t have the guts to tell them. It’s easier not to.

“Well, I told their manager (at the front desk), so they should know.”

This is a very attractive solution: delegate the task of packaging and delivery of the feedback (perhaps in some shit-sandwich form) to the professionals.

Also not a great solution.

First, the manager may have more context on the matter (blood spatters on shirts are part of the new dress code) and simply dismiss the feedback. Ideally, they would tell you when they do this, but they may not.

Second, the best they can do is pass on the feedback in some sort of (ChatGPT) summarized, perhaps anonymized form. Part of the problem here is the game of telephone: specifics are lost in translation, or through anonymization to such a degree that the feedback is no longer actionable.

What’s potentially most harmful is to anonymize the feedback with statements like “people say that...”

Who are those people?! Who did I say what to?

Now you enter any room constantly looking around if “people that say that” may be around. Not healthy.

Third, managers are people too. Big reveal. They forget things. Sometimes conveniently so.

Communication is lossy. With every hop you introduce, information is lost, sometimes all of it.

To phrase this in some Yogi Berra style aphorisms:

If you don’t send the message, it may not arrive.

If you send the message in your mind, it will not arrive (unless you’re one of those X-men).

If you send the message indirectly, it may not arrive at all, or as you intend.

I realize I’m showing my Dutch roots here, but you will have to admit: Going direct is The Way.

This doesn’t mean that you need to tell everybody what you think all the time. That can get tiring. However, it does mean that if you don’t, you cannot reasonably assume anything will change.