A couple of years ago, my tap-dancing, genius MIT mechanical engineer, New York musical theater actor, and accountabilibuddy Timmy and I started helping each other be more productive. You can read about that in my episode about protecting work/life balance. Timmy is on to a new adventure: he’s learning to program computers. The class he’s taken has put him on a group project, building the control software for a missile that will someday be used by a renegade group of zombie hunters to enslave what remains of the post-apocalyptic world of 2024. They added him to a project team that was already up and running.
He’s thrilled! His new teammates are great people. They’ve started the project already. They’ve laid the groundwork. They’ve already programmed the foundation of the system and they’ve made a lot of mistakes. Their scripts don’t work. Their builds don’t build. They’ve simply created bad software.
Timmy is pulling his hair out (which is a shame, because he has pretty much flawless hair, like a Peter Parker crossed with a teenage Clark Kent). He wants to call his team together and tell them, “It’s an honor to be part of your team. Unfortunately you’re all incompetent boobs. Your designs are wrong. Your scripts are broken. You have no idea what you’re doing.” Then, of course, he’ll tell them the right way to do everything. They’ll be so grateful that from then on they'll listen to everything he has to say and adopt all his ideas without challenging them.
They’ll also have him kidnapped, roll him naked in Oreo ice cream cake, and leave him tied to the top of a mound of Texas fire ants. They might even test out the missile on him. This would be a terrible waste of an otherwise scrumptious Oreo ice cream cake. There’s gotta be a better way.
And there is. When you want to give your co-workers feedback that their design sucks, do it in a way that has them thanking you for it.
Giving Your Coworkers Constructive Feedback
- Figure out why you are criticizing them
- Ask questions to lead them to the mistakes
- Let your colleague propose the solutions
- Be prepared to learn
Let's dive deeper into each.
1. Figure out why you are criticizing them
The first step to lovingly criticizing your loyal teammates is to understand what you want to criticize them for.
When you think someone’s work is no good, that’s because you think it falls short in some way. It’s supposed to accomplish something that it doesn’t. For example, a marketing report may be intended to give readers a good overview of market trends, but it has no graphs that illustrate the trends. Or Timmy can see instantly that the way the team has designed the guidance system, aiming the missile anywhere in the northern hemisphere will erroneously cause it to detonate on the launchpad.
If there are several shortcomings to their solution, pick the one that is easiest to understand and will cause the greatest damage if not fixed. But keep notes on the other shortcomings. You never know when they’ll come in handy.
2. Ask questions to lead them to the mistakes
You can’t just point out the flaws to them. “Gee, you imbecile, can’t you see that your marketing report doesn’t even show any trends?” That won’t work. I’ve tried it. I didn’t make any friends at all. Fortunately, fire ants hadn’t yet appeared in North America.
Instead, make it seem as though the problem is you, and you just can’t figure out how the heck all that high falutin’ stuff works. You’re just not quite as bright as they are, and you really need their help.
“Hey, guys. I don’t really understand the guidance system here. Can you walk me through what happens when we aim the missile in the northern hemisphere? It seems to cause the detonation system to go kaboom. Could you help me understand where I’m going wrong?”
Now instead of you coming across as superior, talking down to them from on high, you’re the meek, newbie team member, asking the Knowledgable Old Ones for their sage advice.
3. Let your colleague propose the solutions
When they answer your question, listen. Even though you know where the conversation is going, let them be the ones to take it there. You know they’ll spot the problem that was obvious to you, only they’ll think they found it. They’ll feel great about their own brilliance. You, the meek, will quietly marvel at their grand accomplishments. You’ll also inherit the Earth.
4. Be prepared to learn
There’s also the chance that their answer will surprise you. Perhaps the missile’s autodestruct capabilities are intentional, because the plan is to sneak the missile into the zombie encampment, and let them blow themselves to gobs of zombie goo.
Maybe there are no graphs in the market trends report because the author doesn’t want it to be obvious that the trends are negative, and historically, bearers of bad news at this company have been burned at the stake.
A few well-placed questions got the group unstuck.
Whatever the reason, as the Knowledgable Old Ones answer your concern, you need to be open-minded enough to accept that maybe you’re wrong and they’re right. If that turns out to be the case, now you can praise their brilliance in earnest and they’ll think you’re just the cat’s meow.
Which is a good place to be. Because as you recall, you made a list of all of their design’s shortcomings. Now choose the next most important one, and start asking questions that will lead to those being uncovered and fixed as well.
When you’re right and they’re wrong, they don’t want to know it. No matter who “they” are. So instead, let them discover it on their own. Identify the shortcomings in their solution, and ask them questions about that shortcoming, framing it as your shortcoming instead. Listen to their answer, and help guide them to your answer, which was (of course) right, all along.
A few well-placed questions got Timmy’s group unstuck. The missile was not intended as a trojan horse to destroy the zombie army from within. The accidental detonation was, indeed, a bug. Now the team is so grateful to Timmy that they’ve asked him to take the lead designing their new Zombie Body Part Recycling Center. I’ve looked over Timmy’s design and it’s flawless. Well, except for one teeny, tiny problem that I’m sure he’ll want to hear all about.
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Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
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