A 3-Axis Framework for Feedback
It’s review season here at Stash Hotel Rewards. Even though we’re a small company, we take employee development seriously and have a formal, bi-annual review process. Coming from a relatively senior role at Expedia, it has been a really long time since I have grown an employee from an individual contributor to a manager. Now at Stash, I once again have the opportunity to introduce a wicked smart software developer to the world of people management.
I am reacquainting myself with the early struggles that new managers have and thought I was doing a pretty darn good job setting up my new manager for success. I sent him a list of my favorite books and my earlier blog posts on Setting Expectations, Giving Feedback, and Receiving Feedback. All done, right?
In our 1:1 before we started actively writing reviews, he says, “So I’ve read all your articles and suggested books, and you talk a lot about the why of feedback and some tips on how to give feedback when you have it. But how do I think about what feedback I should give my team members? I am actually not sure.” Maybe I wasn’t doing such a darn good job, after all!
On Being Binary
When I first became a people manager, I used to approach feedback in a very binary way. Either you were a good employee or a bad employee. Rock star or dud. Then, as I found myself in different and varying complex management problems, I realized that it’s not nearly as black and white as I originally thought.
There was that time when a really talented software test manager had a catastrophic life event and couldn’t engage with his job because he wasn’t able to sleep for months on end. And the time that I took a chance on an automotive engineer with no software experience but brought industry maturity and insights with her. Or that one genius software developer with the explosive temper who never quite wanted to work on the projects assigned to him (but lots of low business value, technically-interesting projects were finished).
After more than a decade of people management, I have found it to be extremely useful to have a framework to think about an employee’s performance and how it maps to what’s actually needed in the role/team. I first thought more deeply about this when Expedia first introduced the Core Competencies, which is what this framework is based upon. I like to think about three very different and independent axes, which include:
Axis 1 — Know Thy Craft
This is the “what” of the job and usually where new managers spend their time coaching their employees, especially if they were previously an expert in that space. For me, what factors into how an employee “should” be performing in this space is related to their seniority and prior experience (i.e. how independently should this person be operating in this role). Does the person make good decisions at the right scope level for their role?
For example, for a junior developer, I would expect him to be able to fix simple bugs on the website and participate in projects that a more senior developer had architected. How often is his code completely re-worked in a code review? Or how often does his delivery not actually solve the business need? Is he learning from his past mistakes?
For a senior developer, I would expect her to be able to handle ambiguity (e.g. give vague business requirements and she determines the architecture and a smart way to break up the work so that it can be completed across the team if possible) and provide technical leadership for the company. How strategically and how far ahead can this employee anticipate the problems in the project? Are they always in crisis mode because they can’t account for problems ahead of time? Are their deliverables solid and sustainable once they’re in production?
For people managers, it’s a similar continuum. For a new leader, how often does their team meet their deliverables and to what quality (i.e. how well do they supervise)? Over time, how well does the manager hire, grow, and retain talent? Does she quickly and fairly manage out low performers and toxic employees? Does he make decisions that are right for the company in the long term versus making decisions for short-term gains or to further his career?
Figuring out the “Know Thy Craft” portion is fundamentally different for each different role and function at a company, and it’s the job of the manager to understand how to objectively assess the performance of their team member. If you run a multi-disciplinary team and are managing a function that you are not an expert in, feel free to ask for feedback and help from the functional-area experts. As you think about your team members and expectations of their “craft”, keep in mind the level of ambiguity and complexity that you should be expecting based on their seniority.
Axis 2 — Communication
Communication is an odd catch-all requirement in any job, and it really encompasses several different sub-behaviors. The first one is pure messaging. Do people understand what your employee is talking about when she writes or speaks? Is she able to break down a concept to the different audiences that she is addressing? Does he have well-formed thoughts and opinions that are presented in a cohesive way? Can she explain the “why” of the work she is doing and the impact of her projects to the company?
The next sub-area is what your employee chooses to communicate (or rather chooses not to). Does your employee set expectations well? How often are you surprised by a late delivery or a major decision that was made that you were never informed of? How often do they do unnecessary work while ignoring the work that the team really needs performed without talking to anyone about it?
Finally, how does your employee make people feel when they communicate, especially in a contentious situation? Are they able to influence across the whole team (their peers, their leaders, people more junior to them) even when disagreements occur? For people leaders, are they able to motivate and lift the morale of their teams? Are they able to retain a respectful tone even as others in the situation may be getting heated? How are they adapting to the social norms of your team/company? When I joined Stash from Expedia, I brought with me a large-company brash, aggressive attitude. This clashed with the nice, small-company atmosphere of Stash, so there were a few unnecessary conflicts because I didn’t adapt to my environment quickly enough. Emotional intelligence appears under the communication umbrella because your EQ is often reflected in how you communicate with others.
Axis 3 — Engagement
The final independent axis is an employee’s level of engagement. At its most simplistic level, it’s a continuum of being completely disengaged to “punching the clock” to being highly engaged to being an owner. The question is — how much do you trust this employee to get things done for you in a pinch? In my experience with technology teams, this means that the employee answers the phone when the OnCall pager goes off, is the first one on the outage call trying to debug the issue, or is staying late when there’s something wrong with a critical feature that’s shipping for the business. This even manifests in what type of work the employee is willing to pick up. Is your employee the first one to help out teammates and even people in other organizations? Or are they the ones to say that it’s not their problem or not in their job description?
Under this axis, I also look for a bias for action. In software development, speed to market is key, so the philosophy of “fail fast and move on” is definitely embraced by my peers and me. While I appreciate engineers who spend time thinking about a problem set, often times gold-plating a solution can cost a business lost opportunity.
An employee’s placement on this axis will change over time (especially if they are going through major life changes), and my expectation as their boss is that they are engaged in a sustainable way for both the company and their lives (i.e. it’s equally as bad for someone to burnout as for them to be disengaged). But when someone is always in the disengaged space or is clearly watching the clock all the time, it informs an overall picture of what type of employee they are.
Using The 3-Axis Framework
I particularly like this framework because it works for a variety of job functions and levels of seniority, and it helps me be objective as I am breaking down ways to coach my team members to reach their career potential.
Now that the construct of the three major axes are in place, my job as a manager is to determine what the expectation of the team member’s performance should be on each axis based on their role and seniority and the overall needs of the team. In my head, I have a radar chart of at least the three major axes and sometimes I add more axes depending on the role. This radar chart maps of my current expectation of the role based on their their seniority and experience in the industry. Additionally, if they’re actively growing into another role, I may also have another radar chart of the career direction they want to take (e.g. growing someone from an individual contributor to a manager has different radar charts).
After that, I think about where the employee’s performance actually maps on the radar chart and determine which aspects are a gap, meet expectations, or are a strength. It’s my job to bridge the gaps, encourage the strengths, and to map the team member to the next level through consistent feedback and coaching. I talk a lot about the “how” of giving feedback here.
Wrapping It Up
A framework doesn’t replace the hard work of personalizing your management for each of your team members, but it does give a way for you to organize your thoughts in an objective way. I’ve been proud to grow several team members in their careers using this framework, and I set expectations that I’ll be using it early on in a reporting relationship so there aren’t surprises as I manage a new hire. At the end of the day, if I’ve done my job well, I have a team in place with complementary radar charts who help each other grow their careers, deliver a ton of business value, and have a fun time doing it.
