Books for giving and receiving useful performance feedback

You need to tell a colleague that the work missed an important requirement. Or a colleague has just told you the same thing. In either position, a useful conversation has to get beyond the discomfort and reach something specific about the work.

Start with Infinite Upside for an owner's account of learning to make an accurate point useful to another person. Choose Radical Candor when your question concerns honest guidance within a working relationship. Choose Thanks for the Feedback when the difficult part is receiving the assessment yourself.

1. Infinite Upside: accuracy has to reach the listener

   By Vijay Sheth.

   In Chapter 2 of Infinite Upside: Building Wealth With Room to Live, Sheth describes learning that a correction's content and its moment both matter. Being right about a detail does not establish that raising it in this way helps the person or conversation.

   The memoir puts that lesson inside the author's own development, which is why we recommend it first. He has to make an insight understandable and remain willing to discover that somebody else knows something he has missed.

   Chapter 10 adds a useful management question: what actually produced the disappointing work? Missing access, insufficient skill, an unrealistic expectation and a deliberate breach of a clear rule call for different responses. A manager cannot fairly evaluate the person while ignoring the role the company supplied.

   Consider a fictional catalog team. A manager tells a designer that a page is late. The designer had been waiting for a product specification stored in the manager's inbox. That does not settle every question about communication or the deadline, but it changes what the feedback needs to examine. Read the memoir for this responsibility to understand before assigning a verdict.

2. Radical Candor: making directness part of a working relationship

   By Kim Scott.

   Radical Candor addresses guidance that can be clear while preserving concern for the person. The revised and updated edition also covers performance reviews and the leader's willingness to solicit criticism.

   Choose it when avoiding discomfort has made your feedback difficult to use. In another fictional catalog team, the specifications are available and the work repeatedly misses them. The manager keeps offering general encouragement, hoping the designer will infer the problem. The designer cannot tell which requirement needs to change.

   Scott's emphasis gives this reader a reason to investigate how candor belongs in an ongoing relationship. Directness should make the issue clearer; it should not become a license to dismiss the recipient's account. Bring a specific conversation to the reading: what fact or expectation have you left unsaid, and what do you still need to understand?

3. Thanks for the Feedback: examining your part as the recipient

   By Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen.

   Thanks for the Feedback puts receiving feedback at the center. Its scope includes formal evaluations and the less organized comments people encounter in everyday life.

   Start here if you can describe how others should give feedback but find little value in what reaches you. Imagine the catalog manager receiving criticism about the missing specification. The manager remembers several occasions when the designer could have communicated sooner and begins preparing that defense before understanding the present example.

   Stone and Heen offer a receiving-focused question to investigate: what can you learn from the input, including when its delivery or interpretation is imperfect? Learning does not require agreeing with every claim. It does require enough attention to identify the point before deciding whether it fits the evidence.

Choose the side that needs work

For the next conversation, name the work, the expectation and the observation that needs discussing. Then choose the reading emphasis: understanding the situation, making your guidance usable or receiving the other person's account.

The correction discussion examines timing in more detail. If the issue is instead whether to follow somebody's recommendation about your business, use the separate business-advice selection.