It took me years to figure out that “It’s not my favorite” is Californian for “I hate this”. At least months to realize that “We should do X” means “You should do X” and that “Would you mind checking Y” is a direct request with expectations attached.
Also, your examples are still fairly isolated - ultimately it was almost like using an outdated dictionary where words map to different things. Once you had the right "translation", the issue was fixed. That's not typical for employer feedback scenarios. Often the manager just wants the employee to be more diligent, attentive, have better Pareto 80/20 judgment, etc. You can't teach that to someone who doesn't get it.
“Hey it looks like we’re miscommunicating, what do you hear when I say X?” is a great way to start. Much much better than thinking quietly to yourself something like “Gosh that engineer is so dumb why don’t they ever do what I ask???” and never telling the employee that there’s a problem.
Ultimately people can’t fix a problem they don’t know exists. And despite their best efforts, they can’t read your mind.
If the manager asks you repeatedly about project X, and you repeatedly say "I haven't looked at that yet" or some other thing that accepts responsibility but clings to the original phrasing as an excuse to get yourself off the hook, the manager is correct about thinking "why don't they do what I ask". This indicates a judgment problem.
That sounds a lot like feedback to me. Your earlier comment said you don’t believe in that
Perhaps we have different definitions of “feedback”
Like another comment says people from California are more subtle. OTOH my experience working with people from Eastern Europe is that in their culture there are not many nuances in conversation, they don't give it, so they don't expect it as well.
I get it, there are other cultures, some say "why don't you look into X" while others say "do X" - but if it takes years to calibrate while projects are not done and deadlines get missed, there is a much bigger problem.
[citation needed]
I'm very curious what your experiences are that lead you to this conclusion. It just seems wrong to me. If someone is spending too much time coordinating and not enough time coding or vice versa, you should tell them that explicitly so that they can switch their priorities. If someone is spending too much time writing well factored code and not enough time shipping or vice versa, you should tell them that so that they can change their approach. If someone needs to up their level expertise on your toolset in order to be productive, you should tell them that and point them to the right literature so that they can learn.
In none of these situations is it better to ... what are you even suggesting doing? like winking at them or something? awkward shifting in your seat? the silent treatment? using obtuse jargon?
Just tell people how you think they're doing and how you think they could improve! It may be awkward but you'll get over it...
Not giving feedback is just lazy, and borderline cowardize because it is an easy way to avoid conflicts.
Ideally, the employee’s “right thing” and the manager’s “right thing” are already well-aligned and “feedback” is more like “finetuning”.
If there is a large gap between the “right thing”s - aka what is considered good judgment, this situation is incorrigible with verbal feedback.
None of this is to imply malice (behave like a-holes), just that there are so few hours in a day, and trying to get an employee to pick up on everything through individualized verbal feedback is very taxing.
People are not interchangeable, with regard to any skill. This is even more so for communication which is a meta-skill over many skills.
The upside to greater communication effectiveness is higher performance with regard to skills downstream from communication (almost all of them, almost all the time).
Dismissing the job of adapting communication styles or substance to one side of any relationship just leaves upside potential on the table, or locks in unnecessary downside. This seems antithetical to what management is about - maximizing the value returned by those being managed.
Virtually every time when an employee doesn't work out, it's because they used bad judgment. Feedback is useless for that.
So for example, you will ask them to write documentation and they might technically write documentation, but maybe they write it unclear and don't even recognize it as such. Now, do you want to teach someone the concept of "clarity" like an English teacher? No! If they can't understand what level of clarity is needed based on other code in the company or other cues, it is a manifestation of a judgment problem.
Of course working together won't be instantly smooth like a Swiss watch movement, and you can make adjustments, but there cannot be a big judgement gap. The employee has to be able to recognize what you mean by "clear" without a full blown multi-year English lesson. If they consistently think their work as a "first draft", to be double-checked always by you and given specific feedback over, that is a judgment problem. Massive time-waste.
Yep, if you're that person's manager, what you do is you tell them, unambiguously, that the documentation they wrote was not clear, and you tell them why, and you direct them to examples of clear documentation and other resources that can help improve their ability to write documentation. That's the job! If you don't want to do the job of a good manager, that's fine, but you're doing a disservice to the people who work for you. And, weirdly, you seem to be patting yourself on the back for it. But make no mistake: being unwilling to mentor and teach is actually just bad management.
There are lots of books you can read to improve your management skills!
OP said that subtle clues are inferior, and even useless, compare to direct communication.
In your response, you said indirect, subtle communication is better, but your reason is that it is pointless.
You claim people can never improve, or, that helping them is pointless.
In this scenario, you are not arguing that subtly is better, you are arguing that nothing is better.
Yet by your metric, there is no logic in pointing this out...
You don't need to answer that. It is a rhetorical question. But consider what you wrote relative to good parenting, regardless of ages.
Nobody stops learning. On any measure, hopefully as long as we live, we are all still children relative to where we will be in a decade or two.
Mentoring, books, feedback, encouragement are valuable to give and receive throughout our lives because there is always another level of skill and wisdom to be achieved.
Obviously you can. People are not born with good judgment. Every single person with good judgment was mentored and taught it by different people throughout their lives.
Perhaps you mean that you can't mentor or teach adults good judgment? This is slightly more plausible but also wrong. People are capable of learning new tricks their entire life.
But especially if we're talking about the people I think we're talking about - entry level ish employees, probably in their 20s - no, this is silly, these are exactly the people you can mentor and teach good judgement. They are hungry for someone capable of doing so!
> Management has virtually nothing to do with mentorship and teaching.
I'm telling you, you need to read a book on management. You don't seem to know anything about it, but are nonetheless opining on it very confidently.
> Books will teach you nothing useful
Hahahaha no wonder you're so ill informed. You're wrong, books are great. If you go through life trying to reinvent the world from within the bubble of your own mind alone, you are doomed to fail.