How do you handle appraisal feedback you disagree with?

[Celia24]

I had a 360 work review where all colleagues in the team fed back about me. All of the comments were positive aside from one web developer who said he thinks I don't always have 'confidence' to say no to unreasonable requests from clients. (I'm a PM)

The reality is that I'm firm but fair when it comes to clients. If I think something can and should be done, I'll explore it with the team. If I think something is unreasonable then I tackle that with the client and web developers don't see that side of the conversation to make comments.

What made this worse was my manager then said 'yeah I had a similar thought the other day when you were talking about a task in the group chat'. The reality is that my boss is so hands off he isn't close to any projects but will jump in with his 2 cents without context regularly.

So basically I disagree with the feedback because I'm not afraid to challenge clients when I need to. To have a male colleague question my confidence at the appraisal has bothered me a lot, especially because I'm going for promotion. How do you handle this sort of feedback?

Presumably the web designer is the one who may have to work harder/more quickly as a consequence of your agreement to client demands, so I wouldn't take his comment to heart - sounds like he's trying to make his life a bit easier - so his agenda not yours?

@JMAngel1 yes that's right. I think that's probably the case as you say. As a woman who works mostly with men, having a guy mention my confidence is something I've taken to heart, as I always conduct myself with confidence with clients.

What bothers me more is the fact my manager piggybacked this feedback with 'I thought similar...'. He jumped into a chat giving his 2 cents on a project and got the wrong end of the stick.

The fact he will readily jump to conclusions which turn out to be wrong worry me and make me question going for the promotion under a manager like this. Maybe I'm over reacting, but it is a concern.

It's quite easy for him to make that comment, safe in the knowledge he doesn't really have to consider the client and have those difficult conversations that keep things on track and the client happy.

I would give a strong response. I was once told "people give feedback on themselves". Say this. He's objecting because you sometimes give him more work. It's not his decision which work he does that comes from a conversation between you and the client.

The way you’re emoting in this thread though smacks of a lack of confidence. If you were sure he was wrong you wouldn’t be letting it bother you so much.

@RudsyFarmer it bothers me because I'm worried about how it will affect my upcoming chance at promotion.

I think if you only got 1 negative comment from a 360, you honestly don't have anything to worry about.

It's bad form in this scenario for the manager to overly focus on the one piece of criticism from what sounds like otherwise glowing feedback.

I'd be very careful what you do next. If you appear to overreact that's going to hurt your promotion prospects a lot more than seeming to take it on board.

Maybe run the next few client requests past your boss so he can understand your reasoning.

It's a perception about you, it doesn't mean it's true. The question is why are they perceiving you as so? I hope you are not held back from a promotion due to one or two people's opinions. A decent employer should take a well rounded approach when making such decisions and talk to you about any constructive feedback that may be holding you back before making any firm decisions on whether to promote you. Don't let this consume you, I'm sure you have lots of decent qualities that outweigh these points

Has you manager set an objective related to that feedback? If not, I wouldn't worry about it as although he may see some truth in it, it's not substantial enough to warrant development.

The point of a 360 review is you get to the bottom of it to improve yourself. If a web developer who handles the work you PM feels about this then more technical people probably do too. Ask him WHY he feels like that and listen. It might be that there was a specific project where, in his opinion, there was the opportunity to be firmer with clients. Or maybe he doesn’t understand Agile working. Or maybe you aren’t documenting and governing client requests properly.

In my professional opinion as a technical lead most PMs don’t make enough of an effort to understand the technical requirements for a project & say yes or agreee timescales without checking with leads.

@MuddaUdders thanks, I'll think about what you said re why they're perceiving me so.

And I'll try not to focus on it too much, as I've had some great feedback too, but spent a lot less time thinking about that! Appreciate your comment.

I agree with this. And I don’t understand why so many people seem to find developmental feedback / constructive criticism so objectionable.

A few ways of handling it:

If you care about improving and progressing, ask about what he’s observed and how it’s impacting him and and the team and be open to listening and understanding other views. Then decide what you want to do about it.

If you want to show the right attitude for developing yourself but don’t agree with this feedback and don’t want to change what you do, say something like “perhaps this is more about visibility of the conversations I have with clients, because there’s always a healthy discussion and negotiation about the requirements of the project… how about I debrief the team on the context to help show how we arrived at decisions on scope..”

Or if you’re not bothered about politically manoeuvring around feedback and showing the leadership qualities of being able to take it on and improve, then just ignore it.

Whatever you do, don’t get defensive about it. That would mark you out as un-promotable in many companies.

As this is the only negative comment i feel you’re handling it poorly and not constructively. You’ve even reverted to basically attacking your manager and resorting to the gender difference.

i also work in a male environment and as a manager I’d be very unimpressed if someone immediately resorted to its because I’m a woman, without evidence or decided I’d no clue. I’d much rather see someone say with confidence why do you fell this way, how do we address this.

your reaction is what would make me hesitate to promote you, not the feedback.

The issue @Wenfy is that all the feedback is technically 'anonymous' although my manager joked I could probably guess who said what. So Ive guessed who said it by the description.

I do take the time to speak to the tech team re timescales because I value their knowledge and their time. I also had feedback from 3 other developers which was positive. But I will reflect on it and where they're coming from.

And I don’t understand why so many people seem to find developmental feedback / constructive criticism so objectionable.

Just because someone offers feedback, doesn't automatically mean it's valid. Some critical thinking is a perfectly reasonable response.

Yeah this would role me too. I do project management in a different area to you but equally have to do a bit of that balancing you are talking about. My first thought before I'd read the whole post even was well yes that's easy for him to say as he's not dealing with the client! And he's gonna be put out if he has to revise things or do more work.

However I couldn't bite my tounge on this. I'd say something of similar effect to my manager.

This.

Tbh, you've had one, very mild piece of feedback amongst a sea of positive - and you started a thread on mumsnet. What's the point of a feedback exercise if you're going to ignore it?

It's no trouble with your appraisal - people don't need to be perfect to move on. They do need to be self-aware, and address the challenges other people can see objectively.

At the time @Bargellobitch I did say the developer doesn't see the conversation between myself and the client and therefore not the full picture. My manager agreed that is the case.

He has admitted the project has been challenging at times because he doesn't have all the answers and needs more time to think through than other projects. This isn't an issue, he can have that time as part of the overall project.

This is his opinion. You don't need to agree but the purpose of the process is to gather other opinions.
Listen to it and take whatever value you can.
It may be that you're actually making his workload too heavy by not saying no to things.
You interpret that as listening to the client, deciding what's realistic to do and sometimes pushing the boundaries a bit.
He interprets this as not having the confidence to say no, resulting in increased workload.
You don't have to agree but reflect and try to find value in it rather than getting angry.

It's not objective, it's an opinion - the definition of subjective.

It helps me to see interviewing as a numbers game - you usually need to go through a few to land a reasonably competitive role.

I've been an interviewer/hiring manager a few times when we had at least 20 highly qualified candidates at the CV stage and 4 or 5 who interviewed well and would have been very appointable. It's disappointing for those candidates as they didn't do anything wrong, another candidate was just slightly more suitable for us.

When I'm the interviewee I mentally prepared myself for at least half a dozen interviews.

Agree with others that just because feedback is given doesn't mean it's true. In this case it sounds like there's a shared fact (that you agree things this person wouldn't like you to). He interprets this as a weakness, you interpret it as doing your job. If I was in your shoes I'd be clear about how you're calibrating your approach and basically say 'if you want me to put more priority on making it easier for the team to deliver over making clients happy I can'. It's always a trade off.

More generally agree with others best not to fixate on one criticism.

While you may be right in assuming the feedback is from X, there's a chance you could be wrong. I've had surprises in the past, shown later by someone saying, "I was the one who said abc," when I would have guessed it was another person entirely.

It's a 360. It's full of opinions. I had some people say I was easy to get on with and always helpful, but one said I was too aloof and unapproachable, so, you know... It's feedback. You can reflect on it, think about how much notice to take, and then adjust or not adjust accordingly - but if you aren't going to think it over at all, what was the point in doing it? Sometimes we come over to people differently from how we intended it.

Actually looking back I once had to walk someone through appalling feedback. He was a real marmite person and possibly undiagnosed ND, so the comments were very mixed.

I have to say my respect for him grew about tenfold by the mature way he took it on the chin.

Put me totally off getting feedback ever !