If you’ve ever attended a management communication workshop you might have come
across the concept of the “feedback sandwich.”
At InterACT we like to refer to it as
the “Sh#t Sandwich”.
The idea is that when giving confronting feedback, managers
should sandwich it between two pieces of positive feedback: open with some
praise, then offer the critical feedback, then close with some more praise to
leave the person feeling good. It’s based on the idea that it’s easier for people to accept
negative feedback when they also hear about what’s going well.
Unfortunately, the sh#t sandwich is full of problems. Firstly,
once your employees recognize what you’re doing, they might start bracing for
criticism every time you open a conversation with praise. It can also make the
praise itself seem insincere. Or worse…kind of as an insult: like when you have
to give a dog a pill and you hide it in a piece of sausage to trick them into
swallowing.
This approach can cause the manager’s real message to be
lost, by watering down the actual feedback. Aside from the sh#t sandwich, it’s
incredibly common for managers to get so concerned about being tactful that
their message gets missed altogether. Then you’re left with a manager who feels
frustrated that their feedback didn’t work and an employee who didn’t get the
chance to hear clearly that something needs to change.
In fact, in my work as a corporate roleplay actor, I regularly talk to managers who are
frustrated about something an employee is doing and who think they’ve been
direct about the problem, but when I ask exactly what they’ve said, it turns
out they haven’t been direct at all.
By promoting the sandwich technique, we’re reinforcing
the idea that criticism is something to tiptoe around, when most managers
urgently need to see it as a normal, less emotionally charged part of their
relationships with employees so that they deliver it more often, and are clearer
when they do.
At InterACT we are teaching managers to normalize
feedback—to make it a regular part of their conversations with employees
because we believe that what managers should be going for.
There’s no catchy name like the “feedback sandwich” for it—and honestly, …it
does take more work. But it’ll drain a lot of the awkwardness and tension away
from these conversations and make the feedback far more likely to stick.
Want to know more? Contact us here for a chat.
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