Work Face
A podcast where people finally tell the truth about work. Workplace culture expert Ben Jackson hosts refreshingly honest conversations with people from all walks of life about what actually happens on the job.
Work Face
Your Manager Is Winging It (with Melissa and Johnathan Nightingale)
Have you ever wondered what’s really happening when a manager makes you feel small? Maybe they were multitasking in a meeting, or late to a career defining conversation. What happens when people are given power without the tools to wield it responsibly? And what might our organizations look like if we invested in management competence before employees reach their breaking point?
Melissa and Johnathan Nightingale, founders of Raw Signal Group, share their experiences working for “incompetent” bosses, and explain why most managers don’t learn the basics of the job until they have no other choice.
(00:00) The Scrap of Paper
(03:25) Crying in the Bathroom Every Day
(08:30) The Manager Manager Manager
(14:26) The Tools Every Manager Needs
(20:18) The Problem with Most Feedback
(27:34) “Nobody Wants to Work Anymore”
(33:12) Management Tools vs. Leadership Bumper Stickers
(38:31) Taking Control of Your Own Career
(42:42) Building Skills and Finding Better Workplaces
Johnathan and Melissa are the founders of Raw Signal Group, world experts on management and leadership, and bestselling authors of the book “How F*cked Up Is Your Management?”
Follow Johnathan and Melissa on Bluesky, find their work at rawsignal.ca, and subscribe to their newsletter at worldsbestnewsletter.com.
See also:
Out of Office by Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen
How F*cked Up Is Your Management? by Johnathan and Melissa Nightingale
Situation-Behavior-Impact Feedback Model
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Work Face is produced by Hear Me Out, a culture strategy firm for leaders with the courage to listen. We help them cultivate trust by having real conversations with employees at all levels about what’s working and what’s not.
Learn more at hearmeout.co and follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
And the time came and went, and he didn't show up, and about ten minutes later, I was starting to doubt what's going on, maybe I got the day wrong, although I knew I didn't get the day wrong. And he came in and he sat down, and I'm like, "this is it," and he takes a piece of paper out, and he puts it on the table. Not a full piece of paper, like a torn off, like a scrap piece of paper. I don't know why that detail is so important to me, but I still remember it. And on that piece of paper, he had written, 2.5%. And then below that, a number that I pretty quickly realized was, was my new salary. And he slid it across the table, and he said, "Do you have any questions?"
Benjamin:Have you ever wondered what's really happening when a manager makes you feel small? Maybe they were multitasking in a meeting, or late to a career defining conversation. What happens when people are given power without the tools to wield it responsibly? And what might our organizations look like if we invested in management competence before employees reach their breaking point? I'm Ben Jackson and this is Work Face, a podcast where people finally tell the truth about work. Our guests today are Johnathan and Melissa Nightingale. Johnathan and Melissa are the founders of Raw Signal Group, bestselling authors, and world experts on management and leadership. Johnathan and Melissa, welcome to the show.
Melissa:Thanks, Ben.
Johnathan:Thank you.
Benjamin:It's really great to have you here. We've known each other for what? Uh, about eight months or so now.
Johnathan:Going back to Portland last year, yeah.
Benjamin:Yeah. Um, do you want to share with the listeners? How did we meet?
Melissa:Uh, we met at XOXO Fest, at the very, very last XOXO Fest in Portland, Oregon.
Johnathan:Yeah, if your listeners don't know about XOXO, I'm sorry for them that there aren't any more, but it was a really magical collection of people trying to make cool things happen happen on the internet.
Melissa:And we were there because we make cool things about work happen on the internet, and Ben, you were there because you make cool things about work happen on the internet, and we were like, "A lot of people are here for other reasons, right?" Like not sort of cool things about work, but we noticed that you were there and I was like, "This is, this, this person is our person." Like, we need to just message and say hi. And I think I wrote you, I don't know, maybe it was sort of like an hour or two and I was like, "Hi, we're here , you're here too. Let's say hi."
Johnathan:Also, it's like, it's a niche, right? There are not too many people who treat work as a cool thing.
Benjamin:Yeah, it really felt like we were, um, the only two people who do what we do in a group of incredibly creative people. And I think that, you know, all three of us are also creative in our own ways. And I'll also note for the listeners, I was actually familiar with your work. Before you reached out to me, um, because I, I read about you in, uh, Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Peterson's book out of office where they interviewed you for a part of the book.
Melissa:Lovely.
Johnathan:That was a great conversation.
Melissa:That was a really good conversation. Charlie really wanted to know about work and why everything was so upside down. We're like, "Oh man, we got a lot on why it's all upside down."
Benjamin:Yeah. Um, well, that seems like a nice transition into my first question for the two of you. Um, and perhaps Melissa, you could go first, and Johnathan, you can go second. This is our first time doing a podcast with, with two guests. So we'll have two stories. Um, and and we'll see how it goes.
Melissa:We’ll do our best to share. Yeah.
Benjamin:Yeah, well, I'll share the floor. Um, well, so Melissa, why don't you go first? What do you remember about the first time you felt insecure in the workplace?
Melissa:So it's funny, right? Like I, um, very early in my career, I got a job, um, as an intern, right? Which is like pretty, pretty common stuff, right? You're still sort of doing undergrad, you're doing your studies, you're learning about a thing. And it's really nice to put it into practice while you're learning it. And so like, had this internship and the person that I was reporting to pulled me aside. And she said, "Hey, uh, I got a new job, which means your internship is about to end because I'm the person in charge of internships." But, and like, this is such a moment of sponsorship. She's like, "But as part of my interview process at the new role, I told them that you were really great and that I would run their intern program." And so she's like, "I have this new role and I'm switching jobs. But if you want to interview, they're hiring for an intern." And I'm like,"I would, I would still be able to work with you." "You'd have a bunch of other people that you're working with, too." I was like, "This is sort of great, right?" Like opportunities that fall into your lap as a student are incredibly, incredibly rare. So it's like, "Okay, I will interview." Interviewed. Lo and behold, got the job. Really nice. Start working. Um, and I have a familiar face, right? Like my, my, one of my direct supervisors is somebody I know really well. There are about five other people that I'm supporting. Four of them are incredibly, incredibly lovely. And one of them is terrible. And terrible in like all of the ways that early occupational hazing happens. Terrible in like anything I, I send over, she asks me to do a thing. Anything I send over, she's like, "This is wrong. This isn't correct." Not "Here's how you could improve," but like with screaming like full on. And so my first two weeks in this role, I don't think I know how to spell my name anymore, right? Like, I am crying in the bathroom every single day. I am going home at night being like,"Have I picked the wrong major? Am I in the wrong field? Like, this is just not, something is not right here." But my work is like, yeah, Okay, and the other with the other sort of five bosses, but this boss in particular is really, really rough. Um, anyway, so we get to the end of like my first two weeks where I'm crying in the bathroom basically on a daily basis. And there's a party for this person who's like, just hazing the shit out of me. Um, and I come to realize that, like, it is her last day. That that was her last day in the role. And what I figure out later is that my first day. Is the day that she gave notice. That her notice period was my onboarding period. And, in terms of sort of like lessons long lived as a boss, what she chose to do with her notice period and .My onboarding period was to make my life absolutely miserable. It got better after she left
Benjamin:God, I'm, I'm, I'm really sorry to hear that. You know, I'm curious, how did that impact you outside of you questioning your abilities? Like what other kind of impact did that have on you at work or outside of work?
Melissa:i mean it was a role where i had been brought in for prior success, so like in terms of the head spin of it like to be brought in. In part because somebody liked your work and esteemed your work, and go through an interview process and have other folks say, like, "this feels like a really good fit," and then start day one. Um, like, it, it shrunk me and my belief in my abilities in really profound ways within those first two weeks, right? Like, in terms of, like, being willing to take big swings, like, we talked to bosses about this stuff all day, every day, but I was not taking big swings. I was like, "I just want to sort of disappear," and mostly anytime I send work to this person. You sort of wince, you wait.
Johnathan:Defensive crouch.
Melissa:Yeah, totally.
Benjamin:Was there anything else that you learned after the fact, beyond the fact that this person was in their notice period, that helped add any color to the way they were behaving or explain a little bit more of that behavior?
Melissa:I mean, in terms of like specifics, like I did not know that that person had been passed over for a promotion and that they were leaving with like some, some form of like contention and dissatisfaction. It wasn't at me. Like, in terms of life lessons, it had absolutely nothing to do with me. I was just the most junior person nearby.
Benjamin:And did you share how you were feeling with any of the other people who you were responsible to or any of your coworkers?
Melissa:Nope. Absolutely not. I think in part because like at the time I really felt like, um, I wanted to prove that I could do it. Yeah. And so I really felt like I wanted to, like I wanted to show up in a professional way. And so if you complain about sort of what is unacceptable behavior, but you don't learn as a junior person, you don't learn what acceptable workplace behavior is until way later, and often you learn it through counterexample. And so like, this is one of many counterexamples in terms of things that like, you know, you look at like, As sort of a, an early career person, be like, that really wasn't okay.
Benjamin:Did you ever speak to that manager ever again after they left the company?
Melissa:Never, but I still know her name.
Benjamin:We won't ask you to share that. Um, Johnathan, what about you? What do you remember about the first time you felt insecure in the workplace?
Johnathan:Really differently. Um, so, uh, after I graduated university, my first job was at IBM. And it was me writing code and it was a slower pace than I expected. But that's okay. I liked the people I worked with. And my, um, my manager was sort of like my, like my "manager", right? Like he, he wasn't really, um, we didn't have a lot of what I would consider certainly now to be management conversations. He was, he was senior to me. He was technical. He helped show me, you know, how to get things done there and stuff like that.
Benjamin:I'll just note for the listeners, you put some big air quotes around that "manager."
Johnathan:Audible "manager" right, yeah. Just, um, but I knew, that annually, I would have a meeting with his manager. And that guy was like, a manager manager manager manager. What IBM would call a"profile-holding" manager So I'd been working there for 11 months and I saw this calendar invite show up and it had a conflict with something else, but it didn't matter. Like if this was my time, then when I was going to get clarity on anything, I'm like, what am I, what am I, what's my future here? What should I be doing? What should I be focusing on? Right? I cleared the decks around that because it was important and I didn't know what to expect I didn't get any really priming ahead of time, but, but that was okay, cause this is where it was going to happen and we were in a brand new building. Um, and I still remember the, the number on the room, right? And I remember going to like D-3324 and sitting there in this little interview room. And if you've ever been in a tech office, you know, they've got all these little sort of 2-person rooms with glass walls, but with frosting. for privacy or whatever. But it's clear at the bottom or the top, and so I was sitting there in that room, I got there 10 minutes early, to make sure I got the room, and I was watching all these feet go by, right, just back and forth. all my colleagues and stuff, walking by. Some of them I could recognize by their shoes. I didn't know, what this guy was wearing, so everytime shoes would walk by, I was like, is this the guy, somebody would stop, and I would like, you could feel the anxiety, I guess? The like, "what's this gonna be?" Right? Uh, mostly positive.. But like, still anticipation. And the time came and went, and he didn't show up, and about ten minutes later, I was starting to doubt what's going on, maybe I got the day wrong, although I knew I didn't get the day wrong. And he came in and he sat down, and I'm like, "this is it," and he takes a piece of paper out, and he puts it on the table. Not a full piece of paper, like a torn off, like a scrap piece of paper. I don't know why that detail is so important to me, but I still remember it. And on that piece of paper, he had written, 2.5%. And then below that, a number that I pretty quickly realized was, was my new salary. Right? It was like my old salary plus two and a half percent. This is my raise. And he slid it across the table, and he said, "Do you have any questions?" And I said, "No." Which like, I think I probably did have a lot of questions, but like what I remember saying in that moment was no, because either I have grossly misunderstood what is going on here, or this is the prelude to a conversation and I just, I don't need to quibble about my salary right now, I want to get to like, what is my place here and what is my place here? And how am I being seen in this organization? And so I said "No." And he said, "Ok great, well I got a lot of these to do and so like keep it up and I'll see you around." And he walked out. And I just had to sit with like,"What the hell just happened?"
Benjamin:A scrap of paper.
Johnathan:A scrap of paper! And you know, like, Melissa's talking about a story of, like, yelling. And this was not yelling. This was, this was an act of omission. Right? There's just, like, it's all the things that weren't said in that room that could have been said in that room that left me just totally uncertain about, like, what is my, what is my future here? What should I be doing? What should I be caring about? Does anybody care about me?
Benjamin:How did that scrap of paper make you feel? What did that signal to you as an employee?
Johnathan:You know, my direct manager tried to contextualize it after the fact and say, well, you know, like the, the allocation per employee was only 2%. So 2. 5 percent is a big deal. It's a signal that you're sort of above medium there. Rising star scrap of paper. Outstanding. Um, and I, I tried to honor what he was saying to me, but like the overall impact of it was still like, this is it that like nobody, the, the care that I had, the questions that I had that I thought, okay, well, they don't go to my manager, but they go to my profile holding manager that that care just wasn't there. There was like, you know, There was some, some debate in some meeting room about which, which number should go in this cell of the spreadsheet. Uh, and I flatter myself to imagine that there was debate, but like, but that that's as much as it was. And it felt really sad. It felt very demotivating. And you, you never, we talk to bosses about this all the time in our programs. You do not want to pay someone more to demotivate them. It is a bad compensation strategy, right? But like people do it all the time. They bobble these things. That are so important to the employee because often for the manager, it's at the end of a bunch of spreadsheet wrangling and it's really been sort of abstracted away from the human. And that's sort of how I felt.
Benjamin:You know, it's fascinating to me how the fact that, you know, this was a scrap of paper and not a full piece of paper has stuck with you for so long. And I'm really curious, what does that symbolize for you? The fact that this manager, um, did not even go so far as to bring an entire sheet of paper to that conversation. What did that symbolize for you?
Johnathan:I guess it landed as like ad hoc. That like, you know, you can imagine, especially in a company like IBM, you can imagine a three page template that's all just like sort of garbage, right? But that says like, you know, thank you for your work, which has been rated a blah, pursuant to the following, you're getting this, and like, here's when it will be like, you know, the HR and legal could poof one of those up. I don't need three pages of bullshit. But the flip side, you know, both the piece of paper and the, the way it was delivered, just landed like… like, that was a thing that he knew he needed to do, but he wanted to spend as little time on as possible, because it wasn't important. Uh, and, and I don't know what it is about a small piece of paper that makes it feel that way, where a big piece of paper wouldn't, but it just, it felt like it was lacking any kind of care.
Benjamin:Almost like on the way out of his office to go to this meeting, he thought, "Oh, you know, what is this person worth? Oh, let me just grab a little scrap and write a number," kind of as if it were done at the last minute, is what I'm hearing.
Johnathan:And to depersonalize it, right? Like, why is it on a piece of paper? Like I know now. It's that like a lot of managers are very bad talking about money. A lot of people bring a lot of sort of emotion to money. And it's challenging in an employment context where you have power around other people to engage in a like verbal eye contact based conversation about money. And so they write it down and they slide it across and they allow you to process it and say, do you have any questions? Because it's sort of really hoping that you don't, so that we can all get about our day and forget the fact that like my labor here is what pays for groceries or whatever, and get back to spreadsheets.
Benjamin:What do the two of you think that these stories might have in common?
Melissa:We talk to bosses all day, every day, like there's a reason that this is our, our sort of collective day job. Um, and part of the thing that we find is that like, very few folks remember what it was like to be new. That the more senior you get, the more you want to pretend you've always been incredibly senior. And the more you get to the executive table, the more you want to sort of like, occupy that space, throw your arms out, like take up a lot of room and pretend like that has always been the way of it. And for a lot of leaders that we encounter, they end up in really strange spots because they forget what it is likely that you know when you're coming into an organization, whether like you've worked before. And sometimes people haven't. Sometimes it's really their very first job. Or whether you're coming into that organization, right? Like Johnathan talked about the difference between IBM and scrappy startups, right? Like if you went from IBM to a scrappy startup, you could have a boss who said, "I don't understand how you don't know this. Like you've worked other places." You're like, "Yes, but the context was really, really different." And so many folks lead from this place where they just presuppose like a giant chunk of knowledge that when you dig into it, you're like, once upon a time, like, I, I knew nothing about how the workplace worked, so much so that like, I wasn't sure if it was okay to tell anybody that someone was yelling constantly.
Johnathan:And I think like the layer that I would put on top of it, not only do they not remember what it was like to be young, which is for sure, or new, which is for sure true of both of these, but um, They are also incompetent and like, it's this word that hits for a lot of people, like an insult, right? Like I'm saying willfully incompetent or like grievously, whatever I'm saying is they lacked competency. It is a, you are not a competent manager if you're screaming at people and putting them in a defensive crouch, not because I said so, but because when Melissa talks about like her work performance as a result, it suffers. Your number one job as a manager is to get great work. From your team. Right. And if you, if you engage in a context that damages, that you are lacking competency. And ditto for me that like you spent money to make me less motivated. It's, that's a miss.
Melissa:And lacking competence in that, like that, that like in a skip level moment to not understand the weight of you as somebody skip level manager showing up at a conference room with them to talk about performance and treat it in a rushed manner, you're like, it makes a lot of sense. If you spend any time with it at all, you're like, "How often do you talk to this person? Like, who are you in relation to? Like, how much power do you hold over their future within the organization?" Like, you can, you can get bosses there relatively quickly, but, but I think Johnathan's got it exactly right, which is like, you're really starting from a sort of incompetent starting point.
Benjamin:It's funny, you know, the word that's occurring to me as we talk through this is it sounds like both of those managers in their own way were remarkably cavalier in their approach to dealing with each of you.
Melissa:I feel like I would have taken more cavalier.
Johnathan:Yeah, I think, I think I hear what you're getting at. That like, um, both of them, you know, Melissa just touched on it. That like, you can get bosses to grapple with the fact that management roles involve power, but most of them do not do it by default. Most of them hide from it, right? For every boss out there, who's like trying to build their own little fiefdom where they control everything, we've worked with a thousand who wish no one would ever mention it. Who still want to go out for drinks with the team, despite getting promoted and now managing the team, right? But the cavalierness that you're pointing to comes from that same place that if I don't engage with the power that I have. If I don't want to talk about it or grapple with what it means for me to be blasé, or what it means for me to scream at someone substantially junior to me, then, then yeah, it lands as cavalier, because I haven't given it the appropriate weight.
Melissa:You should say out loud that like most bosses that we meet are not trying to screw up their organizations and they're not trying to screw up their teams. Like more often than not, when we're talking to leaders about what's going on inside their organizations, they often have a sense that they're like, it's not going exactly as I, I would like it to, I don't necessarily know what to do about that. It's mostly just about like, okay, now what do I do instead? Like I have these tools and they may be like sort of half broken and in the corner and like, you know, put together with duct tape, but that's like what I've got. And so unless you're ready to give me something new, like I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep using them even though they're not working that well.
Benjamin:Well, let's talk about something new. Let's talk a little bit about the programs that the two of you put together for managers. I'm really curious, in your programs with managers, are there any insights that you have found are especially surprising to these bosses? Um, about their relationship to power.
Melissa:I just think like, most people underestimate how much attention their people are paying. Like the number of bosses where we're like if you're in a zoom window and you are in a one on one with a direct report, right? Like, let's say you're having a conversation. You're in a hybrid or remote workforce. The lighting on your face changes. And you start sort of like typing at the bottom of the screen? 100 percent of the time, your person can see it. And 100 percent of the time, like, they're trying to figure out what to do with it.
Johnathan:Over and over again, we use this thing where, you know, we'll, we'll ask them some question about like, you know, how does this land or, or how, how do you think your, your team thinks about this and you get an answer and then you're like, "Well, how would you feel if your boss did it to you?" And they're like, "Oh, hate that." Okay, cool. Like, let's dive into that a little bit. Right. You talk about something like, you know, one on ones and structured agendas and you say, you know, like. Agendas can be helpful. They can be a gift. They feel stiff before you roll them out. But often when people have them, they, they find that it's, it's a place to park things so that they don't have to carry them emotionally. people are like, "I don't know. I feel like if I roll that out with people, they're going to, they're just going to clam up." And I'm like, "well, does your own manager use one with you?" And like, "Oh yeah, absolutely. In fact, I use it. Cause it's really helpful to have a place to park all that stuff." And we're like, "Outstanding. I just need you to talk to you for 30 seconds ago." There's this weird thing where the, the practice of management is sort of divorced from the experience of management of being managed. And if you can unlock that, if you can help them reconnect that something important hits on empathy, then there's this immediate, there's this like cascade of like, "Oh, I get it." And then immediately afterwards, they're like, "Shit, I need like 30 more tools immediately because like. Now I'm starting to think about all the experiences that I've had and how am I going to show up for my people better?"
Benjamin:What are some of the ways that they build that actual competency, either through the programs that you're running or, or even after the programs?
Melissa:The number one tool that bosses don't have, but really need is reflection, is "I was in that meeting and it didn't go as planned and I left that meeting and I went into my next meeting and I went to my next meeting and my next meeting and my next meeting and by the time I got to the end of the day, I like should have spent some time thinking about how that meeting was going to read on every other meeting and cascade through my day. But I didn't because I was running," and so for a lot of the leaders that we work with, one of the biggest struggles is like, the "I have a new tool. I put it into practice. It does the thing. I start to generalize like I can use that tool and sort of more situations than just the narrow one where I was using it," and then things get better within organizations. But for a lot of leaders, the like the "I do a thing, and then this thing happens," loop is super broken, because I do a thing and I have no time to think about like "Mhm, what actually happened, and what I wanted to have happen instead." Like, the the reflection loop there is really broken.
Johnathan:Yeah, it's funny in any other practice or trade or whatever, part of learning it is learning, you know a hundred tools. Most people in management roles. didn't go to school for management, right? They, they did get all that trade training. They got it in engineering. They got it in like persuasive communications. They got taught a craft. And so, you know, to your question and to Melissa's point, like, one of the things we have to do is sort of, it's like, here are some tools and these tools will relieve pain for you because they will make a difficult thing easier because like, because management wasn't invented yesterday. Smart teams really want to dive in on the research. Um, but sometimes they don't. They're just like, give me more tools that I can apply. And then the more you do that, the more you start to be able to actually reflect on things.
Benjamin:You know, we've talked a lot about tools, but we haven't actually named any of these tools. What are some of the tools?
Melissa:Delivering structured feedback. A lot of leaders get themselves really hung up, particularly if I was your peer and now I am your boss. It is incredibly difficult for me to tell you that your work is maybe not exactly what I expected your work to be. And so if you turn it in and I'm like, oh, no, it's not really what I thought it was going to be. And we worked side by side for so long and we complained about our last boss. So I don't want to be like our last boss. I don't want to be like sort of giving you a hard time. Uh, but also I do need some way to tell you. That the thing that you just turned in or submitted is like, not quite what I thought it was going to be. And for a lot of leaders, they get like, so turned around and tied up in knots about the idea of like, how difficult it will be to deliver, how hard it might be on our relationship, how much like, how it might hurt your feelings that as a employee in that organization. Um, you often get none of the feedback that you need. Um, and it is a particularly dangerous situation to be reporting to what is a former peer because like you need feedback in order to grow in your craft. But like that person feels really like a lot of struggle around giving it to you and feedback for a lot of leaders is the thing that unlocks it.
Johnathan:And you can pull on any part of the workplace and there's a bunch of those, right, so like lots of organizations use goals, but most goals end up being a wordsmithing exercise. So how do we use goals that actually do what they're supposed to do in terms of clarity and psychological safety in terms of what's expected of me and prioritization, right? We talked about compensation earlier, like compensation is the thing that can be negotiated and sort of managed 100 different ways. But like, if you understand how to calibrate, if you understand how to sort of have the internal conversations that need to happen between HR between executives with employees in terms of how we pay and what our strategy is for doing that in an equitable way, like there are systems out there. There are ways of talking about that stuff. It's just, it's not something you learn when you're learning computer science, right? It's a, it's a different set of skills.
Melissa:If I understand as a boss that like, my job is to make my team effective then like, my next question is like "Effective at what?" Do we have a clear articulation of what the organization is trying to do, which a lot of leaders lead without knowing right? It is very common to be like you're promoted into management. That's so great and never ask. Like, what are we trying to get done here?
Johnathan:Yeah, and it feeds into everything, right? How do you design your team? How do you, how do you understand the trade offs that organizations make that, like, you know, everybody thinks a flat organization is great. Well, let's talk about the trade offs there, right? What's the difference between mentoring and coaching and how do those differences feed into a career conversation that you're having with people before sponsorship even makes sense, right?
Melissa:What do you do the first time you try and promote someone and they say they don't want that promotion? Which so happens, and like a lot of the the counterintuitive pieces right it's like you're promoting somebody you're offering them a salary bump like surely they should be elated and then they're not you're like oh no now what?
Johnathan:There's there's hundreds right? One of the ones that is often like we often find missing and it surprises me is that very few people train on firing and I don't understand other than from a place where, like, of course I understand, but like other than from a place of hiding from power.
Melissa:And people will script you for the layoffs, right? Like they'll, they'll hand you a script for a layoff, but like, that's often the, the sum total of what people get.
Benjamin:I want to dig into feedback in particular, which is the first tool that you mentioned and something that I have seen a lot of managers, a lot of leaders, really everybody in the workplace struggle with. Would it be possible for you to just share an example of what ineffective feedback sounds like and perhaps what the more effective version of that same feedback might sound like?
Melissa:Sure. We'll give you two. Because feedback isn't all negative. So two examples of like, feedback that is common in organizations that I guarantee like, your listeners have probably at least like seen or observed, somewhere within their organization within the last like, 6 to 12 months. A common piece of feedback that's positive: " Hey, thanks."
Johnathan:Nothing wrong with saying thank you. That is feedback. It's a response to your work. It's a missed opportunity.
Melissa:Okay, well, let me give him the negative one and then we can talk about missed opportunities. Okay, so, common piece of negative feedback?"You're an asshole."
Johnathan:Rarely that direct, but often some version of that delivered. Certainly, people will message somebody else and say, "Sam is an asshole." But, um, but neither of those succeeds in driving lasting change, because they're really ambiguous about, um, what's driving the feedback.
Melissa:So I think if you come to me and you're like, "Melissa, you're being an asshole," like, short of like the most self aware person within your organization. That person's gonna be like,"no, you are being an asshole."
Johnathan:Also, "shut up." Also, "I have to go." Right? Like, and the, like, managers can anticipate that. And so they don't, you know, they're like, "I'm, I'm certain that I don't want to give that feedback." There's a tool called SBI that we find a lot of managers really respond to.
Benjamin:And what does that stand for?
Johnathan:Situation, behavior, impact.
Melissa:You know my own boss reaching out and saying "hey thanks," I’m like, "Ok."
" Johnathan:For what?" And maybe if it's "Hey, thanks," I can engage in that conversation. But like, it only takes a little bit of thought to pull it forward and be like,"Look, the last week has been a mess for all of us... Situation. "I saw you helping Sam deal with like his code that wasn't working properly..." Behavior. "I really appreciate that because Sam's new here. And also like, I would always rather you mentor the more junior people on the team than worry about just completing your own tickets. Like that was the right call. And I just wanted to say, thank you."
Melissa:If I get that versus, "Hey, thanks," I now have a much better sense of what is valued within my organization, what my manager's expectations are, and it generalizes. I actually now know, you know, I did this one time. It had a positive impact and like my manager has the expectation that I'm going to keep doing that going forward.
Johnathan:People get uncomfortable with it, they're like "isn't that needlessly structured?" And if you just want to say "hey thanks," just say "hey thanks." But like, one thing we find is that when people are managing people who were very recently peers, praise is often a thing they struggle with, because they worry that their former peers are going to receive it as patronizing, that like if I say "Hey, great job on that." You'd be like, "Fuck you. Like last week we were all doing this thing together." And that sometimes it's helpful to be like, "I really appreciate where you stepped in there. I would, going to say something and it wasn't going to be as good as what you said. And like, here's why," right? Getting into that habit of clocking. sIt shouldbe specific to a situation. Not generally, "this is something about your personality." We should be able to point to the behavior that happened, and we should be able to articulate the impact. Those are things managers miss out on all the time.
Benjamin:What about the negative version of that? You're an asshole.
Melissa:So, some color on "you're an asshole." Uh, again, SBI, right? Like, the, you're an asshole often takes excavation. Because what's happened in that moment is that, like, you, as a very smart, wonderful human, have already generalized, it's just like a trend, it's not a situation. So we tell leaders like, push for like, what, what are we actually talking about?"So in this morning's stand up…"
Johnathan:Situation
Melissa: Behavior:"I saw you interrupt Alex multiple times to ask questions of other people in the room."
Johnathan:That's behavior.
Melissa: Impact:"I felt embarrassed, because that's not the kind of team that I want to be. And we have a value around inclusion. And Alex is new here."
Johnathan:If I'm the one receiving that feedback, I still know I screwed up. It's not like SBI insulates me. It really doesn't. It's very clear I have done something, like, I felt embarrassed is not, is not a situation in the world that I should be trying to create, right? Violating our value on inclusion is not a thing that I would wake up in the morning and say, here's the thing that I'm going to undermine today. So it's very clear that, that I have screwed up, but there isn't much that you can argue with. If you deliver that thing and you just stop and you hold it and you've done a good job of articulating a specific situation and behavior and the impact, your person will be like, " Shit."
Melissa:"I was just really excited about something that like, you know, Sasha said, and I wanted to get back to it."
Benjamin:You know, something that stuck out to me that you said just a moment ago, this idea that most people show up to work and really want to do a good job. That's something that I believe with deep conviction. And it's also something that I don't know if every manager or even the majority of managers would necessarily agree with that. I'm thinking of the managers who I have heard say things like,"No one wants to work anymore."
Johnathan:Outstanding
Benjamin:Right? And, my impression is that the further you go up the org charts, the more distance you put between yourself and, some of the people with the least power in the organization, the assumptions about other people's motivations tend to just get more and more and more cynical and pessimistic the higher you, you go in an organization. Is that something that the two of you have seen in your practice?
Melissa:In both directions, I would say like, yes, we see folks really sort of, not like just, really underestimating like, how much their folks would how up and want to do wonderful, wonderful work if only they, one, had like a shared expectation of what wonderful work looked like, like sometimes we're just really like well past sort of talking past each other in terms of what it is to do the role and do the role extremely well. And then in the flip side, like we often work with venture backed startups. And we will hear from organizations where people are extremely, extremely frustrated with their co founders or their CEO while they are fundraising in part because, like, organizationally it creates like a really, really common and expected and anticipated bottleneck. So you end up with folks who are like, shifting focus and not particularly operational in that moment, right? They're often out sort of having a bunch of meetings and they get back. They're like 2am from the hotel. Everything's different. And you're like, "Okay, what are we supposed to do with that?" So you end up with frustration sort of in both directions.
Johnathan:Yeah, I think, the calcification that you're talking about where like the more senior you get, the more entrenched you can get in this belief that you're surrounded by idiots. Um, Yeah. Yeah. Is it's like comforting self deception. And an interesting thing about it is that you will find very few, if any successful and beloved leaders who feel that way. That you can, you can comfort yourself with it, and the more, you know, you talk about like up the org chart and the more distance you have, but like another frame of that, that we keep coming back to is the more power you have over those people, right? The more you have to deal with one of two realities. Either everybody is just getting progressively more useless over time, there's something in the water, whatever. Right? Or I am doing a worse job. And like that second thing about like this organization isn't reflecting what I care about. I must have work to do. Right. That like, that if, if it has suddenly occurred. That like I'm very senior and nobody is capable of doing things anymore. Like, what does that mean for me?
Melissa:I'll give you an example. Uh, we work with leaders all the time, particularly very senior leaders who are like, "My team has no sense of urgency. We are on fire. We are getting hammered in a competitive context. Like we have sort of like big players breathing down our neck and like, I am up like all night, every night thinking about this. And my team is like, complaining about the yogurt in the kitchen. And I just cannot." And you're like, "Cool." And so we get, we get a lot of that. Right. Like, and we're like, all right,"well, talk to us about your goals system your goals structure within your organization." And they're like, "well,"
Johnathan:"That's a weird thing to ask about."
Melissa:"It's a weird thing to ask about. Why are you asking about that? I guess we tried like OKRs a year ago or so. It didn't work. I think they still do them in engineering. I'm not really sure." And we're like, "Cool, that is the source of the sense of urgency for your organization." Like you've got strategic context about like, What's happening in the market, but it's not making its way to like day to day people typing on keyboards. And the reason it isn't is because like, you're missing a tool. And like, I know, but we keep talking about tools, but we're like, there's a, there's a way that we get, like, we need to run in this direction. We need to run real fast. We don't just scream at people. Like the way that we communicate that inside organizations is that we, we set goals. We talk about the framing and the like context behind those goals, and then we set about hitting them.
Johnathan:In our first book, Melissa wrote a chapter called "Obvious to You is Not the Same As Obvious." And the more senior someone gets, the more we have to quote it out them, right? When they really internalize it, you can see a penny drop and it is the same thing where like, they're like, "Crap, how do I get it out of my head? Like, should I, should I do videos? Should I do all hands meetings?" We're like, sure, great, fine. But like, you're going to need to spell out the implications of it. It's one thing to say, "Facebook has taken an interest in our space. And so it's about to get a lot hotter around here." But like, if none of it makes it to us because the mechanisms and organizations for communicating what's important, what's, what's on the plan, what's off the plan, how are we readjusting work and communicating that to people so that they understand their role in it? Like, if you're doing any of that, cause you're just so furious that nobody wants to work anymore.
Melissa:Start there, start there, like start there. Right. And, and for a lot of folks, like our, our most senior leaders, I'd say it's very similar to sort of our, our middle managers and our folks who are doing it for the very first time, which is just like, let's try this tool. See it goes,
Johnathan:Blame us if you want. Say you're going to try it for a month, cause the Raw Signal Group people said to do it or whatever and like, see what happens.
Melissa:But the, um, the self diagnosis is like the, um, the, like people will point to things like nobody wants to work anymore. And we're like, "well, let's, let's talk about it." Right. Um, and for a lot of folks, like the sort of bumper sticker version is easier than the, the introspection. And we do a lot of push on, like, let's talk about what's actually going on here.
Benjamin:I love the, uh, turn of phrase, the bumper sticker version.
Melissa:There are no shortage of management and leadership bumper stickers. You could have, like, fleets of cars just covered in them."Management is about doing things right, and leadership is about doing the right things."
Johnathan:Like we should just be at a beat poetry slam. You will not find any successful manager anywhere who has not figured out some fundamentals of leadership. You will not find any successful leader anywhere who has not either figured out a lot of what it takes to manage an organization or surrounded themselves with people who have, because like, they're not meaningfully separable in terms of the outcomes of your organization. If you don't have both well in hand, ideally within the same human, because it's totally possible to do, you're going to fail. But usually when people bring that particular bumper sticker out, it's to shit all over management.
Benjamin:I'm really curious, because not every team has the benefit of bringing you in to run one of your programs. And frankly, not every team even has the benefit of a leader who is interested in investing in any kind of management training. What advice might you give to a manager who sincerely wants to do better, but for whatever reason, um, just doesn't have the opportunity to attend one of your courses or whose leadership team really is not supporting those needs?
Johnathan:There's a stat floating around out there, the average manager, gets promoted, gets their first management role about 12 years before they get their first management training. So many people administering the responsibilities of management, the authority of management, the obligations of management from a place of, of really missing that fundamental, not just us, like any training, right? And so one thing I would say is like, change your inputs as fast as you can, start getting some of that stuff coming to you.
Melissa:And one of the things that we find is that, like, peer mentorship is incredibly fun.
Johnathan:Yeah, it's, really need to assemble a of sort of inputs there, like it would be nice if someone could just walk you through it and say here's what it is, but if it's not that, you sort of have to treat it like other interests, like if you got really into Birding or Pokemon or whatever. And so part of it is if you're going to cash that paycheck, you need that skillset.
Melissa:Will say the thing that has me incredibly optimistic is that we started Rossignol Group in 2017 and we only received and fielded calls from people who were organizing management training from a like top down, Perspective, uh, starting about or four years ago, we began receiving calls from people who are organizing management training from a bottom up perspective. They tried to put leaders into management role, as I said to their like, folks, you know, like, congratulations, you're getting promoted and people negotiated as part of the moment of promotion that they would take the role. But only if they got training and I was not that smart, like the moment that I got promoted into management, I was like, thank you. That's great. I'm so excited. That's wonderful. Um, but I, I take it as a point of profound optimism that people are stepping into that role and having a much better appreciation for what it means, much better appreciation for the ways that it can go very sideways and saying like in a moment of, of good, like healthy negotiation with their employer, like I will do this. But we're going to make sure together that I have the skills that I need. I know
Benjamin:sounds like fantastic advice, um, for anybody who is going into a new role, uh, whether it's managing or leadership or a completely new field. Um, what advice would each of you give to your former selves? From these moments that we talked about at the beginning of the conversation, and I'm curious, what advice would each of you give to each other's former self?
Johnathan:For myself, , I would have just pulled myself aside and said, nobody is going to care about your career more than you do. That you can't externalize that. It's not fair. It's not right that your manager is like totally asleep at the switch in terms of what their job is here. That's, that's not fair. You're entitled to better than that. And. Hoping that your fairy God boss is going to have the answers for the future of your career and stuff is not nearly as effective a strategy as like go out, have 10 conversations, pay attention to people who are doing cool work who are more senior than you, ask them how they got there. They will not all answer your email or take your coffee invite or whatever, but like go figure some of it out. I was slower to do that work than I should have been because I really felt like that's a manager's job and like it. That can be true and still not praxis.
Benjamin:And Johnathan, what, what advice would you give to Melissa from from her moment?
Johnathan:It's harder. I feel like, you know, you want to say the pat thing, which is like, you should talk to HR. That's unacceptable. That's hard advice to give because when you walk into an HR office, you, you can get a lot of different responses. And some of them are exactly what I would hope. And some of them are not. And if it doesn't go well, know what your alternative is, because it may not. And that, in a lot of ways makes the abuse worse. Sorry, that's gloomy. I don't have a position. It's like,
Benjamin:No, I prefer
Johnathan:Melissa's gonna be like, Get bent! What the hell?
Benjamin:I, I prefer true and gloomy to untrue and cheery
Melissa:Fair.
Benjamin:Melissa.
Melissa:So, advice for my past self? I want to say I've got a, a solve for bad bosses, um, but I think like part of the reason that Johnathan and I came to this work, but I'll speak sort of for myself and personally that I came to do this work where like is near obsessive levels with helping managers have more of the skills that they need to have things go well more of the time, um, is from personal lived experience of things not going well. The vast majority of the time that I worked for some people who are really not good actors and I can tell a really good story about like I probably met them within the 12 year window where like they had been promoted, and had the title, and had the power but didn't have the skills and I can rationally now many years on say like, oh, I definitely met you within that window, but as an employee, it doesn't help you so much if you're meeting someone within that window.
Benjamin:And what advice would you give to Johnathan?
Melissa:Get the fuck out of IBM. You're so much better than that job, you're so much better than waiting for like somebody to tell you with a small scrap of paper like, what they think your value is like, that person had no fucking idea.
Johnathan:That's great advice.
Benjamin:Fantastic advice. Um, and that feels like a wonderful place for us to land the plane. I have a couple more questions before I let you go first. Um, where can our listeners find you on the Internet?
Johnathan:Number one place to find us, is probably our newsletter. It’s free, we’re not trying to upsell you to a monetized version of it, or whatever, but we write about management topics writ large, right? Like interrogating power and stuff, but also sometimes applying it to something that's happening in the world.
Melissa:We have been writing that newsletter for nearly eight years. So you can find not only the subscription link at worldsbestnewsletter.com, but you can find eight years of archives. Uh, and we are newly on Bluesky. I am @shappy S-H-A-P-P-Y on Bluesky, and basically anywhere else where I got there first.
Johnathan:I'm Johnathan, as you would expect, although spelled funnily, but you'll figure it out. Benjamin: We'll link those And the last thing is, you know, is there anything else that we haven't talked about that you think our listeners might want to know?
Melissa:Oh, that like it gets better, and faster than you think it does. People assume that this is like, a massive like undertaking and it's just going to take like years and years of wandering and figuring it out, and it can, but you also can get people pretty skilled up pretty quickly and it's lovely, like, it's, it's really nice.
Johnathan:And if you're listening to this and you've got a boss, who's awful, where you just think like, they're not going to come to a Rossignol group program because they have no interest in being better because they're still in the screaming phase or whatever. Right. advice is for you too. I get that not everybody can quit, I get that, but like, if it's injuring you on an ongoing basis, we need to start to make that plan. We need to figure out, like, even if it can't be for a year, because we've got to build up reserves, you've just got to put up with it, whatever it is, we've got to start making that plan, because you can't, you can't let the bastards bring you down.
Melissa:It's not free.
Benjamin:It certainly is not, um, Johnathan and Melissa Nightingale. This was an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on Work Face. Um, we'll be in touch.
Melissa:Ben, thank you so much for hosting us. This was a lot of fun. Thank you. Work Face is produced by Hear Me Out, a culture strategy firm for leaders with the courage to listen. Our consulting producer is Lina Misitzis. Original music composed by me, Ben Jackson. Special thanks to Rob McRae and Michelle Mattar. To learn more about Hear Me Out, visit hearmeout.co, follow us on Instagram at @hearmeout_co, or find us on LinkedIn by searching for Hear Me Out.
