Think about how much feedback you have received this year. Reviews, pull requests, somebody in a retro, a colleague who told you something useful over coffee. Now count how much your manager got. It is almost certainly less, and nearly all of it came from above them.
The people who see their actual work most closely are you and your teammates, and almost all of you have quietly decided it is safer to say nothing.
You inherit the cost of that silence. The meeting they believe is useful and everybody else finds pointless runs for another year. The way they deliver bad news lands badly on four people and nobody ever mentions it. They keep doing something that is not working, because the only signal reaching them is an anonymous survey once a year, which arrives stripped of context and impossible to act on.
Giving upward feedback well is a real skill, and it is mostly about size and timing.
Keep it small and recent. One thing, from this week, that you can describe concretely. In standup on Tuesday, when the deadline moved, I could not tell whether that was decided or still being discussed. Not: you are unclear about priorities.
Ask first. Can I give you some feedback on how that landed for me. It sounds oddly formal written down. It works, because it lets them pick the moment rather than being caught while their head is somewhere else.
Frame it as what would help you do your job, not as a verdict on them. What would make my week easier is knowing which of those two dates is the real one. That is a specific request and it is very hard to be defensive about.
Do it privately, with no audience, and not as the closing item of a bad day.
Then watch what they do with it. A manager who thanks you and changes something has just told you a great deal about whether this is a good place to grow. A manager who goes cold has told you something too. Either way you have learned something you needed to know, and you learned it now rather than in year three.
– Asael Shinder
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