I had a lesson learned today.

 

I was talking to one of my direct report about a project. At the end of the conversation, I told him that to meet the project deadline, his work needs to be approved by our VP by next Tuesday, which means be approved by my manager this Friday, and I asked for him to finish the work and review with me this Thursday. There was nothing wrong in my statement, however, there could've been a better way of communicating it. I didn't even realize it till my direct report gave me the feedback that I was not being very respectful to him. He likened my statement to telling a kid to do X,Y by Z time.

 

I immediately realized that it was a very helpful and fair feedback. I thanked him and promised to improve my way of communication in the future. After the meeting, I was thinking more about this. One thing I tried to recall was how my previous manager communicated this type of request/timeline to me in the past. Then I started to realize there were only a handful of times that he directly told me "this needs to be done by X". Most often, what he did was ask me "when do you think you can get this done?", then when I gave an answer that didn't fit the overall project time line, he would ask me the sort of questions like "when do you think this needs to be reviewed by our VP in order to hit the project timeline?", and let me realize that my original timeline wouldn't work, and came up a new timeline myself. I never paid attention to this tactic till today, but now I realize that what he was doing was really making the other person feel more empowered by letting him/her make a "choice", albeit it's not really a choice per se.

 

One could argue that this is kind of hyporitical, but I actually see this as key component of one's soft skill and negotiation skill: Letting the other guys feel in control. Especially when working with junior colleagues, or direct reports, letting them make a choice would be viewed as respectful, while telling them what to do would be viewed as bossy, even though the short term outcome is the same, the long term impact on associate loyalty/moral is vastly different.

 

Thanks for the feedback. I need to watch out for more of these types of small things in the future. I know I am kind of dumb on Emotional Intelligence front, but hopefully with my openness to learn, and adaptiveness, I can become better and better on my soft skills.