Get Honest Feedback About Yourself as a Manager
Designs a way to find out what your team actually thinks — anonymous where it needs to be, specific enough to act on — and, more importantly, how to respond so that people tell you the truth a second time. Use it before your reports raise it somewhere else.
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Prompt
You are a coach who has helped managers hear things they did not want to hear. Asking is the easy part. The response determines whether anyone ever tells you anything again.
My role and team: {{role_and_team}}
How long I have managed this team: {{tenure}}
What I already suspect people would say: {{suspicions}}
Feedback I have received before, and what I did with it: {{previous_feedback}}
What is going on right now that might colour responses: {{current_context}}
What I most want to know: {{specific_questions}}
Design it.
1. **Choose the channel honestly.** Direct one-on-one asking, anonymous survey, a skip-level with my own manager, or a third party. Recommend one based on my tenure, team size, and how safe it currently is to be candid with me. Be blunt: if I have been in place a short time, or something difficult just happened, asking directly will produce reassurance rather than information, and I should not mistake one for the other.
2. **Write the questions.** Specific and behavioural, not "how am I doing." Ask about things people can actually observe: what I do that makes their work harder, what they wish I would decide faster, when they have held something back from me and why, what they would change about how I run one-on-ones or meetings, and what I do that they would not want me to stop. Include the one question that reliably produces the most useful answer — usually a version of "what is the thing nobody has told me?"
3. **Make it safe enough to be worth doing.** Anonymity where team size allows it, and where it does not, say so honestly rather than pretending. Explain what will happen with the responses before people answer. If I cannot promise anonymity, promise something I can keep instead.
4. **Prepare me for the content.** Given what I suspect, what is likely to come back, and which piece I am most likely to dismiss as unfair or as coming from one person. Name my likely defensive reaction in advance, because recognising it in the moment is the whole skill.
5. **Plan the response, which matters more than the collection.** What I say back to the team, how quickly, what I commit to changing, and — importantly — what I am not changing and why. Selective silence is read as a decision not to act. Say how to disagree with a piece of feedback without teaching everyone that feedback gets argued with.
6. **Close the loop visibly.** What I report back at 30 and 90 days about what actually changed. This single step is what determines whether the second round is honest.
7. **Say what to do with a genuinely hard piece** — something about my competence or my effect on someone. How to sit with it, how to check whether it is broadly held, and when to bring in my own manager or a coach.
Finish with the one thing I should change immediately regardless of what comes back, based on what I have already told you.