While complaints and upward feedback share the common thread of desiring change, they are markedly different ways of exerting influence with leaders above.
Team members who prefer to complain openly often express disappointment without any real solution in mind. They believe leaders are in the business of learning about what is bothering them and allowing them to vent about it. Mistakenly, they think this is an effective way of creating change.
It’s not.
By expressing their dissatisfaction through complaint, team members are asking the leader to own their problem or issue and to resolve it. For someone busy with plenty of other problems, this is a task and burden the leader never appreciates.
As a result, leaders often tune out the complainer, viewing them as self-serving, annoying, or bothersome. Even when they agree with the complaint and perhaps place it on their list of issues to address, they find the conversation distasteful. No one, especially a leader, enjoys engaging with a complainer.
In contrast, the same message can be offered as upward feedback. Complaints don’t offer or focus on solutions or suggested improvements. When they do, they become feedback.
Leaders prefer to engage with team members who have a ready-made solution for the problem they have identified or experienced. Leaders view problem and solution commentary as upward feedback that originates from an intention to help the leader and team improve. This changes everything.
Upward feedback is always given in the spirit of improvement. As such, the solution receives much more attention than the problem or dissatisfaction.
When leaders know the team member has spent the time to propose a possible solution for the problem, they react very differently to the message. Rather than seeing the issue as emanating from a selfish or self-serving place with a focus on personal disappointment, leaders view problems raised with suggestions or recommendations for improvement as feedback worth engaging collaboratively.
The distinction between a complaint and feedback is often missed by many team members because of their need for catharsis. Instead of exploring a critical question that captures their dissatisfaction or proposing a recommendation, they dive right into what is bothering them or how the current strategy or approach is wrong in their view.
By taking this path, they diminish their ability to influence the leader to course correct or to make desired changes. Catharsis may be effective in therapy sessions, but it is a losing strategy when it comes to carrying dissatisfaction to a leader.
Make it a rule never to offer a criticism upward without a solution or suggestion to go along with it. When leaders hear your commentary as constructive feedback and not complaint, they become more receptive to addressing the issue or problem. And they like you much better in the process!
Talented team members don’t complain. They refuse to act as victims. Instead, they prefer to engage collaboratively with their leader to fix ongoing problems. They remember that upward feedback always amplifies the solution, not the problem or the dissatisfaction. It’s really not hard to do. Unless your need to vent is more important than being effective.
A Daily Dispatch from the Front Lines of Leadership.
