Ethan Evans

I'm going to say something nice to you.

Then I'm going to slip in a little bit of like, oh, you could do this better.

And then I'm going to say something else nice.

Well, the problem with that is most people, they hear that there's a criticism in there, but they don't hear criticism.

Actually, I have to change.

I have to do something different.

They don't hear that part.

And that's, again, managers aren't trained to do this.

Well, let's look at your corporations.

You know, when you worked in corporate history, how many of your managers had actual training, would you say, and how to be good managers versus they were just top performers on the trade desk or wherever and got moved up?

Yeah, and I would say it's normally even less than that.

A top performer in an individual role gets made a manager because they want it and they're good at what they do.

And so it's assumed, oh, you're a good engineer, you're a good designer.

you can manage designers well there's no proof of that yeah and even if it is true you certainly haven't been told how to give good feedback and so you're left um you know there are cases where i've hurt people because i had to learn on the job and i did it badly because i didn't have the skills in the training and so to your point of feedback

I once had in my very first job, one of the very first performance reviews I ever gave, I thought very deeply about where can this person improve and what do they do well?

And I gave this, I was young and this employee was older than I was, which is already awkward.

Like I'm reviewing someone, you know, significantly my senior.

Well, I did, in my opinion, a pretty good job actually noting strengths and weaknesses.

What I didn't at all do was understand the relationship dynamic here.

And so I pissed him off and he fought me and undermined me the rest of my career there.