Why Your Team Won't Give You the Real Feedback, with Tanya Uyigue

Tanya Uyigue applied for a promotion she was qualified for and didn't get it. She asked why. Nobody ever told her.

That silence became the starting point for her book, What Your Team Won't Tell You. It's written for the employees who can't safely give their managers honest feedback, and for the managers who were never trained to see what their people are seeing.

Brandon and Tanya talk about what happens when a high performer keeps taking on more work while the goalposts keep moving. They get into the "safe bet" employee managers tend to promote, and what a senior leader really means when they say someone lacks "polish." Tanya also shares the moment she found out she'd been an absentee manager, from her own employee, as a joke, in front of her boss.

You'll walk away with the questions to ask every new hire, and what to do if you recognize yourself in a few of these chapters.

About our guest

Tanya Uyigue is a career and workplace strategist, coach, and speaker based in Chicago. She's spent more than 20 years working across corporate and nonprofit settings, and she trained as a professional coach through the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching (iPEC). Her content on workplace dynamics and management reaches a large audience on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, where people regularly share their own manager stories with her. Her new book, What Your Team Won't Tell You: The 7 Management Fails to Avoid, is out now from Berrett-Koehler.

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Intro 02:50 Why Tanya stopped being careful with her words 04:05 How she was passed over for a promotion with no feedback 07:10 What happened when a colleague she helped hire became her boss 08:15 Why she sat on her viral video for a month 11:00 Who the book is really written for 13:20 What "I played myself while they played me" means 15:00 What a "safe bet" employee is and why managers promote them 18:05 What leaders really mean when they say someone lacks "polish" 21:15 How Tanya found out she was an absentee manager 24:30 Why "never let your staff know what's going on" backfires 26:20 What to do when the problem is two levels above you 28:00 How to start strong with a new hire 29:55 What to do if you see yourself in the book 32:15 Why being direct is still the hardest part 34:20 Where to find Tanya and the book A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST

Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, sponsored by Xenium HR

Host: Brandon Laws

In Brandon's own words: "The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your g