All my psych classes and management training have agreed so far that shit sandwich style feedback is ineffective because either people only absorb the negative or only absorb the positive. (This is more true if you have an ongoing relationship with someone—if you’re giving one-off feedback I guess you have no choice!)
I recommend instead framing conversations around someone’s goals. Framing feedback as advice to help someone meet their goals helps me to give more useful information and them to absorb it better, for example “Hiring managers will be looking for X, Y, and Z in your piece” or “Focused on A, B, and C would significantly increase the expected impacted of this piece of research” It’s even more useful if you ask them what they think about their own work first, because sometimes they can already identify some of the problems and you can skip that stage and go straight to giving advice on how to fix them!
Then, if this is someone you manage and you’re reviewing further drafts, give positive comments when they’ve updated it—and make a special effort to notice when they do well on those efforts in future papers.
I agree that if you’re giving one-off advice though the person will be looking to see if you think they have potential through your tone so it is worth reflecting how well you think they’re doing. (EDIT: I see that OP does tell people how well they’re doing but it’s not very encouraging. I agree it’s useful to explicitly say you’re glad they’re part of the EA community etc.)
All my psych classes and management training have agreed so far that shit sandwich style feedback is ineffective because either people only absorb the negative or only absorb the positive. (This is more true if you have an ongoing relationship with someone—if you’re giving one-off feedback I guess you have no choice!)
I recommend instead framing conversations around someone’s goals. Framing feedback as advice to help someone meet their goals helps me to give more useful information and them to absorb it better, for example “Hiring managers will be looking for X, Y, and Z in your piece” or “Focused on A, B, and C would significantly increase the expected impacted of this piece of research” It’s even more useful if you ask them what they think about their own work first, because sometimes they can already identify some of the problems and you can skip that stage and go straight to giving advice on how to fix them!
Then, if this is someone you manage and you’re reviewing further drafts, give positive comments when they’ve updated it—and make a special effort to notice when they do well on those efforts in future papers.
I agree that if you’re giving one-off advice though the person will be looking to see if you think they have potential through your tone so it is worth reflecting how well you think they’re doing. (EDIT: I see that OP does tell people how well they’re doing but it’s not very encouraging. I agree it’s useful to explicitly say you’re glad they’re part of the EA community etc.)
Re: the Edit, I’ve added an additional paragraph to make that particular point slightly less biting.
Also, thanks for the point around framing in terms of people’s goals.