Most of those examples (not giving enough direction, not training new hires enough, not being clear enough on priorities) are probably not going to be surprises for the person, and if you give feedback that shows you want someone to behave differently without having given some thought about why they aren't already then your feedback talks more about your own lack of experience and empathy than anything else.
To give good feedback to anyone you need to understand something about the pressures and challenges that they are facing. And remember that everything is a trade off. For example, perhaps they're incredibly busy, and would like to spend more time with new hires, but are struggling to find time because they aren't getting enough blocks of concentration time to work out clear priorities and they have been told they need to give their trusted colleague more opportunities to grow so they delegated it to someone.
Most likely, if you think something is a problem then they do too. They don't need to be told that or criticised for it, they need help solving the problem that causes the problem.
Imagine the difference between "I want to give you feedback that you aren't spending enough time with new hires" vs "I know you've been wanting to spend more time with the new hires, why don't you take them for lunch and send me to your status meeting over Tuesday lunch time this week."
As I started doing more leadership, I became aware that a lot of the things I might previously have cited as predictable examples of leadership incompetence causing problems were not surprises to leadership. They knew that this course of action would cause problems. The reason that they went ahead anyway was because they believed that the problems caused by the other courses of action available to them would be worse.
Of course, there are situations this advice does not apply, maybe the leader genuinely is clueless or evil or mistaken about the severity of a problem, but a good leader when presented with a problem elsewhere needs to start from a position of respect and learning and if you want to give advice to a leader you should start by trying to model good leadership yourself.
> Imagine the difference between "I want to give you feedback that you aren't spending enough time with new hires" vs "I know you've been wanting to spend more time with the new hires, why don't you take them for lunch and send me to your status meeting over Tuesday lunch time this week."
This is the proper answer. Ultimately, feedback should be about changing something. My experience is that most people are neither good at giving or receiving feedback, and that includes myself. There are more effective ways to change things.
OP's is useful when you have to give feedback, which is expected in most large companies in some form or other (evals, etc.).
Delegation is the managers job - it's not up to the subordinate to delegate on their managers behalf IMO.
One of the surest way to get your manager's back is to help them make their goals and put some stuff off their plates. Like other people said, most semi competent managers are aware of issues happening in their team. If you come up w/ some proposal to solve those issues, it will improve the team much more effectively than some feedback.
It also depends on your goals, but fixing some issues encountered by your manager is one of the most reliable way to promotion in up to mid size companies, unless your manager is a a*hole.
I agree that most leaders will now they are fallible, and also have some idea of which things are problematic. As an inexperienced leader, I still valued getting "known feedback". It gave me a better idea of which problems were growing too large, and which ones remained minor annoyances. In addition, acknowledging the points that were brought up and explaining why I hadn't gotten to addressing them (besides being human) usually gave the person giving the feedback a more positive outlook.
I think the best feedback is pointing out problems (and then trusting the other party to act or at least explain why things are that way). You never have the full context so just telling someone they need to behave differently may not even be ideal given the information they have.
I don't think a manager will be impressed by a report saying "I know you can't do your whole job, so let me handle face time with the execs so I can take your job from you."
I can only speak for myself, but if someone I trust wants to solve some of my problems for me, enabling me to be better at my job, I love that and will push for their recognition and promotion.
If I don't trust them to represent me and the team, then obviously that suggestion wouldn't work, but I'm trying to express the difference between someone pointing out a problem as if the problem is just yours or offering to help take responsibility for the problem as part of a team with you.
I've worked with people who made it a point of pride to always bring a concrete, workable suggestion whenever they brought me a problem. We didn't always go with their suggestion, but they were fantastic to work with.
Thankfully, I've never had to worry about keeping good people on my team down out of fear they'd take my job.
> I don't think a manager will be impressed by a report saying
It's funny because it could go exactly the two opposite ways. If you "report the problem", you might be - totally as punishment - volunteered into the position to work on it, in addition to your normal workload. If you "report the problem and volunteer to do something about it", you might be shot down. Hilarious, right?
That's back to the fundamental problem: you need to work on building an understanding of your manager. You have the workload assigned to you, then you have everything you need to do to further your own career.
I would be impressed by one of my reports saying “We’ve worked together to get me ready for the next step in my career, and I think more face time with our execs will help me take that step. Can you help me find opportunities to get it?” This is assuming we’re on the same page about how ready they are to take that step. But if we’re not on the same page, then I’ve already failed in performance reviews and feedback.