How to give feedback your team can actually act on

Feedback is not just course correcting, it’s also the recognition and appreciation. And I have other episodes on the power of positive feedback and gratitude and how do you appreciate and recognize because that’s also feedback. And I’m going to let you know a little secret. If you start saying more often, hey, I wanted to give you some positive feedback, or the client had great feedback for you, or here’s some awesome feedback I wanted to sit down and share with you.

When you pair the word positive or happy words with feedback, you’re going to start rewiring those pathways that we think it’s a negative, bad thing into thinking it’s not so bad. Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast. I’m Leah Garvin, your host and team operations consultant. Through this show and my signature Ops Playbook, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech to save you time, money, and stress.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be, or a new manager looking to learn the ropes, or are a seasoned manager ready to up their game, everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. From conflicts to feedback to delegating and more, we leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between.

Let’s go. Entrepreneurs and business owners listening right now, we all started with big dreams, right? Freedom, impact, bringing our visions to life. But there’s a twist many of us didn’t see coming, that managing a team is the hardest thing about running a business. And the words, because I said so, doesn’t work with children or our employees. Drawing on my team operations experience in big tech and with business owners, I realized we often complicate how work gets done more than we need to.

That’s why I wrote The Unstoppable Team. It’s a playbook for easing the complexities of team management, showing you the how behind the what and why of your vision. This book’s about finding relief amid the chaos, injecting simplicity into tackling hard problems, and turning your team members into profit generating machines, all without burning you or them out. Kind of nice, right? So if you are ready to make this whole managing thing easier while scaling your business, head to liagarvin.com slash the book or amazon.com and get your copy of The Unstoppable Team today.

Welcome back to the show. This is skills week on Managing Made Simple, and we are going to talk all about feedback. Today is all about giving feedback. And next, we’re going to talk about receiving feedback because feedback is one of the most important skills that we can nail as a manager, as a team leader, as a business owner, and as a person living on planet earth. Okay? Because feedback shows up in every aspect of our lives.

So I am giving you a gift to bring this home to your personal relationships because when we can get good at this, then we can have hard conversations. We can get through those tough times. We can build closer relationships with all the people in our lives, both professionally and personally. Now, why do we need feedback? Well, we need feedback because it is a signal on how we’re being perceived, where we stand with someone else. We need to be able to hear that so that we can build a relationship so that we can better ourselves.

And we need to be able to share that again for the same reasons. When we don’t share feedback, the person in our lives doesn’t know that there’s something happening that we either want to appreciate and thank and validate and recognize, or when something’s not going great. And I’ll tell you right now with more and more teams working remotely or hybrid or distributed all over the world, a gap in feedback is one of the biggest challenges in the workplace right now.

Now pair that with the big challenge that giving feedback’s hard, and a lot of us don’t like it and we avoid it. Now you have this double situation where people aren’t getting the insight into the little things to tweak or to keep doing, right? Feedback is not only constructive, it’s not always criticism. They don’t get insight into what’s working and what’s not. We’re saving feedback conversations for our annual performance review, maybe having it every six months.

Feedback conversations feel so high stakes. The word feedback makes our stomach turn. It’s like, ah, what’s next? Here it comes. What did I do wrong? And this fear around it, this baggage that the word has, well, it makes us avoid it. It makes us come in on our defenses. It makes us think, here we go. Like one more thing to do. It also triggers imposter feelings like, gosh, I’ll never be good enough. Or they see that I’m not good enough.

It can make us feel emotional. It can trigger us if someone else has said that thing in the past, it’s something that really bothers us or something we’re really struggling with. All of this is made worse because we’re not having feedback conversations often. And so next time when I talk about receiving, and I’m going to talk about how to make that whole thing easier, because frankly, that’s going to make both sides of this easier. When we get better at receiving feedback, well then, you know, being the person delivering the message is easier.

But today when it comes to delivering, I want to set again the tone because the better we are at giving it, again, now it goes either way, the more someone can hear a message. The more it doesn’t feel like someone is just looking to poke holes in what you’re doing or is out to get us or whatever these things are that people can come up with. And I understand there are very different levels of sensitivity based on a number of factors, age, job experience, generation, you know, all sorts of factors can come into play when it comes to, you know, maybe it’s directness of communication style, maybe it’s culture, whatever it looks like.

Okay. Gender plays a role because of double standards and biases that can show up in the workplace. All of these things make it complicated. And it may, you may try all the things that we talk about. It still doesn’t go perfectly, but that’s why we’re talking about it because you have to practice it and you have to have these tools in your toolbox to be able to get better at it. It is your responsibility as a leader, as a manager, as a person that oversees other people to try to continue to work on feedback.

Even if it goes well in one situation, we can always keep improving our skills because this is our responsibility to help bring out the best in people. We’re only going to be able to do that with feedback. And again, feedback is not just course correcting. It’s also the recognition and appreciation. And I have other episodes on the power of positive feedback and gratitude and how do you appreciate and recognize because that’s also feedback. And I’m going to let you know a little secret.

If you start saying more often, Hey, I wanted to give you some positive feedback, or the client had great feedback for you, or here’s some awesome feedback I wanted to sit down and share with you. When you pair the word positive or happy words with feedback, you’re going to start rewiring those pathways that we think it’s a negative, bad thing into thinking it’s not so bad. So that’s one thing to try just off the bat. But I wanted to talk about three things that are so key for giving feedback that are going to help it land so much better than whatever you’re doing now.

Or if you’re struggling with it, then it’s going to make it a little easier. And if you feel like it’s going really well, then factor these in. If you hit a wall and you have a hard conversation, maybe it’s an opportunity to bring these in. So if you’re already thriving at feedback, great. Teach us all the rest because we’re all struggling with it. So what are those three things? Well, you’ve heard me say this before the first one, and it’s always the case.

We have to set expectations. Feedback must map to an expectation. Otherwise, yeah, it is kind of subjective. It is just the way we want things. It’s got to be grounded in expectation. Did you know that I do team workshops on all of the stuff that I talk about on this show with large companies like Google and also with startups and small businesses like marketing agencies, law firms, and med spas? Whether it’s making those feedback conversations a little less awkward, how to support your team through all of the change and uncertainty making us all, well, a little on edge right now, or delegating to empower your team to step up as owners.

I come into your teams and give you the tools you need to wrestle with all this tough stuff and feel like you’ve got it handled. Reach out at hello at leahgarvin.com or pass my info along to the decision maker in your company, and let’s make all this team stuff easier and a lot more fun. Before we even start or have a conversation or approach a feedback conversation, we have to think to ourselves, what even were the expectations, first of all, and have I set those with my team member?

A lot of times when we really think about this, the expectations were a little bit hazy. It wasn’t totally clear that, maybe we said we wanted to review everything like Wednesday at 5 p.m., but what we wanted to review or the fact that we wanted to approve these certain elements or that this had to be handed off to that person, there’s gaps in what had to be there. And so then we show up to that review and we’re thinking, what?

They weren’t prepared? Well, we have to make sure we weren’t assuming someone’s going to read our mind. This also comes down to things that feel like working norms. What time people arrive? Are they ready for meetings or can they get settled in? Days in the office versus remote versus when you have a hybrid team. Expectation of camera on. All these things that come into this working norms category, these are team expectations that we actually really do have to establish and reestablish with folks.

These aren’t things that people just look and they say, oh, they have their camera on, so I’m going to have mine too, and everyone just follows suit. That’s why in my Ops Playbook program, I map all of this out with businesses because we can’t just expect that people are going to know how to show up in the right way. We would hope so. We’d hope they’d look around and kind of tell. And frankly, when we’re all in office together, some of these things can be a little easier because people sort of follow the pack, but we can’t assume any of it.

So whether it’s working norms or it’s really kind of concrete expectations around a project or a job, we have to think about, well, what are those? And we have to communicate those. And that’s the first step to having a feedback conversation is anchoring it in, well, here was this expectation. Were we both clear? What did we miss? So if someone is continually showing up to meetings and they have their camera off and you have to think about, well, have I said, hey, we are a camera on, that’s kind of the way that we run this team, camera on by default.

Sure, there’s some situations when we don’t have the camera on, but that’s really how we work here, right? That is an expectation that you’ve set. So if someone never has their camera on and you start snowballing thinking, I know they don’t have their camera on because they’re doing two jobs and they’re trying to like, and they’re not even home or they’re on vacation, pause the runaway train and just say, hey, we really try to build connection through having our camera on.

Again, it’s not a hard policy, but it’s the way that we work and we ask that everybody do that as much as they can. So now you’ve set the expectation. So once we have set an expectation, well, now we can bring in one of those feedback frameworks. And I’ve talked about in the past, I love a situation behavior impact. I think it is so clear, so easy. You can use it for a positive example. You can use it for a constructive example.

And this is where you say, you know, in this situation, in the meeting, on the call, you know, with the client, whatever you say, the behavior, you know, you did this thing or didn’t do this thing or this thing happened. And this was the result. I love the framework. It’s very straightforward again, because you can say, Hey, you know, in that client meeting, the client was really, really nervous at first around the status of the project.

And you really took charge and you took the lead and walked them through all their concerns and had a great positive outlook and approach. And as a result, they approved all of our concepts and they’re so excited to keep working with us. Right? Situation behavior impact, you’ve given some positive feedback that someone can really action. And I think you can think of a constructive example where the person doesn’t run the meeting and the person doesn’t make a decision at the end and the impact there.

I love using a framework because we can also use this to write out feedback. If we have some really difficult feedback to share with someone, using a framework like this allows us to kind of script it out. We can share it with a friend, a peer, a colleague. We can say, Hey, is this landing well, but we know we’re going to be specific. We know it links to expectations. And we know we’re saying that it’s not about you as a person.

It’s about this behavior. So we’re really reducing a lot of chances for defensiveness. Now, last but not least is, and where situation behavior impact doesn’t quite get us there. The third step is to make a clear ask. What’s next? What do I, what do I want to see from you? Let’s say team member, let’s use that example I just shared. They’re running a meeting and a client seeming really concerned. And so they get that team member gets a little edgy and they get a little snippy and they’re not alleviating concerns.

And because of that, the client’s like, Hey, you know, I’m not ready to make a decision. Let’s regroup in a few weeks. So that’s our situation. We know the behavior and we know the impact. Our clear ask is to, Hey, can you follow up with the client, meet one-on-one and walk them through their concerns? Or it’s, Hey, in the next meeting, can we, can we prep for how we’re going to handle that situation? So that doesn’t happen again.

You’re making a clear ask so that you can mitigate and correct that behavior. If it’s the positive example, you’re making a clear ask. So I, you know, the way you ran that meeting was awesome. Like my ask is, Hey, can you talk to the team through how you manage that? Teach some other folks on really how, how you stepped up and did that. Or, you know, Hey, I’m going to ask you get when, when we’re running into that situation, please take the lead, do that again.

Right? So you’re asking someone what you want to see more of so they can keep doing that. And that is going to help us be very clear on, well, why did you even give me this feedback? What am I supposed to do with this? You know, part of that clear ask can also be, you know, can we work together? I’m going to support you in filling this gap in this way. Like, let’s do this together. So making that ask also is a place for you to offer what support you’re going to be giving.

And this is such a powerful way to close the loop, right? That it’s not unclear why you get the feedback. This is a really helpful place. If you want to recap feedback and send an email after say, Hey, great conversation. Here’s what we talked about. Here’s what I want to see. And here’s my ask, right? So that you’re very, very aligned and on the same page. Okay. So these are some of the basics. I know we’ve heard a lot of this already around giving feedback, but we, again, we can never practice this too much.

We can never be clear enough with expectations and those working norms because stuff that’s in our heads, stuff that we feel is really obvious. Sometimes it’s obvious with a small team, but as it grows, it gets a little bit further away from the core and you want to make sure everyone’s clear again. That’s why I create something like the ops playbook for a team. So they have that real roadmap to everybody on the team can see, Hey, this is how we work here.

That’s why team values are so important. That’s why we talk about expectations all the time, really upfront, you know, before a project, or if things are going a little bit off the rails, we have an expectation setting conversation as opposed to the micromanaging death by a thousand paper cut. Okay. We, we use a framework so that we can be specific because feedback conversations are a little bit tricky. We write it out. We stress test it. We make sure this is not just something that I’m firing off because I got frustrated, but it’s grounded and I can actually be helpful with this feedback.

And then last, we make a clear ask whether it’s something we want someone to keep doing, do less of, do more of whatever we want to make sure the person knows what to do with that. So that’s it. Go out there, give some awesome feedback for folks, be direct, right? We don’t want to beat around the bush. I know it’s hard when we’re uncomfortable and we see someone’s look on their face and I’m like, eh, what’s coming, but we have to do it.

And we have to bring that empathy. The more we bring the empathy and we think about, well, how, what’s going on with this person? I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt, but the more clear we are, the conversation will go so much better than we’re worried about so many times. And you know what? There might be times when it doesn’t go well. It doesn’t mean we throw away this frame. It doesn’t mean we should never give feedback.

It means, Hey, I’m not going to win them all, but I’m trying, I’m showing up and I’m here to get better. All right. Next time is receiving feedback. So this one we’re going to talk about as a manager, as a person in general, all the good things. So you’re definitely want you to do that one too. See you next time. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive.

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