Meaningful feedback can help propel people and their work forward. But implementing a good way of giving it is still one of the biggest challenges growing companies face.
As companies grow, founders can take it for granted that employees will do their best work, that they’ll live up to whatever unspoken expectations and assumptions exist in their company. I’ve heard founders and executives use the phrase, “that should be common sense”, way too many times as a way to deflect from responsibility.
People are just expected to do what’s right, even though what is right is rarely defined and folks will only find out they’re wrong when it’s too late. Feedback along the way to course-correct before it’s too late? Rare or non-existent. Nobody has time for that. You hire people to take charge and work with autonomy, after all. They’re supposed to catch on to what’s important to you and the business without ever having clear expectations laid out for them.
Then the moment comes when their work isn’t to your liking, when you’re unhappy with their progress, when they’re doing something that you think they shouldn’t do. That’s when radical candour comes in, giving yourself permission to say what you think, unfiltered, regardless of the circumstances and whether someone has just followed what they assumed was the right path. Radical candour quickly turns into an excuse to vent or yell, to say what you’re feeling in the moment.
Reflecting on situations like these, clients ask me for this kind of permission: “That’s what radical candor is, isn’t it? I should just be able to say when I’m not happy with them.”
But radical candour, or just candour for us Germans, isn’t just a framework where you can pick and choose the elements you like, foregoing the ones that could turn feedback into something productive and useful, and make it part of your company’s culture. Instead it turns into ruinous candor, setting a precedent for how feedback is given, what’s rewarded and what’s reprimanded. The word radical is here interpreted as a reason to say whatever you feel like saying.
Ruinous candor ignores the part where feedback is supposed to be a vehicle of growth, helping people do their best work and stretch into new areas that help the business and everyone in it grow. It focuses only on anger and frustration in the moment, on reacting on a whim rather than responding with intention.
Much of what feedback is aiming to achieve is to spell out unspoken expectations and assumptions. Instead of saying them out loud and building shared understanding, common sense is used as an excuse for not having done the work of management, like setting expectations and giving regular feedback along the way, helping everyone involved achieve the best possible outcome. So what could that look like?
Good feedback asks a lot more of you as someone’s manager:
- You can’t provide meaningful feedback without setting clear expectations first. That’s a conversation to have at the beginning, not at the end, when expectations haven’t been met.
- Observing someone’s work or their professional progression closely provides many opportunities for them to course-correct; feedback should happen throughout. Only knowing that you didn’t do something well after you’ve completed it is sure to frustrate everyone involved.
- Coach and mentor your people. You can provide support for them through mentoring and coaching, or find people within or outside of the organisation who can help them upskill. It’s especially key to provide folks with support when they’re entering new or stretch territory with their work.
In “The Intentional Organization”, which I wrote with Sara Hicks, we call this the accountability framework. We define accountability such that the onus is put on the manager to help employees do their best work. This goes against the common idea that accountability is only about consequences for the person who didn’t live up to the unspoken expectations and didn’t get any feedback or help along the way.
Now, what does good feedback look like? In my view, it’s based on a set of guiding principles that help you move past what you experience in the moment. This type of feedback should be:
- Devoid of emotion, meaning any frustration, resentment or anger. Positive attachment should also be left out of the equation.
- Focused on observable behaviours and their impact. What I observe to be true can be very different from what I believe to be true. The latter involves unspoken and oftentimes unverified assumptions as well as how we feel about a person rather than how we judge their work.
- Coming from a place of support and wanting to help. Feedback shouldn’t just be well-intentioned, it should instead be all about helping the other person do their best work.
- Accepting that you don’t know everything. You only have one perspective in a feedback equation. The person receiving it has another one, and so do other people they’re interacting with. Your perception may or may not match theirs.
- A two-way street, seeking out these perspectives rather than expecting yours to be the sole truth. You never know what’s going on in a person’s life, why they might not be at their best or why they did what they did without asking them.
As a last step for you as a leader, it pays manifold to regularly take time to reflect on what or how you contributed to a certain situation. Thinking intentionally about what you did or didn’t do to bring about a result moves the finger away from other people and their presumed lack of common sense, and pushes it to you.
The work you need to do as a manager and leader requires time and intention. You can’t just work your way out of a situation by picking the parts of a management framework that speaks to you in the moment, with all the emotions you carry. It’s well worth taking the time to think about how you got here and how you can truly move the needle in the future by responding with intention rather than reacting with emotion.
