Give me a chance here.

I recently listened to an episode of the Hacking Your Leadership podcast which focused on professional feedback, and specifically peer-to-peer feedback with teams from various generations.

One of the hosts, Chris, said something that resonated with me:

“If the intent of the person delivering feedback is to truly change behavior, to get the other person to say ‘Oh, you know what, this is a much better way of doing things, I totally understand,’ then the person who is delivering feedback needs to meet the person who is receiving feedback where they are, and deliver feedback in a way that is most likely to illicit the change they’re looking for.”



Chris tapped into the most underrated aspect of giving feedback: it doesn’t work if the other person doesn’t perceive that you’re acting in good faith and trying to meet them halfway.

Why do people hate performance evaluations? Because it’s incredibly difficult not to interpret critique as an attack. If you’re going to give unsolicited but well-intentioned feedback, you have to be sure that the other person is confident that you’re on their side and acting in good faith. You have to show that you’re sincerely interested in helping them.

That’s where leadership comes in. We as leaders have to build organizations that can be fertile environments for constructive feedback and where our employees can accept constructive feedback from us. When we, as leaders, allow ourselves to be lax about a culture where people a) know how to give feedback constructively and b) know how to receive feedback constructively, we perpetuate environments where employees are afraid to speak up. We’ve all been in work environments where everybody’s too afraid to tell the emperor they’re not wearing any clothes, preferring the safety of self-preservation. These organizations have leaders that mistake uneasy peace for harmony and silence for agreement.

So how do we know that we’re building the right kind of culture? Those of us that are starting in a difficult place don’t always have magical leadership compasses to reference, and there aren’t objective litmus tests for positive morale and effective relationships.

Treat every employee with the respect, deference, and open-mindedness that you would treat your spouse. And then encourage them to do the same with each other.

Healthy marriages are a gold standard for every other healthy relationship. My relationship with my wife is the best example of active compromise, collaboration, division of labor, and mutual goals. When I approach her with constructive feedback, I work excessively to ensure that it’s clear I’m coming from a place of good faith and am interested in our shared success as a partnership.

My workplace is an environment where the team (including me) takes the same care with our interpersonal relationships that we would take with our spouses. Some of the things we’ve worked on are:

Shared goals, values, and norms that we can agree to as a group.

Encouraging clear commitments to deliverables and action items, making it easier to follow up and drive accountability.

I discourage personally mediating peer-to-peer conflict. There aren’t any referees at home, so I avoid playing one at work. Compromise and mutual benefit are important parts of any negotiation and disagreement.

I challenge myself to effectively connect my feedback to the larger goals of the employee or the organization, and I only give feedback that is critical. I completely avoid nitpicking.

The team check’s in as a group every 3-4 months to discuss our collective growth, the group morale, and ways we can continue to improve.

So we’re a completely functional, totally perfect unit now right? No. Far from it. But, like my relationship with my wife, we’re actively working on improving our partnership together, every day. It’s taken me over two years to get our organization’s culture pointed in the right direction and I expect it to be another two years before we’re anything close to a gold standard.

Try it for yourself. The next time you’re going to give constructive feedback to one of your employees, stop and ask yourself how you might try to give the same feedback to your spouse or romantic partner. Are you being patronizing? Passive aggressive? Unclear? Your employees have to accept your bad feedback, your spouse doesn’t. Do you stop to ask if your feedback was valuable? Does your employee believe you mean it when you ask them?

Try adopting this mindset for a couple of weeks and I guarantee you’ll start thinking differently about how your team functions together.

Good luck out there,

Patrick

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