How To Create A Culture Of Feedback
The day my employee called my attention
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” —African proverb
I was about to give a speech to my whole company. I always prepare for this kind of stuff. I like to write the main topics on a piece of paper and rehearse a few times one day before.
On this particular day, I had some bad news to give. I was nervous. After giving the speech and sharing the information, one of my employees asked me to join him in a Zoom call (we were a remote company, and that was the way we talked about important stuff). He had feedback for me.
How do we know that we did something wrong if no one tells us? Through feedback, we grow as we have the opportunity to learn and do something about it. As a leader, you have to help your team to grow as professionals, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t help you back. It is essential that you create a culture of feedback in your company.
The importance of feedback
“Ninety minutes of your time can enhance the quality of your subordinate’s work for two weeks, or for some eighty-plus hours.” — Andrew Grove
I remember first reading about feedback in the book High Output Management, written by Intel founder Andrew Grove, where he talked about having daily conversations with employees. A while later, I read The Weekly Coaching Conversation, which talked about weekly feedback conversations. This book finally motivated me to do something about my company situation, and I decided to start with quarterly conversations. It was the best I could do at that moment. I needed to begin to help my employees somehow.
Studies have proven that there is a direct correlation between the quantity and quality of feedback that an individual receives and his or her level of performance improvement. In other words, a lot of feedback equals a lot of improvement. A little feedback equals a little improvement. No feedback equals no improvement.
When you give feedback to someone, it is essential to start by saying that you have feedback. If you start by saying where the person has to improve and only at the end say that it is feedback, it will not have the same effect as if you already warned at the beginning of the conversation. That way, the person will not act defensively and will be more receptive to the given feedback.
At some point, I decided that I would give all feedbacks based on the company’s values. When you provide feedback to someone, it is also essential to focus on that person’s actions. It would help if you did not say “you are incompetent”, but something that emphasizes the action that was not done correctly and helps the person understand why changing it is essential and how she can do it. As I worked with company values as verbs (actions), it was easy for me to point to one of them when I wanted to give feedback.
The communication of a leader
“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” —Epictetus
I genuinely believe that the world would be a better place if we knew how to communicate better. Communication is something essential in our day-to-day. Unfortunately, schools don’t teach us about this, and we end up not always talking in the best way possible. At companies, communication is also very essential. If you want to have work done, you need to communicate in the best way possible. Information needs to be clear for everyone inside a company.
I believe a leader should do three things in his communication:
- Admit when you don’t know something
- Admit when you make a mistake
- Apologize
When a leader acts like that, he sends a message that he is also human like everyone else. It amazes me how people don’t expect to see a leader doing any of these three things. When someone new started at my company and saw me doing one of these three things, the person got surprised. She was not used to seeing this kind of behavior in other companies. Besides, after giving feedback to my employees, I asked if they had something for me too, which was also something unexpected.
To create a culture of feedback, it is also essential that the leader talks about the company goals. Research has shown that sharing what the company aims to achieve and how its performance is going helps everybody to care about where they work. When people do that, they will find ways to help the place they are part of.
One of the things that I did relate to that was to be transparent on the financial numbers. Every week, I sent a report sharing how much money our products have made and how much we have invested in marketing for the past seven days. Seeing that, people knew how their work was impacting the company. They wanted to see the numbers going up. To do that, they would need to help one another to give their best.
One more speech
“We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.” —Bill Gates
My employee’s feedback was that I was smiling while I shared the bad news, and that sounded like I was making fun of the situation. How didn’t I noticed that? When my employee told me that, my first reaction was to thank him. I didn’t realize the way I acted, and I was sorry about that. Then I realized that the feedback had come from an employee and not from a business partner. That was amazing! That’s the type of company culture that I wanted to build.
The other day, after our daily meeting, I said to my whole team that I had something that I would like to talk about. I told that my attention was called about me smiling while I was sharing the bad news. I said then that when I get nervous, I usually smile. The bad news I was sharing made me nervous, and because of that, I smiled. I was not making fun of anybody.
As I talked about the bad news one more time, I smiled again without realizing it. This time, someone from the team told me right away that I was smiling, and everybody started to laugh. They understood that it wasn’t easy for me to share the bad news. I said I was sorry and that I would try to avoid that behavior in the future.
Final thoughts
“You don’t build a business — you build people — and then people build the business.” —Zig Ziglar
Building a company is a teamwork. It would be best if you had people willing to help one another. Without that, you will probably have an environment where everybody just cares about themselves. If they see something wrong happening, they won’t open their mouths. That is dangerous. That can kill companies.
By creating a culture of feedback, you will learn faster what needs to be improved. People are usually afraid of giving constructive feedback to others. People are afraid of difficult conversations. When they understand that the company will evolve faster through feedback, they will do what is necessary to help others and themselves. As a leader, you should be the role model by giving and being open to feedback.
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