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Let me start with one of my pet peeves. You know how they say that feedback is a gift? I hate that so much. Every time I see it on LinkedIn and whenever someone starts the topic of feedback with this phrase, I just cringe.
Intro
Welcome to Lead It Better, the podcast made to help you become a more impactful leader.
Whether you have years of experience or just getting started on your leadership journey, you’re in the right place to pick up practical, actionable advice. We’re gonna discuss not only how to best deal with leadership-related questions and situations but explore why a particular approach might work better than others.
My name’s Marton, and for the better part of a decade, I’ve been helping aspiring, new and experienced leaders develop their skills and leadership strategies.
This is episode 4, and this week we’re gonna talk about feedback; specifically, about how to get it and how to build an environment where your team members feel safe to provide it and are confident that it’s worth their time and effort.
The emperor’s new feedback
There’s one story that comes to mind that perfectly highlights how the lack of honest and meaningful feedback can lead to disastrous consequences. And I’m sure you know it too: Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s new clothes.”
Chances are you remember the punchline, the very last scene of the story: where the Emperor is walking through town until a child finally points out the naked truth (pun intended) that the Emperor has no clothes. The moral of the story is said to be about vanity and pride, but I would argue that it’s a tale about the dangers of not getting good feedback.
Let’s rewind to the beginning. Our protagonist, the Emperor, is known to love and spend lavishly on clothing. Enter two swindlers who introduce themselves as master weavers – they’re so good at what they do, they say, that they can create a material so delicate, a fabric so uncommonly fine, that it has a magical way of seeming invisible to those who are incompetent, unusually stupid, and unfit for their office.
The Emperor jumps at the opportunity – I mean, it’s a great 2-in-1 deal. He’ll get some amazing threads, and as a bonus, he’ll be able to separate the wise men from the fools in his royal court. He hired these “master weavers” on the spot. You already know that the swindlers bagged the silks and gold, but what I’d like to point out is what happens next.
A few days go by, and the Emperor wants a progress update. He’s a busy man, so he sends one of his wisest advisors, someone he trusts to see this magical material. Now the wise man sees nothing, for obvious reasons, but goes on to take detailed notes about what the swindlers tell him about the patterns and the colors and the shapes, so he can report it back to the Emperor as if he’s seen it with his own eyes.
Why?
Wise man he might have been, but he was still too afraid to speak the truth. Too afraid for two strangers to call him incompetent and too afraid to potentially lose his position as a result.
Don’t get me wrong, this is ultimately the Emperor’s fault. This goes back to psychological safety. He didn’t create or didn’t maintain space for honest and, therefore, valuable feedback.
But it gets worse. Because you know what they say: one fool makes many.
In the coming days, the Emperor requests updates repeatedly, sending in his entourage one by one. And while they’re all gripped by the same fear, it gets worse with each person because the people before already confirmed that there’s something to see.
So once the swindlers announce that the suit is ready, the Emperor is left with no choice but to be excited about putting it on. After all, he knows that every member of his small council saw the garment. One after the other, they told him that it’s the most amazing piece of clothing they’d ever seen. They’ve seen it, so the ruler’s only logical conclusion is that he must not be fit for his office. And to admit that… well, that’s not gonna happen.
So now we have the whole leadership team convinced, and after a pretend dress-up, they go out to do a parade across town. The Emperor, basically naked, and his entourage carrying the long, flowy, but very invisible mantle. And you know how the town folk reacted? They said: “Oh, how fine the Emperor’s new clothes are. Don’t they fit him to perfection?”
And we’re only getting to the worst thing now. Once the child – not knowing the pressures imposed by fear – provides some honest feedback, the whole town agrees. Even the Emperor thinks to himself that they all might be right. He’s naked. But he’s too deep into it, and instead of listening and acting upon said feedback, he decided that the show must go on. He walked more proudly than ever with his noblemen in tow.
Coming back to my initial argument: all of this could’ve been avoided if the Emperor had been more intentional about making sure that he kept getting good quality feedback.
So with these lessons in mind, let me ask you: how certain are you about the quality of the feedback you are getting? Are you getting any feedback at all?
I hope so because I can’t overstate how crucial good quality feedback is. It allows you to evaluate how effective your leadership style is. Based on that, you can make adjustments to ensure that you’re providing the best possible support for your team. Without feedback, you can quickly become isolated and disconnected, not knowing and not understanding your team members’ concerns, perspectives, their views on your strengths, weaknesses, and even your blind spots.
the top 3 things you can do
So here are the top 3 things that you can do to get honest and valuable feedback from your team members:
- create space for feedback
- shut up and listen
- follow up
1. create space for feedback
So how do you create space for feedback?
Well, let me start with one of my pet peeves. You know how they say that feedback is a gift? I hate that so much. Every time I see it on LinkedIn and whenever someone starts the topic of feedback with this phrase, I just cringe.
Give me a minute to explain because I understand why it’s a popular thing to say, and I get the sentiment behind it. I do. It’s a way to incentivize people to listen to something that might make them feel uneasy. So you tell them they need to consider this a gift: they’re getting value for nothing, so they need to receive it with open arms. I get it.
But. If you stop for a minute to think about it, giving and receiving feedback is nothing like giving and receiving gifts. When was the last time you had a knot in your stomach, handing someone a nicely wrapped box? And when it comes to receiving gifts, well, I’ve never heard anyone say that their birthday present was almost as good as that last piece of feedback they got. Nor the other way around. And while we’re at it, what do you do with your gifts? I’m sure you got a few really good ones, but I bet there are some which you either returned or trashed. Some might be collecting dust on a shelf.
So no. Let’s stop with this “feedback is a gift” nonsense. Feedback is feedback, and you should treat it with the respect it deserves.
If you need a metaphor, I’d rather say that feedback is a mirror. There are things you can’t do without a mirror. Even if you’re sometimes unhappy with what you see.
The goal then, in creating space for feedback, is to ensure that your mirror is not distorted and reflects reality. Even if you’re sometimes unhappy with what you see.
The reason why it’s so difficult to get honest, reality-reflecting feedback from your team is that – from their perspective – they need to speak truth to power. Even if you don’t think of yourself as a person of authority, there is a power imbalance between you and your team members. You might have the power to fire them, to decide about promotions, salary raises, etc. And even if you don’t do these things yourself, I’m sure you have clout with the decision-makers.
It’s difficult to speak truth to power, so your job as a leader is to make it easier for your team to help them overcome that difficulty. After all, if you act on that feedback, it’s gonna be for their benefit as much as your own.
You need to lay the foundations. Part of it is the psychological safety we discussed last time – an environment where your team members feel safe about opening up. The least you can do is to ensure that there are no negative consequences – and you need to think about this in the broadest sense possible. If you do nothing else, just frown at a comment; that might be enough to discourage someone from approaching you again.
Whether you’re joining a team that didn’t have a culture of feedback or you’re trying to turn things around in your current team, what you need to remember is that the trust it takes for your people to speak up is not something you can earn in a day – especially if that trust was broken. It’ll take weeks and months, and you need to stay consistent about creating opportunities for feedback. Whatever you choose from the spectrum of possibilities, be it one-on-ones on the one end or anonymous surveys on team meetings on the other, what’s important is that you don’t get discouraged if there’s zero engagement around this topic.
It takes time to build trust.
But if you keep asking, there will come a time when someone will offer you some feedback. When someone starts speaking truth to your power.
This is a crucial moment because your reaction will determine whether this will be the first or potentially the last piece of feedback you get from your team. So once that feedback rolls in, you do two things in quick succession: you say thank you, and then you shut up and listen.
2. shut up and listen
And by that, I mean that you don’t respond to what you just heard: you don’t try to justify it, explain it, or otherwise react to it – except if you were asked for a reaction. If someone’s telling you about their view of a particular situation, maybe about something you did – that’s their personal experience that they’re sharing. Their perspective. Nothing you can say at that moment will change their mind. Remember, they’re in a stressful situation; they’re speaking their truth to power – if you try to respond with anything but a thank you, you’re invalidating their personal experience. You’re communicating your disinterest in feedback.
Do you know how you can easily communicate that you’re very much interested? You listen. Maybe ask a few follow-up questions and listen some more.
One of my favorite quotes on this topic is from Andy Stanley, who quite famously said: “Leaders who don’t listen will eventually be surrounded by people who have nothing to say.”
I’ve seen this unfold at a team meeting I was lucky enough to observe. A group of managers and their own manager were deep into a business situation. Based on the body language and the amount of humming and hawing that was going on in the room, there was obvious tension – they were not in agreement about the next steps. Now one of these managers was brave enough to provide feedback to their boss about how they handled a particular situation and even tried to suggest an alternative solution. The person in power cut them off and said, “you don’t understand the full situation; you’ll do what I asked you to do.” Twenty minutes later, to wrap up the meeting, this manager of managers asked for ideas and feedback. Yeah. After half a minute of silence, there was a weak attempt at “come on, you’re always full of great ideas,” but then we just left it at that.
So if anyone approaches you with feedback, just remember what the famous American philosopher Stacy Ann Ferguson used to say: “shut up, just shut up, shut up, shut it up, just shut up, shut up.”
3. follow-up
Ok, let’s recap. You’re conscious of creating space for feedback, and you make sure to listen when that feedback is provided. Here comes the piece de resistance: any time you get feedback, be it in a team setting or a 1-on-1 meeting, you need to follow up.
If you don’t, all that work you have done so far will be in vain.
The follow-up is the return on investment. If you’re missing this piece, you can have the most open and trusting environment and people who feel entirely safe. Still, they’ll be missing the incentive to give you more feedback in the future.
Why bother if nothing comes of it?
To give you an example, you might be familiar with: whenever there’s a company-wide we-want-to-know-what-you-think type survey, the participation rate tells you whether or not the people think it’s worth their time to fill it out. And if you’re lucky enough to see the participation rate split based on years of service, make sure to check whether it’s more or less the same or it’s going down with seniority. If it does, it’s quite telling: the people who have been with the company longer feel that their input to this survey will not yield returns.
Now don’t get me wrong. Follow-up doesn’t mean you have to do everything the team asks you to. There might be action items for you, there might be action items for them. You figure it out, split up the work, and do it.
Of course, there might be things that are not feasible to do, so your follow-up there is to come back at a later stage and explain why you won’t be doing something.
For example, I once had some semi-anonymous feedback from my team that it’d be great if we were a pet-friendly office. I knew then and there that this would never be approved, but rather than killing the discussion and what else might come of it, I listened and promised to take it up with upper management. I’ll be honest, knowing what I knew, I didn’t push for it super hard – you pick your battles, right? -but I did talk about it with my managers. And a week later, I could go back to my team and explain why this won’t happen. It wasn’t the answer they were looking for, sure, but they were assured once more that they could come to me with anything.
If there’s ever a situation where the change or the action item is not up to you, you can still follow up with your team by providing them updates on the progress. Or even the lack of it. Because the effort that you put into coming back to this topic validates that their input was indeed important to you. They’re getting some return on their investment. And as a result, you’ll be trusted with more feedback in the future because you serve them by working on the issues they bring you.
Even if you’re sometimes unhappy with what you see in their mirror.
Recap
Now before we finish up, there’s one more thing I’d like to highlight: this one isn’t an easy topic. It’s not easy to get it right. Whatever you plan for, however intentional you can get, you will make mistakes. There might be situations where you can’t hold your tongue or forget to follow up to the extent your team would’ve wanted. You’re human; you’ll make mistakes. And that’s ok. What makes it ok with your team is owning your mistakes and apologizing. Apologize for your rash reaction and take time to explain what happened. It’s not all or nothing, but when you make mistakes, you need to make amends to heal the damage you did and maintain your team’s trust.
Trust that you can build by consistently creating space for feedback, listening intently, and following up in a meaningful way.
What’s next?
Ok, so what’s next? Where do we go from here?
We talked about how feedback is a mirror, providing you with a view of reality you might not be able to see otherwise. Now that’s good quality information to have, but it only becomes useful and valuable if you do something about it. That’s where a growth mindset comes into play, and being intentional about having a growth mindset.
This is what I’d like to discuss with you next time.
If you’re interested, make sure you hit subscribe and share this episode if you think it would benefit someone you know.
Thanks for listening; I’m truly grateful for your time and attention.
Talk to you soon.