If you’re throwing darts at a dartboard but you can’t see where they hit, you won’t know how well you’re doing or where you can improve.
It’s the same with your employees.
If you don’t give feedback to them, then they won’t know where they stand or where they can improve. However, to give feedback well and to help make it well received, you must get some foundations of feedback right.
Without these foundations, it will hurt any feedback you give.
First, you want to have a culture of safety.
A culture of safety is one where people feel free to speak up and disagree, admit mistakes, share problems, say when they don’t know, and so on.
There’s no fear of judgment or the fear that if they do wrong or something wrong happens, it will kill their career or they’ll lose their job, etc.
Often, many leaders, and many companies, have compliance mentalities. They have these bureaucratic rules, these lists of things you’re supposed to follow. And they’re going to walk around and ensure you follow those rules.
It’s about compliance. It’s about catching you doing wrong, not about helping you.
Now in those environments, of course, mistakes, problems, etc. aren’t freely admitted because people don’t want to get in trouble. They don’t want to be “gotten” or hurt their job or career or be judged or made to feel stupid.
When you have that kind of environment, people focus on avoiding mistakes versus excellence or what will give the best output. They are less willing to listen to feedback because these environments lead to a protection mentality (protecting oneself, one’s image, one’s career, etc.), not growth.
However, with a culture of safety, people are much more willing to accept feedback because they know you’re about helping them, not out to get them. They know the feedback is about helping them, not hurting their career.
It’s not a mentality of protection, but growth and production.
Second, you want to develop a growth mindset (in yourself and others).
You want to make sure you develop a growth mindset in yourself first, and that you help others in your team and organization to develop a growth mindset in them.
You want to develop a growth mindset in yourself because when you have it in yourself, you are about growth and leanring, not about protecting your image or status. And as a leader, you model the behaviors you want.
So, if you want a growth mindset in others, you model it yourself.
Part of that is receiving feedback yourself. You can’t expect others to want and receive feedback if you don’t receive it yourself as the leader.
You also want to hire people and develop a growth mindset in your team. That way, it’s not about status, protecting one’s image, or “proving” one’s smarts.
The mentality is about learning, growing, and getting better. When you have this mentality in yourself and others, people will more likely want feedback because they want to grow, they want to get better, and feedback is a great way to do it.
Without a growth mindset, people don’t want feedback because they want to protect the image they have of themselves.
Third, you need to actually care about your people.
First of all, if you don’t care, it will severely hurt you as a leader because people will recognize that you don’t care. It will hurt your influence with them, and your ability to lead will be severely diminished.
But, more than that, when it comes to feedback, if you try to give feedback but don’t care about the people, it’s not going to be well received.
And on top of that, it will likely be seen as manipulative. You are just trying to get something out of them.
However, when you care about people, and they know you care, they’re much more likely to receive that feedback because you are doing it out of care.
Even if you don’t give it perfectly, they’re more likely to receive it because of that care.
The Foundations
Getting these foundations right will help you build a culture where feedback is the norm. People will want it more and be more willing to listen to and apply it.
It will also help remove that “need” to butter up feedback in a sandwich, hoping it will make it taste better.
Without these foundations, no matter how useful the feedback is, no matter how needed it is, people won’t want to receive it.
