301 | The Art of Feedback: 4 Keys to Healthy Conversations for Thriving Teams

Most leaders know feedback is important — but few know how to do it in a way that actually builds trust instead of fear.

In this episode of the Lead Culture Podcast, Jenni Catron unpacks why healthy feedback is one of the most generous gifts you can give your team — and how it can transform your culture from confusion to clarity.

Jenni shares a practical framework for giving feedback that’s relational, balanced, consistent, and thoughtful — so you can stop dreading tough conversations and start calling your team up to the culture you’re building together.

You’ll learn:

• Why feedback connected to Core Values changes the tone and outcome of hard conversations
• 4 essentials for feedback that builds trust (not walls)
• How to make feedback a normal rhythm, not a surprise attack
• Practical prompts to start a better feedback conversation this week

If you want a culture where your team never wonders where they stand — and trust runs deep — this episode will equip you to lead the way.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Culture Matters — Jenni’s bestselling guide for building unstoppable teams through clear, intentional culture.

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Transcript

Hey, leaders, welcome to the Lead Culture podcast. I'm your host, Jenny Catron, founder and CEO of the Forsight Group. We're a company dedicated to helping leaders develop thriving teams. Each week, I'll be your guide as we explore practical strategies to equip you with the tools you need to lead with clarity, confidence, and build unstoppable momentum in your organization. My mission is to be your trusted coach, empowering you to master the art of self-leadership so you'll learn to lead yourself well so you can lead others better. Each week, we take a deep dive on a leadership or a culture topic. You'll hear stories from amazing guests and leaders like you who are committed to leading well. 

So let's dive in and keep learning on this leadership journey together. 

All right, friends, we have been going through this amazing summer of leadership series, and this is number seven of eight in the series. And I really do hope that you're feeling more equipped and empowered as a leader. Like I hope that...

These skills are just giving you some practical handles and some ideas that help you really think through how to sharpen your leadership so that it impacts your culture in a powerful way. Each of these leadership skills has been really carefully chosen because they're not just great for you as a leader. They're essential for shaping a thriving, healthy culture.

Leadership and culture just go hand in hand. And so that's what you hear from us frequently at Foresight is just our commitment to say, hey, we want to keep helping you grow as a leader because when we do that, we know that we're also helping shape your team. See, culture doesn't drift towards clarity or excellence. It gets there because leaders like you are intentional about the way you lead. Did you catch that? I'm going to say it again.

Jenni Catron (02:41.742)
Culture doesn't drift towards clarity or excellence. It gets there because leaders like you are intentional about the way you lead. So here's a quick refresher on what we've covered so far. Hopefully you've listened to most of them. If you haven't, maybe you're brand new to the podcast, somebody shared it with you and so you're catching up. You can go back and catch up on the other skills we've discussed so far, but here they are in briefs just so you have an idea of what we've covered.

We started with self leadership because the hardest person to lead is you. So leading culture starts with leading yourself well. Then we talked about emotional intelligence, which is the foundation of leading culture well, because you have to be aware of yourself and of others to lead effectively. It's kind of, builds on the first one. The first one is self leadership, like you leading yourself well. Emotional intelligence is having that really good, healthy understanding of yourself, what's going on with you.

understanding others and then how understanding how you influence and show up with others. Such a powerful tool. The third skill we talked about was communication, which is really the heartbeat of culture. If your words aren't clear, your culture won't be clear either. Then we talked about decision making. That culture is revealed in the way decisions are made. How you make decisions in your organization tells me a lot about your culture. What you say yes to or no to shows

what you value as well. Then we talked about delegation and delegation is one of the key ways you build trust and how you help your team grow by releasing and empowering them to take action. And then last week we talked about accountability and how accountability requires clarity. You can't expect what you haven't expressed.

And so those are the skills we've talked about so far today. We're leaning into another big one. Feedback, feedback. And we have a love hate relationship with this word and with this skill. And if it makes you cringe a little bit, you're not alone. Like we all wrestle with how to do feedback well. And that's what we want to talk about today. And I want to start with this question. I've had a number of leaders like

Jenni Catron (05:04.799)
in coaching use this with me. think my friend Jeff Henderson is one whom I've heard ask this question a lot. What's it like to be on the other side of you? What's it like to be on the other side of you? Well, I know what it feels like to be on this side of me. And sometimes that's a little crazy, but what's it like to be on the other side of you? It's one of the most powerful questions we can learn to ask. And it's a vulnerable question to ask.

But healthy teams foster a culture of feedback. They get comfortable with asking that question or questions like it. What's it like to be on the other side of me? Give me some feedback and how I'm doing. Tell me more about how you experienced that feedback is essentially evaluative communication. So we talked a lot about communication a few weeks ago. Feedback is like where we're, we're evaluating.

the communication or lack thereof, right? Remember in that episode, I said that communication is an act of respect for others. Remember that? It's so powerful when you begin to think of communication as an act of respect, like I'm respecting you enough to communicate what I think you need. Feedback, while sometimes more personal and sensitive than standard communication of information, feedback is the ultimate act of respect for those we engage with because you're giving

You're giving feedback with a desire to help others grow and grow and improve, which builds trust and it emphasizes care. I'll say that again because I kind of stumbled on it a little bit. Feedback given with a desire to help others grow and improve builds trust and it emphasizes care. Feedback should be given with a desire to help others grow, to see them improve.

to give them feedback that helps them get better. And we all want that. But giving feedback is, there's an art to how we do it in a way that helps it be received well. The most meaningful feedback is often the hardest to give and the hardest to receive. But when it's done well, feedback helps your team grow and healthy cultures are built.

Jenni Catron (07:24.434)
on growth. They're built when every person on the team is committed to growing and improving and getting better. leaders, great leaders don't avoid feedback. We just get better at it. Now we're going to be clumsy. We're not going to get it right all the time, but we've got to be committed to doing it because it's so essential for our growth and for the growth of others.

I want you to think for a moment about maybe one of your greatest seasons of growth, right? Maybe you can think back to a season where you were just growing a lot. We all have kind of those growth spurts, even in our leadership and odds are that it involves someone giving you feedback at a critical moment. I can think of a number of them. think of if you read my book, the four dimensions of extraordinary leadership. I talk about that moment where that leader says to me, Hey Jenny, if you want to work with people, you've got to learn to love them to lead them.

Like that was a critical growth moment. And then there have been a number of others along the journey. There's also been just in personal life that tennis coach who corrected my serve and while I felt clumsy for a while in the long run, then my serve got better and you know, like I got exponentially better at the game, right? But like sometimes you have to be given feedback and it like it you have to relearn something, right?

Maybe it was a coworker who alerted you to how your hurriedness makes other team members feel anxious. Maybe, you know, somebody gave you feedback about how your not saying hello made them feel like you didn't like them, right? I sometimes it's simple things, but we don't realize that we need the feedback to know so we can grow feedback given with an intention to help another person get better is invaluable.

Like invaluable when somebody is brave enough to give you feedback and you know they're giving it because they really want you to grow. They really see the best in you and they want to help give you perspective that maybe you just can't see. That's the heart and the spirit of feedback given well. So I want to give you four key aspects of quality feedback. Now I want you to be thinking about this, particularly in how you can give feedback so that you can give feedback in a way that others receive it well.

Jenni Catron (09:46.84)
When you think about a time that someone gave you some challenging feedback, I wonder what caused you to receive their input, right? Because you've probably also had moments where somebody gave you feedback, but the way they gave it to you, you didn't receive it. It probably made you frustrated, angry, you you kind of, and you dismissed it. I you've had those experiences, I have as well, where the delivery didn't convince me they cared about me. Now, there's some good...

emotional intelligence required here because you need to be aware of like maybe what's going on with you and maybe you're not interpreting the feedback well. So you've got to leave room for that. without becoming your counselor, here are some things I want you to think about as you give feedback to give and receive feedback. These four aspects are essential. And the first one is just to be relational. Even though it was hard to hear when that person gave you feedback.

You likely received it because the person who gave you the feedback was somebody you had a relationship with. was somebody you respected and trusted. You knew they wanted the best for you. So if you have that scenario in mind. You received the feedback even though it was hard because you had a relationship with that person. They knew you and wanted the best for you. So feedback lands best in the context of relationship. I want you to think about maybe some of your team. What's your?

What's the level of your relationship with them? Have you built a relationship in which they would be likely to receive feedback because you've already demonstrated an interest in them? You care about them. You've you've built a relationship with them. That's going to give you a better opportunity to give that feedback. If your team trusts you, they'll trust your words even when they're hard to hear. So I want you to lean into that relational aspect of.

of your connections with others because it's so critical to being able to give feedback. In the four dimensions of extraordinary leadership, we talk about leading with the heart and that's the relational side that really is the starting point of leadership to earn influence, to earn the right to speak into others' lives. We have to have demonstrated an interest in them, that we care about them, that we really want to build a relationship and get to know them. So...

Jenni Catron (12:08.588)
The first piece of thinking about giving feedback to somebody is do what kind of relationship do I have? And then secondly, if you think about that scenario where you received some feedback, I bet you can count multiple times that that person also gave you positive feedback, right? So here they are, they're giving you some constructive feedback, but I bet if you think about it, there were plenty of times that that person also gave you positive feedback. Their investment in providing positive feedback

gave them credibility to also deliver constructive feedback. so leaders, we need to pay attention to this. I'm the first to want to point out everything that's wrong and kind of blow by everything that is good, but we've got to make sure that we are speaking up when things are good. We're also giving positive feedback. See, the misnomer and even why we all cringe a little bit when we heard the word feedback is because we typically perceive feedback, especially in a work context, to be negative. And leaders, we need to flip that.

Feedback needs to be both positive and constructive. Feedback needs to be positive and constructive because we want to make sure that feedback is normal, that it's expected, that it's common to just get constant input in how we're doing. Don't just speak up when something's wrong. Celebrate what's going right as well. Encouragement creates openness.

Critiquing without encouragement just shuts people down. So you want to be thoughtful about both, that your intention to give feedback is both the positive and the constructive. The third thing I want to encourage you on is to be consistent. If you think about that leader who had given you feedback, I bet you their feedback was also consistent. They didn't just swoop in during the good times or the bad, they were consistently engaged in your work and their feedback demonstrated an ongoing commitment to you.

They didn't just swoop in when things are great or when things are really bad, but they are consistently in the rhythms of your work and they see you in action. They know what you're doing. So leaders who provide feedback well, consistently use one-on-one meetings, performance reviews, and other organizational systems, meetings, et cetera, to provide a consistent and predictable rhythm for giving feedback. And this is something, leaders, that we also build these mechanisms into our culture by way of

Jenni Catron (14:34.476)
feedback where we build in rhythms into our leadership where feedback is expected. It might be in one-on-one meetings. It might be debriefing a project, but we have mechanisms for feedback that are just part of how you work. Feedback should only happen when someone messes up. Feedback should just be an expectation. If you finish a project and you review it together and you give each other feedback, you turn something in and you ask for feedback from your boss.

Like feedback should just be something that's just normal in your culture. And then finally, thoughtful. That you want your feedback to be thoughtful. When you think about that person who gave you feedback, I bet you they employed emotional intelligence in how and when they shared the feedback. They were thoughtful about how and when they gave it to you. They didn't just blurt it out in the middle of a meeting in front of everybody else.

They were maybe sensitive to if you had a bad day, maybe they held off and they told you the next day, or maybe they took some time in the meeting to check in and find out how you're doing and then moved into the feedback. They were conscious of the setting and the timing to ensure that they were giving you feedback in a way that allowed it to be best received. Now, I also promise you, you can probably think of a scenario where somebody gave you feedback and you weren't not in a place to receive it. Like that person.

wasn't thoughtful about how and when they gave you the feedback. So I want you to be thinking about that. That's really the emotional intelligence skill also at play. Great feedback isn't just what you say, it's when and how you say it. So consider their season or be mindful of the moment and what's happening. Feedback delivered with empathy will always be more effective. And so those four things, if you just, you know,

stop for a minute when you need to give some feedback and you think, what's my relationship with this person? And have I been intentional to build a relationship that gives me the opportunity to give the feedback? How can I give both positive and constructive feedback? How can I create some consistency and create rhythms where we're doing feedback regularly in our organization and then being thoughtful about when and how you do it? Like if you start to employ those for

Jenni Catron (16:55.102)
aspects of feedback. Leaders, promise you'll get more comfortable giving feedback and you'll create a culture where people are more comfortable receiving feedback. And again, it's absolutely powerful when those things are at play in your organization. So let me give you a couple of questions to think about today. Do you avoid hard conversations or do you engage them with care? So how do you feel about this feedback thing? Do you kind of avoid it?

or do you lean in with an attitude of care for your team? Is your feedback building your team up or do you have a tendency to just point out what's wrong? We do that as leaders. I'm first one to be guilty. Like, so just being thoughtful about, I giving feedback that's also building up? And we've got to point out what needs to be fixed, but am I balancing those two things? And do your team members know where they stand with you?

Are they guessing of how they're doing or if they're effective? Because maybe we just haven't given them enough feedback for them to know how we feel about how they're doing. So consider those questions today. And then here's some next steps I would encourage you to take. Schedule one to two short one-on-one conversations this week to give meaningful feedback. Now, maybe you've got to wade into this a little bit, so pick one that's a positive one.

that you just need to give somebody some really positive feedback and maybe pick one that you need to give some constructive feedback. But pick a couple conversations today that you're going to be, you're going to think through those four aspects and then you're going to show up and give some feedback and then use this simple structure. Here's just a way to think about how to frame this. You can say, here's what I see you doing well. So give them some positive, tell them what's working well. Here's an area where I think you could grow and give them, make sure you're giving specifics. When you give feedback,

Give very specific situations, scenarios, details, so that it's actionable for the individual. And then ask, how can I support you in that? Offer support. Don't just leave them hanging. Give them some feedback on what you think maybe needs some improvement or feedback on how they handled something. And then, how can I support you in that? Is there anything you need? Invite your team and then, so here's the kicker.

Jenni Catron (19:16.15)
invite your team to give you feedback. Now, this is a biggie, you guys, but it models humility and it builds trust and it demonstrates that this is what we do. here's the thing, if you're the leader of a team or the organization, if you ask people to give you feedback, they will say, you're doing great. It's gonna take a while for them to decide to give you some actual feedback. So you wanna look for some very specific scenarios. Maybe at the end of the meeting,

debrief with one of your team members and say, hey, anything in that meeting you think I could have done better or communicated better, and it could give them a specific scenario, like a specific situation and ask for some, for a specific feedback of, there anything I could have done to share that announcement more clearly? See how that's a pretty specific ask. And I'm almost assuming there's something I could have done better.

invites people to it gives them permission to give you more specific and helpful feedback. So you're to have to ask it different ways. You're going to ask it very specifically, but you want to create a culture where you are inviting feedback frequently. Because again, it's modeling humility, it's building trust, and it's demonstrating that this is just what we do. And I'm starting first. I'm going first as the leader and I'm asking for that feedback so that I can get better because I believe it's so important to our growth.

organizationally, personally and organizationally. All right, friends. So, feedback has shapes your culture, whether you mean to or not, like whether you have a culture of feedback or you don't have a culture of feedback, the kind of culture of feedback you have, like there are some cultures where they, everybody gives feedback, but it's not very thoughtful and it's not relational and it's kind of cutthroat. So that might be shaping your culture in a different way. So feedback shapes your culture. So how is it shaping your culture?

When feedback is inconsistent, unclear, or avoided, people fill in the gaps with the stories they make up. And that creates confusion and distrust. So we want a culture of good, healthy feedback. Because when feedback is clear, respectful, and consistent, you create a culture of growth and not fear. You've seen it, you've experienced it. You know what I'm talking about. And now I want you to be purposeful to do it.

Jenni Catron (21:39.38)
In culture matters, I dive deeper into this. This is a big one because feedback is one of the essential tools for helping your team thrive and be unstoppable. So I want to keep encouraging you to dig into that and put some of these tools to work in your organization. Feedback is one of the most courageous ways you can lead and one of the most generous things you can do for your team when you do it well. When you care enough to be clear, you're giving your team a gift.

So friends, lean into feedback. Don't be afraid of it. It can be so incredibly powerful. And I promise you, when we do it well and we create an environment where team members receive it, the relationships, the connections, the trust just grows exponentially. It's really, really powerful. So maybe if you're finding this series helpful and you're ready to take your team on a deeper dive of what it looks like to assess, define, and build an amazing culture,

I want you to commit to reading culture matters, the book together this fall. This is my USA today, best selling book. It's been out like seven months now that feels, is that right? No, five months, five months, five months now. And I'm getting such fantastic feedback from the teams who have read it together, but maybe this is a great project for you and your team this fall to walk through the framework that I outline in the book where I help you create, or help your team grow, thrive, and be unstoppable. I walk you through the lead culture framework.

and help you really define the culture you aspire to. And so you can email me at jenniecattron at getforsight.com, J-E-N-N-I-C-A-T-R-O-N at getforsight.com, G-E-T the number four, S-I-G-H-T dot com. And we'll give you bulk order discount. So if you're going to order for your whole team, just email me and we'll give you a bulk order discount. And that way you can get copies for your entire team and you can read this book together and go on this journey.

of continuing to build a healthy, thriving, and unstoppable team. Until then, keep leading well. Next week, we're going to finish up with one more skill. We're going to talk about the subject of ownership. So be back for that one. Go listen to the episodes you've missed. Rate it and review it. Share it with a friend. And I'll see you next week.