Do you ever struggle with giving feedback you have been holding onto for a long time? Do you yearn for a work environment where feedback fosters growth, change, and positive relationships? This episode is a deep dive into the harsh truth about evading feedback and its detrimental effects, and inspires you to see feedback as a relational tool rather than a confrontation, necessary for nurturing a healthy work culture.
If you would like to understand how your systems of feedback may or may not be serving your team, you should give this a listen.
If you are looking for a guide to becoming a more successful leader, don't miss out on this opportunity to sharpen your leadership skills.
To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story
Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 5:00pm MST. Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/
Do you ever struggle with giving feedback you have been holding onto for a long time? Do you yearn for a work environment where feedback fosters growth, change, and positive relationships? This episode is a deep dive into the harsh truth about evading feedback and its detrimental effects, and inspires you to see feedback as a relational tool rather than a confrontation, necessary for nurturing a healthy work culture.
If you would like to understand how your systems of feedback may or may not be serving your team, you should give this a listen.
If you are looking for a guide to becoming a more successful leader, don't miss out on this opportunity to sharpen your leadership skills.
To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story
Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 5:00pm MST. Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/
Speaker 1:
Every action you take as a leader has a ripple effect, starting with your team, going out to the organization and even out into people's personal lives. Here we offer you the chance to learn from real life stories of leadership so you can gain a deeper understanding and level up your own skills From communication to culture, to power and equity, to feedback, to resolving conflict and more. Join us and make sure you're creating the ripples you want. Welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink.
Speaker 2:
Hello, welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink. A couple weeks ago, we started discussing feedback in the office and what that looks like, and today's question follows up on that, and this happened for the second time now in talking about feedback or only 10 episodes in but this is such a big topic again that this is actually going to be split into two episodes. So today we're going to be talking about some of those systems and structures around feedback, when we're looking at building feedback into culture, and next week we're going to look even more into implementing that and how you create this in your workspace. So TS writes in with her situation. I liked your previous episode about feedback and hoped you could help with my situation. I really resonated when you talked about not wanting to stir things up and instead choosing harmony.
Speaker 2:
I know that I'm a people pleaser and I've always found it hard to say constructive things to my team and other people in my life. I currently have a staff member who has not been performing to a high enough standard. I feel like I've tried to hint at him that things need to change, but I don't think he heard me, as nothing has changed. I know what I should be doing as a leader is giving him more critical feedback, but I'm still hesitant to do so. I don't want to have that conversation, but I also don't want this situation causing problems for my team. How do I start giving constructive feedback about problems that have existed for a long time? So this is a great question. Ts, first of all, I'm really glad you've been enjoying the show and have been using it to reflect on your own leadership practice. That makes me so happy to hear and, like a lot of our challenges, you're not alone in this. People will literally rather ghost people, disappear from their lives entirely than give them feedback. This is a very common phenomenon. They want to avoid that hard conversation and there's a lot of reasons for this. And in the workplace, people will leave a role, they will fire staff, they will do anything to avoid these hard conversations. So the fact that you are asking and engaging in this is really fantastic.
Speaker 2:
Let's dive in and take the first steps here and actually, let's just start by talking about this idea of ghosting versus feedback. Why do we even give feedback? Why would we bother? And ultimately I would say it's because we want something to change in our relationship with that person, whether it's on the technical side or whether it's on that more relational side. We're looking for some sort of change and that change does involve effort and it involves sitting in the discomfort of that conversation which, as we all know, might not be very pleasant. So you can almost think of that effort and that emotional piece as an investment that you're making. We make investments to grow things right. We want an investment to grow. So feedback then becomes an investment in your relationship being better. And that means you have to enjoy or want to have this relationship enough that you're willing to sit in that discomfort.
Speaker 2:
If you meet someone for the first time, you're talking to them. You don't like the way, maybe that they're saying something or an idea they have. You know you're never going to meet them again. Are you going to put in the effort, this investment, to have a really tough conversation and give them feedback, or are you just going to let that go? That's essentially. You know you're going to kind of be ghosting them because you don't expect to see them again.
Speaker 2:
But now when you think about your long-term relationships, those are like, obviously, with your family, your parents, your kids, your spouse, those are pretty obvious. You're hoping that they will be long-term healthy relationships In the workplace. I would also say you're probably looking at long-term healthy relationships. That is the ideal. You want your relationship with your boss, your staff team, your peers, to be really, really healthy. And if you are willing to do that, it means that you're going to sit and put in that effort and be maybe a little bit emotionally uncomfortable having these conversations. So you get to decide right now what is it worth? Is it worth that effort? Is it worth that investment?
Speaker 2:
I don't know about TS's specific situation, but she already mentioned also some of the reasons it might be worthwhile to invest in that we can only hazard she talked about. She doesn't want the situation to go to a bad place at work if she doesn't give that feedback. Because what happens? We know that other staff members might get upset if another team member is doing something that is impacting the whole team. We know that that person themselves might want to leave because they don't understand why people don't like them or why things aren't working out in the workplace for them. You might want to leave because you're not feeling equipped or like you can handle what the staff members are doing anymore, or your team could just have bad results.
Speaker 2:
There are so many potential consequences that could come from not giving this feedback and hopefully just even thinking about that as a start is am I willing to put the investment into whatever relationship this is, in order to gain the reward of things getting better, having a stronger, healthier, long-term relationship? So we're going to start with the assumption that you are willing to do this, ts, just by the fact that you've been listening, you've been reflecting and you want to do this. So it sounds like you've probably listened to that in our previous feedback episodes and you have some idea of how to start making your feedback more relational, which hopefully is helping. If you are a people pleaser, you're probably a more relational person and that probably helped a little to plant this seed of how you might deliver that feedback. But what it sounds like is there's also this challenge of if I've been a people pleaser for a long time and now I'm trying to give what could be potentially a more critical definitely constructive piece of feedback, that's going to feel really hard, because why haven't I told this person before? Are they going to have questions? It might feel even more conflictual to bring up something now. So again, you might have that tendency to want to just go. Oh well, I'm going to let this thing slide. Let's move past that, and the way that you can really move forward on all of this is by shifting your whole culture around feedback as a team.
Speaker 2:
Once again, this is a bigger piece, so we will be going into this more in the next episode as well, but let's just start by looking at some of the cultures and structures we already might have for feedback in our workplace, and there's a couple of common things that I tend to hear about with this in the work that I do. The first is people who just don't really have any structures or systems around feedback. There's this assumption that when things come up whether positive things or negative things people will share about them, they will talk about it and things will get resolved. I most often see this in small organizations that are just starting to grow. We've talked about this before.
Speaker 2:
When a business first starts, you have your core group of people. They probably have pretty shared values and ideas, and that works pretty well because everything's similar and then, once they start growing, they reach this point of oh, we don't have systems in place. When things aren't going well, we're not giving that feedback. So the real challenge is when you don't have anything structured, you might never end up giving any feedback because it's going to depend entirely on if people are comfortable and think of that feedback in the moment. And you also might leave staff wondering what is happening. Should they just assume that things are going well because no one said anything negative? Or are they questioning a lot Like oh surely people must be upset at my work but they're not saying anything, so maybe that's decreasing some trust. So I wouldn't recommend personally having no structure to your feedback. That becomes a very nebulous situation which often doesn't serve growth at all.
Speaker 2:
Now some organizations I'd say the majority are a step ahead of that and they have some sort of scheduled or structured time for feedback, usually within an idea of a regular performance review, maybe quarterly, maybe annual. You're looking at KPIs, you're looking at goals, you're looking at outcomes. So that is helpful because it does give staff knowledge that they will be talking to their manager leader at some point to understand what's been going well, what they can keep working on. They're setting some goals. So already that structure we talked about structure being one of the ways, as a leader, you can help serve your staff team. You've created this structure. They know they're getting feedback. That's great.
Speaker 2:
The challenges with this format especially if it's as long as annual, but even with quarterly is what often happens is either feedback gets piled up, as in supervisors are constantly making notes of, in case you mentioned this and this, and if you have a rubric, usually there's multiple categories with multiple pieces to work on. So for the staff member that's getting this feedback, it can potentially be quite overwhelming because it's almost like an information dump of all these different things. How do they know what to focus on? Are they now feeling quite harsh on themselves, right? We're all our harshest critic. They're going to take that really personally potentially and be quite hurt about all the things. They might be questioning why they didn't get this feedback months ago when that actual incident occurred. Or you may have taken out feedback as you went along because it's no longer relevant, but maybe it could have been a great learning opportunity in the moment.
Speaker 2:
So often these structures aren't the best for really timely feedback and of course, they're also going to fall into a little bit of that feedback sandwich piece of. You're going to get a whole bunch of positive and whole bunch of constructive feedback at the same time, potentially in layers like that not my favorite method, but at least this is structured. People know what's happening and so they know they will be getting something. Some benefits go kind of to what I would say is the next level, which is a bit of a blend of these methods. Maybe they have something like a regularly scheduled meeting between the leader and the staff member, let's say once a month, and the intention behind that meeting is you're going to discuss what's happening, you're going to discuss goals, you're going to discuss growth opportunities and that that supervisor is going to potentially give you some feedback, both positive and constructive, to help you continue to do your role better.
Speaker 2:
This one can be highly effective depending on the skill of the leader. So unfortunately, it's often not as effective as we'd like it to be, because a lot of leaders simply haven't had enough support and training and how to give feedback in a really healthy, positive way that creates growth and change. Because, once again, we're already only three top three episodes in on this topic and it's so much bigger than this, so it's quite complicating and no judgment on any leader who has not had the opportunity in the training to do this well. So if your leader is really great. They're giving really great positive points with a lot of detail. They're giving really great constructive points with steps of what they'd like to see improved in the future and what the outcomes would be. So even in those cases, though, you're probably again going to end up in that feedback sandwich of this was good, this was not as good. This was good. Also, in a lot of cases, what I've seen is this might be the first meeting to go if things get busy or something's just not quite happening with the team is this is the first meeting that's like oh well, maybe we don't need that meeting this time, I'll follow up next month. And so then you start to lose this consistency, this opportunity for growth, and it loses again a bit of effectiveness.
Speaker 2:
And with all of these systems of feedback, it's very rare that I see systems and structures that are actually effective for peer to peer feedback and for staff member to leader feedback. Now, of course, I hear a lot about open door policies, and everyone likes to say, oh, I have an open door policy, my staff know that they can come to me with anything. They need Couple challenges potentially, that come up with that. My first question for leaders who say that always is well, how often do people come to you and not just how often do they come to you with their problems, but with specific feedback about what you might be able to shift to be able to help them and your relationship further? And, as we know, this is the hardest thing. We talk a lot about power.
Speaker 2:
Again, when you're in that vulnerable spot of being a staff member to a leader, you are literally maybe talking to the person who has the ability to fire you and saying I don't like it when you do this. That is very vulnerable. It's very, very challenging. So when open door policies don't have a lot of trust already developed in the team and a structure really that helps people give feedback to a leader in a way that feels safe and comfortable for them, then you're not going to get it. You're going to get an open door policy where not many people come to you with anything and you're going to think everything's fine because no one's saying anything.
Speaker 2:
So, again, we do want some sort of structure or system that supports the leader, also getting consistent information from their team about how they could serve them better. And, on the same vein as that, how do peers support each other and give feedback amongst your staff team. It's actually very limiting if you, as the leader, are the only one giving feedback to each individual person, but do we have systems usually that allow this staff and this staff to have a conversation and talk about things that they might be seeing, that you don't see, and how that's affecting both their relationship and the team dynamic and the outcomes of the team? So this is again why it's really critical that we can create all these different components to a culture of feedback where it's not scary, it feels like an investment, so people do value it, so they're willing to put that time in. They see the results because their relationships are improving between their coworkers, with you as a leader, maybe, if they're middle managers, with the people that they're supporting and all these levels. This culture actually feeds and grows and creates this continual growth and improvement.
Speaker 2:
So there's a couple things obviously, then, we're addressing. As we think about how we're going to create this culture of feedback, you're going to need to think of what the structure is going to look like. As I mentioned last week, we talked a little bit about the need for leadership to create structure for their team, and that's actually a component of how you can be responsible as a leader. They need to have that structure so staff know what's coming, so they have a sense that they will be able to grow, so they know how they potentially give feedback. You want to make sure that your feedback system addresses things in a timely manner so they can actually be improved in a timely manner if there's something to improve. You of course, want to make it safe for your staff to give feedback to you, knowing what the outcome of that will be, how we'll work with that system, instead of just having you give all the feedback to the staff team. Once again. That takes the burden off you. You get all the peers to give each other feedback strengthens that. And finally, we do want to get away from these systems that just lump constructive and positive always together in the same session, because that's again just makes us feel good, doesn't actually make the feedback as effective and isn't actually the best way to build trust and connection through relationship with your staff team.
Speaker 2:
So how do we do all of this? We're going to talk about that next week. You'll have to join us then to find out. Ts, I know obviously we didn't answer your full question yet, but I'm so excited to continue on with this next week. As a reminder, you can submit your own story and question to the show. If we use it, I will be following up with you one-on-one for a session to make sure we answer your question and to support you as much as possible. The link for that is in the description below, and if you want to join us live so you can comment and ask your questions, we would love to have you. The link for that is in the description below. Thank you so much for listening and learning this week. I hope you have a fantastic week.
Speaker 1:
We hope you enjoyed the episode. Make sure to subscribe, comment and connect with Leah at meetleahca.