Leveraging Leadership

Listener Question: How to Request Feedback as a New Chief of Staff

• Emily Sander • Season 1 • Episode 168

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Emily Sander answers a listener's question about getting specific feedback in the Chief of Staff role. She suggests asking more focused questions and tailoring the feedback process to fit individual preferences, like providing options for written or verbal feedback. Emily also highlights the importance of building a culture of open feedback through demonstration and modeling.


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Who Am I?

If we haven’t yet before - Hi👋 I’m Emily, Chief of Staff turned Executive Leadership Coach. After a thrilling ride up the corporate ladder, I’m focusing on what I love - working with people to realize their professional and personal goals. Through my videos here on this channel, books, podcast guest spots, and newsletter, I share new ideas and practical and tactical tools to help you be more productive and build the career and life you want. 

 

Time Stamps:

01:52 Initial Feedback and Suggestions
03:10 Specific Feedback Strategies
07:40 Building a Culture of Feedback

emily-sander_2_04-01-2025_134545:

All right, so I just got an email from a listener of the show asking a fantastic question and saying, Hey, I know this is kind of an in depth question. Um, could you do an answer? For it on a podcast episode. And I was like, that's fantastic. Of course I will. So let me read you Charlie's message here. So he says, Emily, I'm a loyal listener of your podcast and really appreciate the insights you share about the chief of staff role. it would be fun to share this on the show. Can you do an episode on this? Um, I'm hoping you can help me with something I'm struggling with. I'm about six months into my first chief of staff position, having never done anything like this before, I'm really committed to getting better at this role and believe strongly in the power of feedback. I regularly ask my principal our CEO for feedback during our weekly one-on-ones, and I've tried to encourage feedback from our exec. Team leaders as well. I even ran a 360 review at my 90 day mark. My goal is to build a culture of open feedback, both receiving and giving it. The challenge I'm facing is that the feedback I receive tends to be either very general, um, some examples here are like, you're doing great or super minor. Such as, could you please format the subject line of your recap emails like this? While I appreciate any feedback, I'm finding it hard to get truly actionable insights that would help me grow in this role. Do you have any suggestions for how I can elicit more meaningful feedback? I wanna make sure I'm developing in the right ways and adding maximum value to my principle and to the organization. Thank you for any help. Keep up the good work. Okay. First of all, Charlie, you're off to a fantastic start. The fact that you are being intentional about building a culture of feedback at all is great. The fact that you are regularly asking for feedback is great. The fact that you went so far as to have a 360 review at your 90 day mark is. Above and beyond. That's well above average. So you're doing all the right things. One thing that jumped out at me when I read your message is you might wanna make your asks for feedback more specific. So if you're getting general feedback like, Hey, great to have you, great to have you on the team, you're doing great. I'm not quite sure what question or prompt you're using, but I hear a lot of people say things like, I'm open to feedback or open to feedback anytime. Or, do you have any feedback for me or can you share what I'm doing well and what I could be improving on? All of those are fine. All of those are way better than doing nothing. The next step from that might be something more specific. If you have a specific area you're really interested in getting feedback on, share that with them and that might help them go from, okay. Broad feedback on anything and everything to, oh, that specific area. Got it. Okay. I can dial in and zoom in on that. No problem. That's easy. I'm not quite sure if you have something specific in mind, so I'll just make up an example here. If you. Are six months in. So you're maybe leading, uh, the leadership meeting now. Maybe it's a weekly leadership meeting and you are now on point for that, and you want feedback on that specific area. if you wanna be even more specific than that, you can ask things like, are the agenda items relevant to you and your team? Um, I'd love to hear some feedback on is the context I'm providing for these topics and themes. We're discussing too much information, too little information. Like do you need to know more to have a proper discussion about it? Am I going overboard and sharing too much? You already know this stuff. Can you give me kind of like a calibration test on that? Maybe something even more specific is, do you have. The information to go back to your team and answer the questions that they're asking you back in your functional group or team. So it can be more specific in, just mentioning the leadership team meeting and if you wanna get even more specific within that, these finer points of what it could be within that team meeting. So right there, just with being more specific, I think that'll get you a long way to getting you more meaningful, actionable insight. A couple other things to go along with that. Just know that people respond differently to being asked to provide feedback. So sometimes when people are like, are ask, can you like provide feedback to me? They go, oh no. Like, okay, that's like a pressure situation. I don't wanna hurt people's feelings. I don't wanna be offensive. Oh no. I have to provide feedback. Like let me cringe and kind of do it and hopefully this is okay and what you're looking for and they wanna be done with it. A couple ways to alleviate that. First of all, it sounds like you are already asking for feedback and therefore giving permission to give feedback. It sounds like from your approach and your attitude, just how you wrote your message is that you genuinely want feedback. It's going to help you, and I wanna build this culture. I genuinely wanna do that, so I'm gonna assume that that's coming through in your delivery where it's like, no, like please like give me feedback. Sometimes queuing them with the word help. Like, can you help me? It would be really helpful to me.'cause a lot of people like to be help. Like, oh, I'm helping someone. I wanna be helpful. So like, he's clearly asking me for help. I need to provide that to be helpful. So that cues people in the word help. And then sometimes people have different preferences for how they like to deliver feedback, right? So some people are very good at giving feedback on the fly, like, oh, that leadership meeting, like, boom, boom, boom. Here you go. Some people like to think about it. They like to get their words right? They like to sequence things. They like to be fair and objective about their feedback they're giving, et cetera, et cetera. And so they want some time. They want some time to think about it and if you give them time, they're gonna give you some excellent feedback. So it might be building in some time or asking them, you know, when would be best for you to, to provide feedback. Some people are like, if you give me time, I'm gonna forget what happened in the meeting, so you gotta ask me real time. Some people are like, you gotta give me at least a week so I can recap my thoughts. One idea. Here it, let's go with the weekly leadership meeting example. You have it every week, so maybe at the end of the month when they have four reps under your belt, they have four examples and they can see some different things and patterns that are working well, maybe not working well, or here's an idea or, oh, without one that made me think of this thing. You might say, Hey. I'm looking for specific feedback in this area. Here are the three, like even more specific things that I'm asking about. And then at the end of the month, can we set up like a 30 minute debrief where you can just share your quick thoughts with me? Something like that where it's like, okay, boom, got the specific feedback, boom, got the timeline. I'm gonna have four examples to go off of. And then yes, I can absolutely spend 30 minutes with you if you swing by. Some people like to write out their feedback'cause they can be very precise with their words. Like, I wanna use this word, not that word. I wanna sequence things like this and then I have it in writing. It's better for the person receiving the feedback'cause they can read it over and over, et cetera, et cetera. And that's how they feel comfortable giving feedback. So if they feel more comfortable giving you written feedback, open that up as an option. Some people are the opposite, right? They're like, oh, no, no. Like you, you have that in black and white. You could take that wrong. I want you to hear my tone and intonation and sentiment and all the connotations that I'm going along with that. So they wanna talk out loud to you. So just giving people options for all these different ways to give feedback. The biggest takeaway though, I would say is, um, the more specific asks for feedback.'cause that's helpful to people. A lot of people ask me for feedback and I'm like. Buddy, you gotta like bring that in. Like I could go on and on about general feedback for you from a dozen of different angles and I don't know if that helps you. Can you please help me help you with being more specific in your ask. Oh, and like in terms of building a culture of feedback, just by you demonstrating how you ask for feedback and how you receive feedback helps build a culture of open feedback. So just you doing this will consciously or subconsciously cue and clue people in to the fact of, oh, like Charlie asked for feedback really well, and, oh, when I give feedback to Charlie, it's not scary. Um, and it, it's always helpful to him and he is always, you know, uh, gracious to receive it. Oh, and then good things start to happen because when I give feedback, like things actually change, and then now the things that I was irritated about are actually better. And then some people who are astute might go, oh, you know what? Like that seems to be working pretty good for him. I'm gonna try that. And now I have a model on which to place like my asking for feedback on. Okay, let me try this myself. And then if people don't quite pick up on that consciously, it might be you having and leading a conversation around building a culture of feedback later on. And people will subconsciously have this like model built in where like actually like, no, like some of these things you're talking about sound familiar because I do this with you or you do that or I've seen you do that. So this is, all by way of saying, just by you demonstrating this we'll inherently build and start building a culture of open feedback. So anyway, hopefully that has been helpful, Charlie. Fantastic question. And the team and company is better for having you on it just because you have this approach and you have this thoughtfulness about you. So hopefully this helps Charlie. And I just wanna give you kudos again for your fantastic approach and attitude and being intentional and thoughtful about building this culture. I think your team is lucky to have you and your company will be better for it. But if you have any follow ups, then please feel free to write me back and if anyone listening has any questions, um, this was fantastic. So. Please feel free to shoot me a question that you want answered in a podcast'cause I can talk through it and talk about different angles and things like that, that might be helpful to you and to other chiefs of staff. So shoot me an email. It's emily@nextlevel.coach and I will talk to you next time on leveraging leadership.