From Feedback to Leadership: Cultivating Team Growth

One of the main tasks of a good manager is to promote the professional development of their team members. To make this possible, managers must first foster a culture of psychological safety that allows them to have difficult and honest conversations. Once they have psychological safety, teams can begin to give and receive effective feedback.

Feedback has many benefits, principally:

1. It promotes a healthy and productive working environment.

2. It makes it easier to achieve common goals.

3. It enables career conversations and planning.

In Collective's corporate leadership programs, which are designed for business leaders, we address all of these topics through a practical application methodology. Let me explain some of the concepts on which our programs are based.

Psychological Safety in the Workplace

According to the American Psychology Association, a psychologically safe team looks like this:

• Admit and discuss mistakes

• Openly address problems and difficult topics

• Asking for help and feedback

• Trust that no one on the team is out to get them

• Trust that they are valued members of the team

Robert Sutton, Ph.D., Stanford professor, organizational psychologist and co-author of The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder, recommends that one of the best ways to determine if your team meets this requirement is to see if individuals tend to talk more about their own mistakes than those of others.

If you believe your team meets the above criteria, then you're ready to take the next step: giving and receiving feedback.

Feedback: Ally of the Best Leaders

Despite the benefits we have already described about feedback, there are still many fears and myths surrounding it.

A survey of more than 7,500 employees found that 44% of respondents agreed that it is stressful or difficult to give negative feedback or criticism. The survey also found that 21% of managers admitted that they avoid giving any kind of negative feedback for fear of giving feedback.

According to Melody Wilding, professor of human behavior and writer for Harvard Business Review and Forbes, “The absence of constructive feedback also undermines your team by depriving them of mentorship and opportunities to improve. Workplaces characterized by poor communication and unclear expectations provide fertile ground for low trust and lack of engagement.”

Prof. Wilding suggests, instead, focusing on the potential rewards of clear communication:

• Your observations could be exactly what is needed to guide a complex and challenging project to a successful conclusion.

• Honest feedback to colleagues about disruptive behaviors can contribute to a more peaceful and productive work environment.

• Your constructive criticism can help a colleague develop and grow in their role.

Step-by-Step Guide 

First of all, we should be aware that there are two types of feedback:

1. The things that if you don’t fix, can get you fired (for example, repeated tardiness)

2. Things that are normal to need to develop at your level in order to be promoted. These are things that shouldn’t keep you up at night, but are worth investing time and energy in improving (such as improving your public speaking skills).

Regardless, there are a few things you can do as a leader to provide effective, transparent and respectful feedback:

1. Prepare:

You should always prepare for giving feedback. This doesn’t mean it can’t be in the moment or immediate, but take a breath and think about what you want to say and achieve, rather than reacting emotionally. Prepare the points you want to share and agree on a specific time to deliver the feedback by informing the other person that you'd like to arrange a phone call or face-to-face meeting for this purpose.

At Collective, we recommend Terry Williams' Start Stop Continue technique because it helps the person focus on actionable items. 

• Start: Point out things that would be very helpful for the other person to begin doing to be more effective in their work.

• Stop: Point out things that make achieving goals more difficult and that you would like to stop. Be specific here too and give examples.

• Continue: Start with the things the other person does that work really well for you, that make your work better, and that you would like them to continue doing. Be very specific about the action and the reason why it works for you.

“Continue” is particularly important because it is a type of positive recognition. Feedback does not always need to be negative — and often it’s the positive feedback (and public recognition) that helps us stay motivated in our jobs.

Additionally, we explicitly avoid the “sandwich” method of giving feedback (negative feedback sandwiched between two pieces of positive feedback). This technique can make the positive feedback seem disingenuous or minimize the importance of the negative feedback. 

2. Choose your words carefully

Our guide for giving feedback is the book Radical Candor, by Kim Scott. We love it because she starts from the premise that if you want to have a difficult conversation with someone, you have to care about them. In this sequence of ideas, she suggests that:

• Be direct and kind: Being direct doesn't mean being rude. Have a clear idea of what you want to say. It's counterproductive to beat around the bush. Remember that the other person is also in a vulnerable position.

• Avoid getting personal: Don't use adjectives to describe people, instead describe their actions. For example: "You are unreliable" as opposed to "If you don't deliver reports on time, that shows unreliability."

• Take responsibility for your thoughts and words: Never say something like: “There are people who think that you...". It is your responsibility as a leader to stop rumors and encourage people to be direct and honest with the other person about their perceptions. If something your team member does has made you feel a certain way, you should say so. Example: “When you interrupt me when I’m talking, I feel unheard and disrespected”.

3. Close with a plan

Finish the conversation by inviting the other person to create an action plan together to improve or mitigate key aspects of their performance. Depending on the other person's emotional state, you can suggest actions during the conversation or give them a few days to process the information before meeting again to brainstorm ideas and strategize.

Turning these feedback best practices into habits will allow you to improve your leadership skills and establish the communication foundations to support your team members in their career development. There's nothing more rewarding for a leader than seeing their associates discover their potential and harness it to become new leaders.