Everybody Needs Feedback

Do I do it differently for each person? And this is just the formal stuff. I'll tell you about the informal stuff in a minute. So some people want to hear all the good things first and they block out the bad things. And then there are other people, it's the darndest thing. They're sitting with the pencil and they're sitting with their notebook and they're looking at me, giving them compliment after compliment, after compliment, and their eyes are glazing over. And then I go, okay, so here's your areas for development, and they start writing everything down. I've decided that depending on the individual, I will do that. I'll give the good stuff first. They'll write everything down. Then I go, okay, now I want you to repeat back just one thing I told you that is one of your strengths. And half the time they don't even know, they just want the negative feedback to improve. So I've learned over time.

Why do you think that is, that they focus mostly on the negative?

I think it's because they are high performing. I have a really high performing team and I think that they know their strengths already, honestly, and they just want to keep getting better. And I've also learned for people like that when you really nail them and tell them, you screwed that up, it doesn't work because they're harder on themselves than I would be on them. So with, with a lot of people, I'll go, okay, that was a mistake. What did you learn? Sometimes if they're difficult employees and I need to take further action, I'm much sterner and I keep repeating the things over and over again. And then if they can't work on it, I'm not good at it, but I will let people go. I've learned over time that everyone wants to hear feedback differently, but everybody needs to hear the feedback. Now, when somebody is in a room and they mess up, I never criticiz publicly. Never, ever, ever. I praise publicly. I go, that was a great presentation. That was terrific. Sometimes they'll go, have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? But if someone does something, particularly if it's egregious and they're like putting somebody down or something like that, at the end of the meeting, I go, hey, come see me in my office. And everybody around the table goes, oh, they're going to get yelled at. So we go in there, I close the door. I go, okay, what did you do wrong? And they usually will tell me.