Fast Feedback

What have you found to be the most effective tools or approaches for giving feedback to members of your team?

To giving feedback to members of my team?

Yeah.

I thought you’re going to ask how do I take in feedback?

Well, that too, that’s coming.

I think giving feedback to my team, I give it to them right in the moment. I’m a big fan of fast feedback. I don’t like things to fester, I don’t like things to bubble up. If there’s something I think you could be doing better, I will tell you that in that moment. I will tell you this, and if anybody from my team, or boards or previous teams that I’ve ever run, the beauty of being a leader in the 21st century, is that you have this on you while you’re in meetings. And as someone’s presenting, I always tell them this, I was like, “Keep your text message open.” And they’re like, “Okay.” And so as they’re presenting, I’m literally coaching them as they’re presenting, kind of like a football coach, when you have like the offensive coordinator inside your helmet, the same thing. I’ve always found that to be like a beautiful thing. That’s kind of like cheating in sports, but somehow they let it go.

What kind of things do you tell them? What kinds of things are you texting them?

I’m texting them things like, “Hit on this point, hit on this point further, articulate it longer, go shorter on this point.” I was like, “ skip the next slide, go to the next one, because you have to play the room.” It’s things of how to make them successful versus things like information. They don’t need the information. I trust that every single person presenting that I’ve ever had on my team, that I’ve ever coached, will have the information correct. It’s about catering it, and then using my eyes, to complement their eyes to read the room in that moment.

Easier to do in a virtual environment; harder to do in a real environment, but I’ve still been able to get it done pre-pandemic. But, again, it’s to help provide little tips here and there. “Hey, someone’s asking a question right now. Hit that next, because that’s going to articulate the next slide.” So, it’s those little, tiny pieces of feedback that I think help people in the moment. And then immediately after the moment, that allows them to make changes on the fly.

I think, again, it’s like, what if you touched fire and you didn’t understand you got burned until two hours later? That’d be an awful experience. You would continue to touch the fire, right? I want people to be able to iterate in real time because that’s when the memory is fresh and that’s when they can change. So being able to provide feedback in that manner, I think is really helpful. So then, when we go through review, when we go through a meeting where I had to deliver formal feedback, nothing is a surprise.