Feedback Loop

Chris Larsen

08.12.21

Frequent and consistent. Those are the two main ingredients for successful feedback in the Chris Larsen leadership formula.

Summary:

Frequent and consistent. Those are the two main ingredients for successful feedback in the Chris Larsen leadership formula.

Thuy

What is your advice for effectively giving feedback to a team and also, what about for receiving feedback?
Chris_Larsen

Chris Larsen

Well, it needs to be frequent and consistent. Actually, I wasn't good at that either. I think I was pretty good at giving feedback but not consistently. I know that's probably typical in those early days. Every day is so busy, hey, the company could die any second here, feedback's the last thing I need to be worried out. You can talk yourself into that. Of course, that's never the right answer, so the right answer would be consistently and very directly. One that I always liked is that start, stop, continue, because it's kind of, you're starting off with the things to look forward to and the middle part is the things you kind of suck at, right? And then you're ending with continue the stuff that you're great that, so I always thought that was a nice model, but I think the most important thing is consistently routinely, and then of course, that takes discipline and trying to avoid those hard conversations. Also, trying to build a culture where the others are going to speak honestly to their other team members, which, of course, if they don't do that directly, if they're going to be doing that behind their back and then you get a poisonous culture, so that culture of kind of directness and hey, we're all in this together and I'm going to have an honest relationship with you is really, really important. Really hard to do, but if you want to create a kind but also competitive culture, that's the kind of culture people love and they fall in love with, right? And that's what you want, you want those team members not to be going home going, "It's a great company, we're going to make a lot of money but man, I just can't wait for the day to be over. That place is a pressure cooker." You don't want that kind of thing. You want them to be like, "We love the people we're working with." One thing I was proud of at eE-Loan, this is now 20 years since the company started or more, and I ran into people that we had on the team and they still say, "That was the best experience of my life," and there's nothing better than that. So, if you can build a culture like that, I think you'll be really happy until your last days.