This is what I told my team about feedback…
Do you give feedback to your co-workers? How often?
Do you wait for the annual review or give it as things happen?
When you have friction with a colleague, how do you handle it?
Two weeks ago I caught myself giving the same feedback to two team members.
“How to give feedback to a co-worker.”
That got my attention.
It led me to end up having a conversation with part of the team about this.
Here’s the raw recording.
The core value I mention in the video is this:
Radical Candor – Be Straight
We give and receive honest, direct feedback because it’s the fastest way for us to grow as people and as a team.
Most of us avoid hard conversations. We’re afraid of coming across as rude or of creating awkward situations. So we stay quiet and hope the problems sort themselves out. They don’t.
What this means in practice is that we’re choosing our own comfort over other people’s growth. Meanwhile, the other person usually doesn’t even realise anything is wrong.
They carry on doing the same thing because nobody told them it wasn’t working.
Being straight fixes this. We speak up because we care about people and we want them to succeed. We’re direct about what needs to change, but we do it out of genuine care for the person.
This isn’t about being cruel or nasty. It’s about having the courage to have conversations that genuinely help people improve.
What I’ve learnt over the years is that leadership has to repeat the important, core messages, constantly.
Before I learnt that lesson, I didn’t understand why.
I used to think:
“Why keep repeating the same things. It’s an insult to people’s intelligence, surely they get it the first time.”
But then I’d notice that some people listened and applied it, and others didn’t.
Until I started repeating the core messages, and people started to see that it really mattered and to apply it.
Most of the time they don’t mean any harm.
We’re creatures of habit, and in any change, you have to fight the inertia of established habits until new habits take hold.
I see it in my own habits.
Our job as a leader is to decide which messages really matter to get across and to repeat them and set the example until they’re embedded in the culture of the organisation.
🤙
Jorge
PS. I’m on a journey of defining the values that will shape the future of my teams. It’s been fun 😊