How to give feedback that actually works (without your team shutting down)

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. When it comes to feedback, it’s okay to feel uncomfortable. Now, I don’t mean like weird uncomfortable, I mean out of our comfort zone. And it’s okay as a leader, as a manager, if something you say puts your team member out of their comfort zone. Now, they might not like that, but it doesn’t mean we don’t give feedback. And right now we are in a moment where more and more leaders feel really afraid to give feedback because it might freak somebody else out.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t give feedback, that means we get a lot better at it. And today I want to talk about the importance of helping our team members reach outside of their comfort zone and how to make that okay for them and for you as a leader. I’m Leah Garvin and this is The New Manager Playbook, where I share tools, tips, and stories to make managing your team the easiest part of your job. Because dealing with people is hard enough, am I right?

When we think about feedback, I always love to ask the question, what comes to mind when I say the words, hey, can I give you some feedback? Like those six words, every time I say it, even though I say this in every talk I give about feedback, every workshop, every coaching session with teams, companies, anywhere. Even saying those words out loud makes me like drop zone and I feel my stomach in my throat and I want to throw up.

Because the words, can I give you some feedback, for most of us, makes us feel like, oh God, here we go. I did something wrong. Like, okay, and that’s what our team members feel. And so when we say that, all of a sudden, our team members get really nervous. They get defensive, they put their blinders on, or they get their defenses up, or they don’t want to talk to us about it. And so when we enter a conversation about feedback, it’s already on this weird, weird vibe.

They’re like, okay, throw it at me. What is it? What is it going to be? Is it something that I can defend myself around? Is it something I can say, well, you did this and like turn the tables? Our team members get really, really nervous about that. And we have to understand as a manager, like that’s how they’re coming in. They are like porcupine spikes out, like ready to fight us off because it feels like they’re not safe.

Right? But I want us to think about like, when is the last time we actually changed and got better at something without hearing a piece of feedback? And so this is really the lens that we want to bring to our teams. So I want to give you an example. One of my first big jobs, like kind of corporate jobs, was working at Bank of America. I was literally working in Chicago in the Sears Tower, funny enough.

Now it’s the Willis Tower, but you know what I mean. It at one point was the tallest building in the world. I would take the train downtown where it was in Chicago, so I’d have like a big jacket in the winter and snow boots and change like in the elevator into regular clothes. And worked for a very, very demanding boss. We worked in the technology division of Bank of America and we had a global team, a huge team and the stakes were really high.

We managed all the technology systems for the trading platforms, right? Like if something goes wrong on that team, like yeah, the whole system goes down. So very, very high stakes and our manager held us to a really high standard. And he was someone that if you made a mistake, you were going to feel embarrassed about it. And from this boss, I knew just by seeing him, just by being in meetings and seeing how he reacted to other people’s stuff, that everything I did had to be checked over, not once, not twice, three times at least by me, making sure that I didn’t put anything out.

I didn’t send him an email, didn’t create a deck, didn’t do a presentation that wasn’t flawless. Because I knew the stakes were high, I knew he had a high standard, and I sure as hell knew that if I didn’t hit that or I had a mistake, I was going to hear about it. And that was going to make me uncomfortable. That was going to make me feel dumb or like I messed something up or I should have known better.

And that knowing that created this habit for me, where I have been very diligent with how I approach my work. And it’s been something that folks have recognized in me later like, wow, like whenever you send something out, it’s always like very, very accurate, precise, it’s always done like that. It’s not like, what the hell is this, can we have this finished? Because I was held to such a high standard, and the stakes are really high for me.

And in being in that situation where I was out of my comfort zone, and I got some hard feedback the first time something wasn’t done, I never did that again. And God, it was like, I don’t know, 15 years ago, I don’t remember exactly, specifically feeling embarrassed by one thing he said. It was knowing you would be feeling uncomfortable if you got something wrong, that you would be called out. Now, he was also very, very fun to be around, always laughing, making jokes, he was nice.

He wasn’t like a tyrant making us all feel afraid to do anything, but he had an extremely high standard. And I’m so grateful to that, because having this manager so early in my career, it really set the tone for having a high standard for myself along the way. And I think right now we’re in a moment where managers, all of us are really afraid to hold a high standard, because there’s a very different relationship to our work.

It’s not just generational, but it’s showing up a lot as folks are entering the workforce, especially in situations where they may be working remote and it’s their first job. Or maybe they went to college remote, or they haven’t really been in that office situation where you get that quick, easy, kind of like quick, not maybe easy, but like quick common pieces of feedback where you can’t just kind of feel it out because you’re in a situation where there’s other people around.

There’s a real, real resistance to feedback right now in the workplace. And we gotta fix that, because we only get better when we hear feedback. And I was telling a friend the other day, how does your kid grow out of wearing pull-ups at night, right? And I was asking her, and I wanna make sure that my daughter feels like she’s doing that at the right pace. I don’t wanna force her, but I wanna make sure that I’m not missing the boat in something.

And this friend said to me, well, her kid, they stopped wearing pull-ups, and they sleep without underwear. And then when they’d pee in the bed, that would be uncomfortable. And their body would notice that, and they would feel uncomfortable. And slowly, it trained their body to stop peeing in the bed, then they would get up and they would go to the bathroom instead of just peeing and laying and pee all night. And I thought of, holy shit, this is the same exact thing.

We are refusing to take off the pull-ups, sleep in our bed one night, pee in our bed, and feel uncomfortable and go, okay, I’m gonna get up and I’m going to go to the bathroom instead. Or I’m gonna not drink as much water before I go to bed, or I’m gonna do something differently. When we don’t put our team members in that situation, they’re wearing pull-ups the whole time and they are not learning the valuable information they need based on being uncomfortable a few times, one time, it might only take once or twice.

So everyone listen, we’ve got to let our team members wet the bed, okay, that’s the first thing. And I wanna talk about a few things that as reflecting on, well, how do we make it safer? Because there’s a whole other podcast training, whatever I could do for teams on how to receive feedback and how to think about it and how to internalize it. But right now I’m talking about you, the leader, the manager who has to deliver feedback and wants your team member to not just get defensive and quit or not show up again or whatever has been happening right now.

And we all know horror stories, I did an episode recently, the dreaded either I quit or I’m going to HR, as if feedback is now something that’s not allowed to be said in the workplace. Well, that’s not true, people need to hear feedback. So what do we do? Well, I would say first things first, I think we can make it really safe to hear feedback when we first have volunteered our own examples. So as a manager, I always love to share with my team things that I’ve learned when something’s gone wrong, that I really changed my process around.

An example of something that I worked on that was really hard, open the door and show your teams that, hey, it’s okay to not be perfect. But when we get feedback or we learn a hard lesson, we apply that lesson and we do something different next time. Not only do you build humility around like, hey, I know I’m not infallible, but we also show them, hey, when you make a mistake, you are expected to change your process, to not do it again, to learn from it.

So we not only build that psychological safety, we also are training them to be accountable. So let’s say for example, actually, I’ll share a story from someone that I, in a training I was attending on public speaking training. It was led by someone that used to work for the CFO office at Microsoft, like way back in the 90s. And he said he was preparing a presentation for the board and he stayed up all night getting everything ready.

You had in that day and age, like you had to send it to a printer and they’d print it off in the morning, they’d bind it with the spiral binding, they’d have it at everyone’s desk in the morning. And he woke up really early, he had slept like two hours, and he went to look over the presentation one last time. And he saw a decimal place was in the wrong spot, meaning the numbers that he had put out on the profitability was reflecting 10 times higher than they actually were.

So his heart sank, he got in a panic, he was like, okay, it feels okay knowing that this is the last day I work in this company, what am I gonna do? But instead of just giving up, he immediately resolved the issue. He fixed the issue in the presentation, he reached out to the printer, he was actually able to reprint it, and he was able to bring the new copies with him to the board meeting. So he wasn’t able to switch them out in time, but he brought them with him.

And he said to his manager right before the meeting, he said, hey, I noticed a misplaced decimal point. I fixed the presentation, I reordered the copies, and here they are, so we just have to go in the room and switch them out. Now this was on me, I didn’t catch that in time before the printing. And what I’ve done is I’ve created a checklist that I will run through every single time before the next presentation, and I will make sure that this never happens again.

And that his boss, the CFO of Microsoft at the time, she said, thank you, I really appreciate you catching the mistake, you fixing it, and you changing your process for the future. Now when I heard this guy share this story in this training I was in, I thought to myself, wow, what an amazing example to share as a leader with our teams, something that we effed up so bad that we thought that was it. And we teach them in that, how we course correct, how we deal with this in the future.

That is the kind of story that helps our team members see that feedback’s okay, making mistakes is okay. And it starts to open the door of, we’re gonna be uncomfortable sometimes, stuff’s not gonna feel easy, it’s not gonna be great, but when we learn from it, we can be better and better and better. So that’s the first way that we make our team members feel like, okay, it’s okay to feel uncomfortable at work and here’s what we do about it.

Now the second thing, I’m gonna do this one fast because we talk about it all the time, set expectations. We have to be really, really clear on what we expect, how to approach something if there’s some specifics we wanna give there, when we wanna check in with our team members, and of course, what success looks like, what done looks like, what a good job looks like, all of these things so that we can give feedback. And one of the things when someone tells me, okay, I work with managers every single day with leaders and companies, coaching, developing their team operations, whatever it looks like.

And when I hear a manager, and I’m not calling you out if you feel this way, when someone comes to me and says, oh my God, my team member, they’re just not getting it. And I’ve tried to give feedback, and I don’t know, I think it’s hopeless. I’ll say, okay, well, what was the expectation set? And they give me a blank stare sometimes, or they go, well, I think I, nothing. When we haven’t set an expectation, how the hell is our team members supposed to be able to deliver on that?

And I know we think a lot of this is intuitive, they should understand it. This is like the company we work in, why wouldn’t you not get this, okay? A lot of this seems obvious. But until we have set clear expectations, we cannot tell our team members they didn’t meet the expectations when they don’t meet them, right? Feedback is like discussing, has an expectation been met or not, right? Positive feedback is when someone exceeded that, and they crushed it, and they blew it out of the park, that’s amazing.

And constructive feedback is when someone didn’t quite get there, or they blew it totally, whatever. So if we don’t have any set expectations, what are we giving feedback about? That’s where it feels like personal preference, that’s where it feels like, well, how was I supposed to know? That’s where the defensiveness comes up. And so when we’re thinking about, I gotta give feedback, and it’s gonna be an awful conversation, and I don’t wanna deal with it, when we get our head like that, we gotta roll back the tape and say, wait a second, have I set clear expectations?

If the answer is yes, proceed, use my situation, behavior, impact, any of the frameworks I share on the show. If we have not set expectations, we’ve gotta do that before we give feedback. And if you have only a little bit of time, and you feel like, well, something really went sideways, and I have to give the feedback right now, because I do suggest you give the feedback in a timely manner after something happens. Bring it back to what was the obvious thing, right?

What was the thing that you felt like was part of the job, or they should have known? So saying, hey, I know that someone shows up to a client meeting, going into a meeting with a finance client where they’re always dressed up, and they’re wearing a sweatsuit. Let’s just say that. They show up to a meeting, and you’re going into a big, fancy building downtown, and they’re wearing a sweatsuit. And you’re like, oh my God, what the hell?

So maybe you didn’t spell out a dress code, but it felt obvious to you, right? This is a high-end client, or you work in a law firm, you’re going to a court, they’re wearing a sweatsuit. You’re like, what is this, right? You got to deal with this. Say to them, say, hey, our expectation, we run a high-end agency, firm, whatever that looks like, and how we present ourselves is part of that. And that’s kind of what we agreed to when we signed up.

And wearing a sweatsuit to that shows that we don’t really treat our client with that same respect that they treat us, right? Or that we’re not bringing that high standard. And I understand we hadn’t spelled it out, but this is something that we really have to be doing for the next time. Now I share kind of what I hope is a wild example there, because you see what I mean. You can connect it to the bigger picture.

But truly, we do want to set much clearer expectations up front for kind of those day-to-day things. And I think you know what those mean. And feel free to email me at hello at leahgarver.com if you don’t. Now, the last thing is talking about with our teams that, hey, we hold up high bar, we have a high standard. That’s okay to do too, right? I’ve talked about this quite a bit, that it is okay, and welcome, and completely acceptable to talk about the high standard you have, that you have.

We have a large number of users, right? I worked in big tech for about a decade. Companies that serve billions of users, right? This is going in front of a lot of people. We have a high bar for this. Maybe you run an agency, or you work at an agency, and you are working on very high-end services, right? Whatever it is, we should kind of always hold a high bar, let’s be honest. Whatever that is, sharing it with your team.

And there’s a great example in the book, The Culture Code by Dan Coyle. And it’s about Greg Popovich, infamous coach of the San Antonio Spurs, that was really seen as one of the best coaches out there for how he dealt with his team. I think he said something along the lines of, to his teams, we hold a high standard, and you’re on this team because we believe that you can meet that. And that sort of holding that high bar and telling his team, he was right there, that he believes in them, that’s what helps people rise to the occasion.

And that also creates a psychological safety where our team members feel like, okay, yeah, I might be a little bit uncomfortable. I might be pushed out of my comfort zone, I might feel stretched, but these people believe in me. And so when we do those things, or when we share our own examples of things that we’ve learned and overcome, we set really clear expectations. And we say, hey, I’m holding that high bar, and you’re here because I believe that you can meet that.

That is what makes our team oversee that, yeah, I’m gonna take off the pull up, I might be in the bed once, but I have the support to get back out there. The managers are gonna change the sheets, we’re gonna get back out there, I’ll sleep through the night, and I’m not gonna pee in the bed again. Because unless we get uncomfortable, I really feel like we have not fully stretched ourselves in the way. It’s uncomfortable to grow, it’s uncomfortable to be building strength in a new area, right?

Our muscles get sore, our brain gets sore, whatever it is, it’s hard. It’s okay if it’s uncomfortable, okay? But we can’t get there, and our teams are gonna get there if we’re avoiding feedback because we don’t wanna have this weird thing. So I’m really, I’m urging you to set up all this stuff up front, talk about those stories, set the expectations, show that you’re holding a high bar, then give feedback using the frameworks that I talk on the show, and it will go so much better, all right?

Everyone with me? Drop the pull-up, you’ve got this.