Feedback only works when your team feels safe enough to hear it and accountable enough to act on it. Lia walks through three moves that make feedback land: sharing your own mistakes first, setting crystal-clear expectations before the conversation, and openly holding a high bar while signaling you believe your team can meet it. If you manage anyone and have been softening or avoiding feedback, this episode is the reset you need.
This episode is part of the Feedback & Hard Conversations series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“Your team member isn’t bad. They just haven’t gotten feedback.”
“…the first thing I always ask when someone says they have a team that’s underperforming is, well, what feedback have you given them? And nine times out of 10 it’s crickets.”
“If we are losing people because we didn’t give feedback, that’s on us. When we didn’t see if there was a chance, it’s on us.”
“…before you decide it’s hopeless, before you decide it’s over, think to yourself, okay, what feedback can I give? Where can I be more clear?”
Episode highlights
The frustration spiral that starts with silence
You are fed up. Your team member keeps missing the mark, and the thing they are missing feels completely obvious to you. So you stew, you take on extra work, and eventually you start mentally writing the job posting for their replacement. Meanwhile, your team member has no idea anything is wrong. Lia’s core argument: that gap is almost never about a bad hire. It is about a feedback vacuum.
Why ‘it should be obvious’ is a trap
Lia hears the same thing every day from corporate leaders and business owners across industries from tech to home building: ‘They’re just not getting it.’ The first question she always asks is what feedback they have given. Nine times out of ten, the answer is crickets. Nothing, or something so vague and general the team member could not act on it even if they wanted to.
The trap is the phrase ‘it should be obvious.’ Once you decide someone is a lost cause, you get tunnel vision. You stop remembering what you actually communicated versus what you assumed was understood. Clarity that feels self-evident to you from the inside almost never lands the same way on the outside.
The meeting start-time example (and why small things matter)
Lia uses a vivid scenario: a team member who keeps rolling in five or ten minutes late to a 9:30 meeting, iced coffee in hand. The leader is furious and interprets it as disrespect. But the team culture is casual, people trickle in, and the meeting rarely kicks off the real agenda before 9:40 anyway. No expectation was ever stated. No feedback was ever given. Then suddenly the team member gets hit with ‘Do you even want to be on this team?’ and they are blindsided.
The same pattern plays out at bigger scale, whether it is an employee using AI to draft copy without disclosing it, or someone communicating with clients in a way that misses the mark. In every case, the disconnect could have been resolved through a single clear conversation. Instead, frustration compounds in silence until it feels unrecoverable.
What performance coaching actually reveals
When Lia steps in to do performance improvement coaching, she meets with both the leader and the team member. Not to take sides, but because the gap almost always shows up on both ends. Getting aligned on expectations and what feedback has actually been given is where the corrective steps happen. A large share of the time, once both sides see the disconnect clearly, performance turns around quickly.
The business case for this is simple: rehiring, retraining, and onboarding is expensive and exhausting. If someone is willing to try, find out before you cut them loose.
The expectation-setting framework before any feedback conversation
If you decided today was day one and you were giving someone a fresh start, here is exactly what you would cover:
– What the expectation is, stated plainly, even if it feels obvious – Context and the why behind it – An example of what done looks like, especially if it has to be done a specific way – When you will check in and what success looks like at that checkpoint
That is the full setup. Then give them a chance. Then give feedback on what comes back. Only after that do you have real information about whether this person can turn it around.
If you skip feedback, the problem follows you
Lia makes a point that often gets overlooked: every time you lose a team member because they never knew what they could have fixed, you also lose the chance to sharpen your own clarity as a leader. Bring in a new hire without addressing the expectation gap, and you will hit the same wall again. The feedback habit protects you and your next hire, not just the current one.
The bottom line is simple. Give the feedback. Set the expectation out loud, with context and an example. See how the person responds. Most of the time, things turn around. At minimum, you now have real information instead of a story you told yourself in frustration.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 226: How to give feedback without it turning into a laundry list. When you have a lot of corrective feedback to give, rattling it off item by item erodes trust and trains your team to do the bare minimum. Lia’s fix is to categorize feedback into themes, connect each theme to a clear company why, and balance corrections with specific, concrete recognition. This episode is especially useful for small business owners and team leads who feel buried in constant corrections.
- Ep 214: How to give feedback after you’ve waited too long. It is never too late to give feedback, and avoiding it only makes the problem worse for your team. Lia walks through how to own the delay, contextualize the conversation, and deliver the message in a way that reduces defensiveness and rebuilds trust. Most useful for founders, owners, and team leads who have been carrying unspoken feedback and need a practical script to finally move it forward.
- Ep 212: Why avoiding tough feedback is the most expensive mistake you can make as a leader. Avoiding difficult feedback does not protect your team member, it leaves them in the dark and lets problems quietly damage everyone around them. Lia breaks down the most common pitfalls leaders fall into with hard feedback and makes the case that one uncomfortable conversation is always cheaper than the resentment and performance damage that builds when you stay silent. This episode is especially useful for founders, owners, and team leads who know they should say something but keep finding reasons to wait.
- Ep 178: How to give feedback that actually works (without your team shutting down). Feedback only works when your team feels safe enough to hear it and accountable enough to act on it. Lia walks through three moves that make feedback land: sharing your own mistakes first, setting crystal-clear expectations before the conversation, and openly holding a high bar while signaling you believe your team can meet it. If you manage anyone and have been softening or avoiding feedback, this episode is the reset you need.
Want to go deeper?
The New Manager Playbook. Lia’s bestselling guide to leading a team for the first time.
Full transcript (click to expand)
Your team member isn’t bad. They just haven’t gotten feedback. I want you to think about this for a second. You have a team member and you’re fed up. You feel like they are just not getting it. They’re missing the mark. It kind of feels like this person doesn’t care because the thing they’re missing, it’s so freaking obvious to you. Like, of course we’d have to do that thing every day. Or of course we’d have to be on time or of course we have to send the notes out this way or of course we should talk to the client this way.
And so you’re, you’re literally at your wits end and you’re thinking, I, you know, I got to hire another person and I want to have to deal with this. I guess I’ll start taking on some of these responsibilities so that I don’t get left without, without coverage here. And you’re just racking your brain for what to do about it. And in the meantime, your team member knows none of this because your team member isn’t bad. They just haven’t gotten feedback.
And that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. I’m Leah Garvin and this is the new manager playbook podcast where I am on a mission to make managing your team the easiest part of your job. And nothing’s harder than when your team member sucks, right? When you have someone that’s not delivering and it’s happening over and over and you’re really frustrated and you’re having to take on more slack or other team members are having to take on more slack and they’re getting frustrated.
Nothing is worse than that. So yeah, I get it. None of us want to be in that situation. But what I hear every single day, every single day is I don’t know why my team members are, are missing the mark. I hear it from the corporate leaders that I work with in industries, from tech to sports, to marketing, to home building. And I hear it from business owners, this team member, they’re just not getting it. They’re just not getting it.
I need to find a new person or I have a few people that are just not getting it and the person isn’t delivering. They’ve got to go. And the first thing I always ask when someone says they have a team that’s underperforming is, well, what feedback have you given them? And nine times out of 10 it’s crickets. No feedback was given nothing or it was really lightweight or a little bit vague and abstract. Come on general.
And we didn’t give feedback that the person will be able to action. And I’ve had a few recent examples where someone has wanted to get rid of an employee. And so I’ve gotten involved with doing some performance improvement coaching. And this is something that I strongly recommend. If you feel like someone is not hitting the mark, get them some coaching. See, is it salvageable? I think when we recognize someone is not delivering, you know, unless it’s something really egregious, which I’ll let you decide what that is, mishandling of funds, egregious, lashing out on a client or a customer, egregious, right?
There’s some things that are pretty obvious, obviously harassing anybody of course, discriminating. Yes. Those are like boom right away. Violence is, you know, but if something’s more around performance delivery output, right. These are the things that are, are, you know, it might feel egregious when it’s happened a few times, but these are the things that we want to figure out, like with some support, could this person turn these behaviors around? So for all of the stuff over there, which is probably 98% of the things that come up right day to day, someone that’s missing the mark, a little bit slow there, you know, there may be some excuses.
The attitude’s always great, but like, yeah, like that kind of general day to day little performance bugs. That’s the stuff that if you recognize someone is not delivering to get them some performance coaching and help them improve that and make a plan and they have to correct these certain things in a certain amount of time. And then you kind of obsess. Now I’ve always said it. I’m not an HR professional. I don’t have training in kind of the ins and outs of compliance, especially around firing folks.
And it does vary state to state. But I do know that, you know, it’s strongly advised by HR experts to give people a performance and plan and offer them the opportunity to course correct. And what is the foundation of that plan? They’ve got to know what the hell they were doing wrong. They need feedback first. Okay. So I’m going to start, that’s what we’re going to talk about. Right. Well, what do we even mean here? When you’ve decided someone isn’t missing, isn’t hitting the mark when they’re already like a lost cause, what typically happens is we decide this and then we kind of get tunnel vision to seeing any of the positives that are working or sort of forget what we’ve communicated.
And it seems like, yeah, I told them it’s so clear. Like they should know this. That’s the kind of thing that we actually have to take a step back and we have to think, what actually did I say? And when did I say it? And under what circumstances did I say it? That’s the feedback. Let’s take a scenario. Let’s say a team member, they are coming in late all the time, right? To your team meetings. And you had a situation where it was pretty, it was pretty loose.
Like you have a, you work in an office, but it’s pretty laid back. People kind of come and go in the mornings. People kind of trickle in and not come and go, but people trickle in nine, nine 15 grabbing coffees, chit chatting and around. You have a weekly meeting that starts at nine 30. And it’s, it’s pretty casual at first. Right. And, and you get started, there’s a little bit of chit chat and probably like nine 40, you kind of start on the, on the meat of the conversation.
But you have a team member and they’re always coming in around like, you know, the meeting starts at nine 30, they’re getting there nine 35, nine 40, they got the iced coffee in hand and it just starts to bug you. You’re like, come on. Like the meeting starts at nine 30 and you know, let me just notice it a few times. And now you’re thinking like this person doesn’t respect me or my time. I’m here at nine 30.
I frankly, I got here at nine o’clock to open the doors. Like what, what’s going on? How come this person thinks it’s okay to roll in iced coffee, you know, acting like there was traffic, but it’s like, obviously you made a stop. And, and they’re, they’re late over and over and over. And so finally you say to them, Hey, like what’s going on? Like you have no respect for this place here. Like do you even want to be on this team?
And that person’s thinking, Whoa, what? You never said we start right at nine 30. It was unclear. People were just chit chatting. There was no expectation set and then you didn’t give them any feedback when they were late. They have no idea. Now I give this example because it can seem really trivial, like meeting start time. But these are the little things that start to add up and we think to ourself, it’s so obvious the invite starts at nine 30, but you have these little cultural norms on the team.
Like everyone’s chit chatting doesn’t really get started. So it feels like maybe to the other person, it wasn’t a firm expectation. And then you did not give any feedback when they were late a few times and you just built up this frustration. And they are on the receiving end of this like really elevated frustration when they had no idea. Now we can imagine how this takes shape with bigger things. Someone that’s, um, you know, let’s say I talked about this.
Okay. On an episode a couple of weeks ago, using AI constantly and they leave in the em dashes in and, and it’s very obviously using AI and you’re like, can you please proofread this? If I wanted to have a robot, write all the copy for this, I would just do that. I wouldn’t pay you money either. I wouldn’t pay you also. Right. And you’re getting frustrated and you’re thinking like, obviously I have you in this job so that I don’t have, you know, that there’s like a human writing and, and discerning this and kind of make redoing this.
And it’s so that I don’t have to use AI only. I don’t want to do that. Obviously that’s not what I want to do. And you have this team member, and they’re thinking, whoa, like this is awesome. I can shortcut this project by using AI here. And like, this is a disconnect resolved through feedback. And when you’re not giving feedback and you’re just looking over that person, you’re like, I get it. We get frustrated, but we don’t tell that person and we get more frustrated and we get more frustrated and we’ve reached this ending that feels like we can’t come back from it, but we can, we can come back from most endings by giving feedback, by stopping and getting on the same page.
And what happens when I do this coaching and these performance kind of improvement conversations for folks, um, I always, you know, tell the manager, the leader, business owner or corporate leader, I got to be meeting with you and I’ve got to be meeting with that person because there’s a gap on both ends. And it doesn’t mean I’m like taking sides with, you know, anyone, or if the person’s performance is really struggling that I don’t think that they need to turn it around.
It’s we need to get really aligned on the expectations and what feedback’s being given because that is where the corrective steps happen. Like that’s where the little things are fixed. And a lot of times by really seeing, okay, where are the disconnects and communication showing up on both sides, the performance turns around right away. And I want you to find that empowering and inspiring and find hope in that because it’s a pain in the butt to rehire.
It’s a pain in the butt to retrain, to onboard, to get new folks. And if someone has an interest in turning it around, someone’s like really, you know, doing their best to try to get there. Like, don’t we want to figure that out? Even if they’re a little bit defensive or a little bit frustrated or feel like, you know, like they’re not like just like, Oh my God, please. Like I’m, I love you back. Tell me everything.
Like they’re always going to feel that way, but we want to try and I’m going to say it again. Your team members aren’t bad. They just haven’t gotten feedback. Most of the time we want to give them an opportunity. We’ve got to give people feedback. We have to demystify it. We have to give them positive recognition. We have to give them constructive. And if someone is not performing, we got to give constructive feedback continually. We’ve got to set expectations and come back with the feedback and see how they respond.
We have to say, what, what were you hoping to see? And by when and when we supposed to review things, you have to say, you know, what does it mean? You’re not meeting the mark. What does that look like? What does it mean? This thing was supposed to be this certain way. Show an example. These things, again, it feels so obvious to us. We’re in the middle of it. We see it, but it’s just not always obvious someone else make it obvious for them.
And then if they’re resistant or like it just isn’t catching on, it could be a skills issue. They could get some coaching or development. They may be there a wrong fit for the role. If it’s an attitude thing and they’re not willing to improve and that could be around fit. But we, we can’t just decide that out of the gate. And again, this is something I hear every single day. Like, ah, I’m just worried about my team.
They’re not, they’re not a fit. They’re not getting it. We then, it’s always like, okay, let’s level up, go up out altitude, bird’s eye view, come up here and think about what have I said? What have they been expecting? What have they been informed? Where are we at? What are the, what is like, what are all the pieces up top? We got to get out of the weeds and start to think, okay, and if we said today is day one and I’m going to give them a new chance, give them a new opportunity, then we would have to start with, okay, what are the expectations?
Even though it felt super obvious and they should know better and it’s, it’s clear to me, clear as day to everyone else. Okay. This is what we are doing. Here is any context. This is the why. Context. Here’s any context. This is the why. Here’s any backstory. Um, here’s an example. If it has to be done a certain way, more context. Here’s when we want to check in. Here’s what success looks like. Here’s what done looks like.
That’s all the expectation setting. Boom. That’s step one. Give them a little chance. See what they come back with and then give feedback. Okay. Then we know only then we know before that we don’t have a chance. Okay. We, we, we can’t keep having revolving door of employees because we didn’t give feedback give feedback. That’s on us. If we are losing people because we didn’t give feedback, that’s on us. When we didn’t see if there was a chance, it’s on us.
Every time you lose a team member because they didn’t know what they could have fixed, you’re actually losing opportunities yourself as a leader to identify, okay, well, how can I be more clear in the future? Because if you get a new team member, like let’s say you, someone was really missing the mark with certain, certain things around communicating clearly to clients or to stakeholders and you really, things need to be done a certain way. And they were, they, they weren’t doing it.
It was like a huge miss. Right. And you just like, screw it. That person’s not going to get it. Now you bring another person in. How, how would that person know too? Right. Like maybe they’ll figure it out. Maybe they’ll observe. Maybe they, they are a little bit more kind of like, Oh, like asking to shadow you or like proactive. But if they’re not, you’re going to have the same mistake again and again and again and again.
So you’ve got to get better at setting expectations and giving the feedback so that you don’t have that same issue. And then at least you know that your employee is got the feedback and is still bad. So before you decide it’s hopeless, before you decide it’s over, think to yourself, okay, what feedback can I give? Where can I be more clear? And then give that feedback. And I’m telling you most of the time it can turn around.
Most of the time, at least you figure out where the gap was so that it can be a training thing or something that you can build into your process in the future. All right. See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
Why is my employee not improving even though the expectations seem obvious to me?
What feels obvious to you as the leader is often not obvious to your team member at all. If you have not explicitly set expectations, given feedback when something went wrong, or shown an example of what good looks like, your team member is working off assumptions. The gap is almost never attitude or capability. It is almost always a missing conversation. Before deciding someone is not improvable, ask yourself honestly: what did I actually say, when did I say it, and how specific was it?
What should I do before deciding to fire an underperforming employee?
Before you decide it is over, give clear and direct feedback first. Set expectations from scratch, even if it feels like they should already know. Explain the what, the why, show an example of what done looks like, and set a check-in date. Then give them a real chance to course correct. Most performance problems can turn around once someone actually knows what they need to fix. Skipping this step and replacing the person just sets you up for the same problem with the next hire.
How do I give constructive feedback to a team member who is missing the mark?
Start by setting the expectation clearly, not just repeating your frustration. Tell them specifically what needs to be done differently, give context for why it matters, share an example if the work needs to look a certain way, and say when you will check back in. Then follow through on that check-in and give feedback based on what you see. The feedback needs to be specific enough that the person can actually do something with it, not just a general note that they need to improve.
Is it worth trying to coach an underperforming employee or should I just hire someone new?
Replacing someone is expensive and time-consuming, and if you skip the feedback step, your next hire is likely to run into the same issues. Unless the problem involves something serious like harassment, dishonesty, or violence, most performance issues around output and delivery are worth addressing through direct feedback and a clear improvement plan. Getting someone some coaching can also help surface whether the issue is a skills gap, a communication gap, or a real fit problem. You deserve to know the difference before you make a hiring decision.
How do I stop having the same performance problems with every new hire?
The pattern repeats because the missing system travels with you, not with the employee. If you let someone go without ever clearly communicating expectations or giving specific feedback, the next person walks into the same unclear environment. Getting better at setting expectations upfront, including the what, the why, examples of good work, and check-in points, is what breaks the cycle. Each time you lose a team member without having that feedback conversation, you lose the chance to learn what you could communicate more clearly going forward.