Most performance problems are not about a bad hire. They are about a feedback vacuum where expectations were never clearly set. Lia walks through a simple framework: set explicit expectations, give specific constructive feedback, and only then decide whether someone can turn it around. This episode is essential for any owner or leader who has ever thought ‘they should just know this.’
This episode is part of the Feedback & Hard Conversations series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“…frame it in terms of what is important to that person. I know you care about speed. I know you care about efficiency. I know you care about getting things done. That’s why I’m here to give the feedback.”
“…you wanna see something different? You gotta say it. You have to have that person understand this is actually the ask. This is the repair.”
Episode highlights
Why giving feedback up the chain feels so hard
When your team is unmotivated, burning out, or losing trust in leadership, someone has to say something. But when the person causing the friction is your own manager or a senior executive, the stakes feel completely different. You’re in a tough spot: your team is looking to you to fix it, and yet the person you need to address is above you in the hierarchy. That tension is exactly what makes this a Sunday Scaries topic.
For founders and owners who do not have a management chain, Lia reframes the exercise: use this framework to give yourself honest feedback about how a recent situation or conversation landed with your team.
Step 1: Frame the conversation around what matters to them
This is a Dale Carnegie classic, and Lia applies it directly to feedback. Most people think in terms of their own priorities, so if you open by connecting your feedback to what the other person already cares about (speed, efficiency, hitting the deadline, making the sale), they are far more likely to actually listen. Start with: “I know this is important to you, and that is why I am bringing this forward.” That anchor prevents you from sounding like a complainer coming out of nowhere.
Step 2: Show proactivity, not doom and gloom
Do not walk in with months of accumulated frustration. Framing the conversation as “I’ve been sitting on this for six months and it’s gotten really bad” makes you look reactive and puts the other person immediately on the defensive. Instead, position yourself as someone addressing something early: “I’ve heard some rumblings and I wanted to get ahead of it.” That proactivity connects directly back to their interest in getting things done faster.
Step 3: Use the Situation-Behavior-Impact framework
Vague feedback like “you’re always hostile with the team” will go nowhere. Specific feedback tied to a real moment is far easier to hear and act on. Use SBI: name the situation (the Tuesday review meeting), describe the behavior (the comment that the work was not where it needed to be and the meeting ending abruptly), and share the impact (the team had put in significant effort and left feeling pretty down). Concrete and contained beats global and sweeping every time.
Step 4: Volunteer what you will do
This is the move that changes the entire dynamic. After you share the feedback, immediately offer what you are going to do about it. Something like: “I will take the feedback you shared back to the team, relay it clearly, and come back to you with a revised plan.” You are no longer just dropping a problem on someone’s desk. You are a partner in solving it, which means the other person is now genuinely listening.
Step 5: Make a specific ask
Feedback without a request for change is just venting. You have to name what you actually want to see next time. In the review meeting example, that might be: “Next time, can you share that kind of feedback with me privately so I can address it with the team?” or “Can we do a quick one-on-one before the team presents so we can align on direction first?” The ask holds the leader accountable while keeping the focus on moving forward, not relitigating the past.
The 5 steps at a glance
1. Frame the feedback around what is important to that person. 2. Show proactivity. Address it early, not after everything has fallen apart. 3. Use a specific feedback framework. Lia recommends Situation-Behavior-Impact. 4. Volunteer what you will do to help move things forward. 5. Make a clear, specific ask for what you want to see change.
These steps will not work perfectly in every edge case, but they will get you significantly closer to a productive conversation than winging it.
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 194: Your team member isn’t performing. Have you actually given them feedback?. Most performance problems are not about a bad hire. They are about a feedback vacuum where expectations were never clearly set. Lia walks through a simple framework: set explicit expectations, give specific constructive feedback, and only then decide whether someone can turn it around. This episode is essential for any owner or leader who has ever thought ‘they should just know this.’
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)
See, so you’re not creating a new problem for that person by raising feedback saying, Hey, you’ve been doing this thing. You had no idea. I’ve been sitting on this for six months. It’s gotten so bad, everyone’s quitting. Here’s the feedback. Obviously, that’s not going to land well and it’s not gonna make you look very good either. Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where I bring a decade of experience working in some of the most influential companies in tech to help you navigate the ins and outs of being a people manager.
From conflicts to feedback to delegating and more, we will leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it and everything in between. Doesn’t matter if you’re a new manager looking for some tips or a seasoned manager looking up their game. Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. Let’s go. Let’s go, let’s go. Let’s welcome back to the show. It is Sunday again, so we’re talking Sunday Scaries.
Anne, what’s scarier than having to give feedback to your own? Especially when your own manager has been stirring some stuff up and the team’s kind of unhappy about it. This is really, really difficult. And if you are a business owner, founder, and you don’t have to give feedback to a specific manager, I want you to look inward and imagine someone was giving this feedback to you. So this is kind of an inception one for you. If you don’t have a.
Because it’s an opportunity for you to think about, Hey, have I been doing some of these things or has someone been trying to give me feedback and I’m gonna give myself this feedback before it has to be addressed. Okay, now this topic came from a question someone texted me from my text list. 4 1 5 2 3 4 5 7 1 6. I do see them. I do respond, and I do bring the content you asked me about into the podcast.
Let’s talk about the situation that this often comes. From my own experience having to give feedback to managers or, or executives or whatever. I think oftentimes it’s potentially feeling micromanaged. I don’t have the autonomy that I should, especially if I’m managing other people, potentially changing deadlines where it created some confusion or some, some fire drills and spinning of wheels. I’ve had to give feedback about executive leaders who really thrashed a team. They, they came to a review or some kind of approval.
Said something pretty harsh like What is, what is this? This is all you’ve been doing last week, or come back to me when this is actually finished. Like very harsh and that really threw off the team. All of these different situations result in one thing. Team is unmotivated, team feels not supported, and some feedback has to be had before people start burning out. Now, if you are a manager having to approach this, You’re in a tough spot because often your team has been raising these issues, so they’re looking to you to address it and you’re feeling it too.
And yet the person you have to give feedback to is senior to you, and yeah, that’s why we’re feeling the Sunday scaries around it, right? Because it’s a tough situation. So I wanted to talk about a few things that you can do. To make it a little bit easier, at least, so that you can come into that conversation with a plan. The first thing when delivering feedback really to anybody, but certainly when delivering feedback to someone more senior to you, is to frame it in terms of what is important to them.
Now, this is an old school Dale Carnegie trick of speaking in terms of what’s important to that other person. This is an influencing strategy because let’s call it what it is most people think in terms of their own. And if you’re having a hard conversation, benefit of the doubt says if you frame it in terms of that person’s interest, they’re gonna be listening. So what might be their interest, speed, efficiency, getting things done, making the deadline, making the sale.
These kinds of things are likely in that executive’s interest or in your boss’s interest. So we wanna start the conversation framing as I know this thing is important to you, and that is why I’m delivering this feedback. That’s the context you wanna set. So it’s not like I’m just a complainer, I’m coming outta nowhere. I don’t like anything. Nothing’s ever good enough. And of course that’s not what you mean by this, but I think when we are not careful, we don’t not set that anchor of here’s why I’m here.
I know that this is important for the success of the team, and I know those are things that are important to you. That’s why I’m here. Okay, that’s the framework. Second one, we wanna not necessarily paint a doom and gloom picture. That everybody has been mentioning this for months and I haven’t said anything and it’s gotten really bad and I’m not proactive. No. We wanna come in and say, and I wanna address this before it becomes more of an issue.
I wanted to share some feedback. I’ve heard some rumblings and that’s why I’m here right away. Because that proactivity then links right to that understanding. They wanted to get things done faster. See, so you’re not creating a new problem for that person by raising feedback saying, Hey, you’ve been doing this thing. You had no idea. I’ve been sitting on this for six months. It’s gotten so bad, everyone’s quitting. Here’s the feedback. Obviously that’s not going to land well and it’s not gonna make you look very good either.
Okay. Third thing, we wanna use a feedback framework. I love situation behavior impact. I talk about it all the time. It is clear, it is actionable. We know exactly what happened, and it’s easier to address something hard and uncomfortable using a specific framework. For example, let’s say you were just in a review and an executives getting frustrated or nervous, the meeting’s not moving along fast enough and they say, you know, this isn’t what I was looking for.
Come back to me when you have better ideas and they kind of end the meeting abruptly and people are pretty thrown off, people put in a lot of hard work to get to that meeting and are just left with a bad taste in their mouth, and you wanna address it with this. Framing the conversation in terms of that meeting is going to be the container that’s gonna help you move the conversation along. It’s much harder to say you’re always ho hostile with the team, or nothing’s ever good enough.
Like that’s not the kind of thing you wanna bring forward, but saying to them in the meeting on Tuesday, The comment that you made around, you know, we’re not where we need to be. And the way that it was said, and it had an impact on the team, folks were, were pretty surprised to hear that because they had put in a lot of work. And I completely, again, I understand where you’re coming from. I know that it wasn’t at the level you were expecting, but I just wanted to share that the way it was said.
Folks that had prepared a lot for that meeting were feeling pretty down after. Now, what do you do with that information? We also now have to volunteer with what we will do. So let me bring these last two steps together. You’ve shared the feedback in the meeting, the comment and the tone didn’t land with the team. Now you say what you will do. I know I sense that you’re feeling worried about the timeline, sense that you’re feeling worried about the quality of the work.
Here’s what I will do. I will go back to the team with the feedback that you’re sharing with me right now. Relay it to them and come back to you with a new plan for how to move forward. That’s what I can commit. Now in the feedback conversation, you have committed to helping make the whole thing better. This person’s really listening Now they’re saying, okay, you have given me feedback, but you’re also going to help me.
You didn’t just drop a turd on my lap and say, Hey, the, the team morale is shot and deal with it. No, you said this created an bit of an issue. Here’s how I’m gonna help. And now the last step make an ask. Okay, you wanna see something different? You gotta say it. You have to have that person understand this is actually the ask. This is the repair. In the situation of the example in the meeting, the ask might be next time, can you offer that kind of feedback to me privately so that I can address it with the team?
Or next time, let’s have a one-on-one before the review so I can preview it with you and make sure we’re, we’re moving in the right direction before the team presents the work in front of you or next time, whatever. You see what I’m saying? You’re making an ask so that you still hold that leader accountable, but it’s framed in moving forward instead of, let’s go back and rehash everything and everything. Recapping these steps. One, we wanna frame it in terms of what is important to that person.
I know you care about speed. I know you care about efficiency. I know you care about getting things done. That’s why I’m here to give the feedback. Two, we don’t wanna paint the situation as doom and gloom. Like I’ve been sitting on this thing for 10 years. We want to show our proactivity and that, Hey, I’ve addressed it right away. Three, use a specific feedback framework. I love S B I situation, behavior impact. I feel like it literally works every time.
Try that and if you have your own feedback framework, you like go. Four, volunteer. What you will do, you are a manager. You are someone that’s supposed to be taking action, being proactive. Go for it. Tell them what you’re going to do. And last but not least, make an ask. Put it out there. This is what will be helpful to see next time. Can you try this? Can we explore this? Can we experiment with this? Will you do this?
Make that specific ask. And I’m not gonna tell you it works every time. I know there’s edge cases. You might be sitting here with all sorts of question. And if you’re feeling that way, text the word MANAGER to 4 1 5 2 3 4 5 7 1 6 and share your edge case. Tell me what’s going on so that we can talk through it. But I do think if you try these five steps, you are so much more close to having a productive conversation than you were if you were just winging it.
And I hope at least it helps to alleviate those Sunday scaries even just a little bit. See you next. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple Podcast where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive. I always love to hear from you, so please reach out at liagarvin.com or message me on LinkedIn.
See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
How do I give feedback to my manager without it backfiring on me?
Start by framing the conversation around what matters to them, not what's bothering you. If your leader cares about speed, efficiency, or hitting deadlines, open with that. Say something like: I know these things are important to you, and that is why I am bringing this up. Then address the issue early, before it snowballs, so you come across as proactive rather than someone who has been sitting on a complaint for months. That framing alone makes the conversation land completely differently.
What is the best framework for giving feedback to someone more senior than you?
Use situation, behavior, impact. Anchor the feedback to a specific moment, like a meeting that happened on Tuesday, rather than making a broad claim like you are always hostile with the team. Describe what was said, how it was said, and the effect it had on people. For example: the comment made in that review surprised the team because they had put in a lot of work and left feeling pretty down. Specific frameworks make hard conversations cleaner and easier to act on for everyone in the room.
How do I raise team morale problems to my own leader without throwing my team under the bus?
Do not paint a doom and gloom picture. Avoid saying things like everyone has been complaining about this for six months and I have not done anything. Instead, show up early and frame it as: I have heard some rumblings and I wanted to address this before it becomes more of an issue. That proactivity protects your credibility and signals to your leader that you are there to solve something, not to dump a problem on their desk.
Should I offer to help fix the problem when giving feedback to my manager?
Yes, and it is one of the most important steps. After sharing the feedback, volunteer what you will do next. Tell them you will take the feedback back to the team, relay it clearly, and come back with a plan. This changes the dynamic entirely because your leader sees that you are not just surfacing a complaint, you are actively helping move things forward. It keeps the conversation collaborative rather than confrontational and makes the leader far more likely to actually hear what you said.
How do I end a feedback conversation with my manager so something actually changes?
Make a specific ask. Do not leave the conversation open-ended. Say something like: next time, can you share that kind of feedback with me privately so I can address it with the team? Or: can we do a quick one-on-one before the team presents so you can preview the work first? You are still holding that leader accountable, but you are framing it around what happens next rather than relitigating the past. A clear ask is what turns a hard conversation into an actual behavior change.