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
“As you recognize small things, specific things, people become champions of that behavior and reinforcing it. And it makes it so much easier because now you have people that are like little superheroes around these different skills.”
“The more personally accountable and invested people feel in doing a great job, the more their radar is open to finding ways they can keep improving this.”
“…we cannot just wait for these huge moments to recognize work and to thank people for the good things that they’re doing.”
Episode highlights
The real reason positive feedback drives performance
Most leaders only speak up when something goes wrong. The problem: team members start to feel picked apart, put up a wall, and stop believing change is possible. Lia’s core argument is that behavior change has to come from within. When someone sees themselves as a capable, high-performing person, small corrective nudges land. When they only hear what is broken, nothing sticks. Pouring gas on what is going well is not fluff. It is the foundation that makes every harder conversation possible.
Specific, repeatable, and tied to a bigger vision
Effective recognition is not “great job.” It names the exact behavior, explains why it mattered, and points to where to use it again. Lia uses a meeting example: instead of a vague compliment, you tell someone they started with a clear agenda, pulled in multiple voices, and ended on time with clear actions. Then you ask them to bring that same approach to client meetings. That specificity turns a one-time win into a repeatable skill the person now owns.
Connecting recognition to a team member’s career goals makes it land even harder. If someone wants to start their own business one day, pointing out the moments they led strategically or brought entrepreneurial thinking to a problem shows them the path forward. This is why Lia separates career conversations from performance reviews in The New Manager Playbook. Understanding what someone is working toward lets you recognize the right things.
Why you should not wait for big milestones
Seventy-eight percent of leaders save recognition for product launches, big revenue moments, or annual reviews. If your industry has long gaps between milestones, a team member could go six to nine months without hearing that they are on the right track. That silence is what sends top performers to job boards. Micro moments matter. A quick note after a well-run meeting or a thank-you when someone made a new team member feel welcome counts. It does not give anyone the wrong idea. It tells them what specifically is worth repeating.
The compliment sandwich does not work. Here is what does.
The classic compliment-constructive-compliment structure fails because people either only hear the positives or they brace for the negative and discard everything else. Lia’s alternative is to look at the situation holistically: name what worked, name what did not, and then ask the person for their plan. Putting the plan in their court is the key move. They become the owner of the solution instead of someone chasing a moving target you keep moving on them.
When there is something to correct inside the positive feedback
Even when a meeting went over time and you are genuinely frustrated, the move is not to lead with the failure. Acknowledge what started well, be direct about the impact of what went wrong (the team now has to find another meeting slot, the project could slip), and then ask: what is your proposal for bringing people into the conversation and still ending on time? You get accountability without crushing the confidence that produced the good parts in the first place.
Recognition creates ambassadors, not just happy employees
When you consistently recognize specific behaviors, people become champions of those behaviors. The person you praised for running a tight meeting is not going to be the one blowing up the agenda next time. They become a model for the rest of the team. Others start to notice and emulate it. A single piece of specific recognition creates a groundswell you did not have to engineer. That is what makes positive feedback a leadership strategy, not a nicety.
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)
As you recognize small things, specific things, people become champions of that behavior and reinforcing it. And it makes it so much easier because now you have people that are like little superheroes around these different skills. That’s going to be so helpful for you. Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where you get a masterclass in managing your team with ease in 15 minutes or less. I’m Leah Garvin, your host and team operations consultant. Through this show and my programs with small businesses and corporate teams, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech into strategies to save you time, money, and most of all, stress.
Doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be. Are a new manager learning the ropes or a seasoned manager ready to up their game? Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. From conflicts to feedback to delegating and more, we leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between. Let’s go.
Welcome back to the show. I promise you we’d be talking about feedback again, this time, the positive, the recognition, the appreciation, the showing people where they stand that on the whole, they’re doing a good job. Because let’s face it, that’s all we want to know that, hey, am I doing okay? Where do I stand? And am I on an upward trajectory? All of your team members want to hear that. And there’s always debate on, should we work on our strengths and getting those better or like really identifying our weaknesses?
A lot of different schools of thought around that. I know Ray Dalio, and I love all of his work, talks about really working on the weaknesses. And then what is it? Marcus Buckingham and the CliftonStrengths camp, they talk about working on your strengths. And so there is a lot of debate on this and I think there’s enough evidence that on the whole, the more we are showing people, here is what’s going well, and we want to pour more gas on that fire and really fuel the things that are going well, the more open people are to the constructive things.
Because when people feel like they are being picked apart constantly and they can’t get anything right and you only talk to them when you have to fix something, that starts to make them put a wall up and they feel like, well, what’s the point anyway? And there is a ton of data and evidence around that, especially when it’s around behavior change. Any behavior change has to come from within, right? We all know that if someone wants to start an exercise program or quit smoking or do whatever something differently, that’s got to come within themselves.
So them feeling like you’re picking me apart as my manager, they’re never going to change that behavior. And that’s where the positive feedback comes in is like, ooh, I see myself as this leader. I see myself as this person that can achieve this. I see myself as going in this right track and these little tiny shifts, these are going to make me better and help me get there. That’s why it’s really important as leaders to understand the goals of our team members, right?
To have career conversations and know what someone’s bigger picture for themselves is. And that’s why I talk specifically about career conversations separately than performance reviews in my book, The New Manager Playbook, because we have to have those different than one-on-ones and different than performance reviews. A career conversation, learning about people’s goals, this helps you delegate better because you can connect some tasks that you’re handing off to a bigger goal they have. This helps you understand what motivates them.
It helps you create more of a sense of purpose and meaning in their work. It is so helpful. And most of all, it helps you recognize and really know, well, what is the person’s bigger vision for themselves? So you can be sharing feedback in accordance to that. So for example, if a team member really, really wants to start their own business one day, right? Now you can find moments to recognize when they are thinking like a visionary or operating strategically or bringing some entrepreneurial spirit into that or really leading folks in a good way.
All of that helps paint the picture of this vision they have for themselves of starting a business. And so all of that feedback and the recognition around those things, that’s going to land for them. Instead of saying like, hey, I don’t like how you ran that meeting or, you know, this didn’t make sense. If they’re not grounded in any, like I care about you and I’m holding your vision with you, they’re just going to feel like they’re being picked apart.
Even if you’re specific, even if you use all the good tools, right? Even they’re just not going to feel open to that. Now the question that I get all the time, and I recently did a LinkedIn post about this was we’re not just giving out participation awards. You’re not thanking people for showing up to work or just attending meetings. No, you are giving specific, actionable, repeatable feedback, right? So take a meeting they ran that went really well saying, hey, I just wanted to say great job on running the team meeting this week.
We’ve had rotating, everyone on the team takes a turn running the meeting and you started with a really clear agenda. You did a great facilitation to bring all different voices involved. And we ended the meeting on time with clear actions. I would love for you to do that again the next time you run it and actually bring that same strategy into some of our client meetings. That would be great to see. Now you have shown someone that you are celebrating the skills, the behaviors they did.
You’re telling them where to utilize that again. They can see, oh, okay, this meeting management thing, I was maybe nervous running the team meeting. I tried something new and it really worked. Right? So the person also feels seen. Now I mentioned team meeting because we also tend to save recognition, appreciation till these big moments, the product launch, the new thing just came out. We’ve served, we’ve made a million dollars. Now let’s recognize everyone. No, we recognize little meaningful moments.
And again, it’s not participation awards. We’re showing people the story for themselves that on the whole, you’re doing these things right. So they want to do more of those things, right? You see what I’m saying? And then they believe that and they are now feeling personally accountable to this behavior. The more personally accountable and invested people feel in doing a great job, the more their radar is open to finding ways they can keep improving this. So that same example in meetings, that person feeling really good about how they manage the meeting.
They’re probably not going to derail future meetings. You know what I mean? And be the one that’s like making it off, making the agenda go over because they saw you valued that you praise them for that. And they’re going to now be someone that’s helping become kind of an ambassador in your team for effective team meetings. So you’re going to see that as you recognize small things, specific things, people become champions of that behavior and reinforcing it.
And it makes it so much easier because now you have people that are like little superheroes around these different skills. That’s going to be so helpful for you. And other people start to see that behavior and then they start to model that and emulate that. And now you’re having this groundswell of this behavior you want to be seeing. So positive feedback is not just telling people good job. It’s not just thanking them for showing up for work.
I’ve said it a few times because this is a question that we can feel. If we didn’t, I think, hear a lot of positive feedback from our own managers growing up or maybe our parents or whoever, or rising through the ranks. We were in a no news is good news kind of situation. And we only got feedback when it was corrective. And we’re thinking, well, what if someone’s not doing everything great? I don’t want to give them positive feedback.
I don’t want them to think everything’s fine. We still need to find those moments for where the person has done something on the right track potentially, or in the right domain so that we can show them the way to get to the other side. So let’s take for example, someone that they ran the team meeting and it went way over and you’re like, Oh my God, I can never ask this person again. Like this is such an easy thing at softball, I threw them and they dropped it saying, Hey, let’s talk about the team meeting started really, really strong.
I love that you had an agenda and you really engaged folks in the conversation at the same time with so much dialogue, the meeting got off track and we weren’t able to end on time and get to the actions. And now we have to pull everyone back together. So I really appreciate the effort to really pull people in the conversation. And what’s really, really important for next time is managing the time because that is such a big challenge that we have on the team and it’s finding a new slot to get everyone together is it’s going to potentially set this project back.
So can you share a proposal for how you do those two things, how you bring more people in the conversation and how we still end on time and put it in their court, ask them to do that. Right? This is the caveat there. You’re asking them to share their plan instead of just having them try it again, where you might worry they’re not going to get it right. And now I have another meeting that went over, right?
So even asking someone or, Hey, in that people conversation, what are some ideas you have for bringing people in the conversation and still ending on time? Maybe in that feedback conversation, you work through it so they can run that meeting the next time. And you can see how you can apply this to different situations. It’s not the compliment sandwich or shit sandwich for some people call it where you go compliment, constructive feedback compliment, where people either only hear the positives or they throw away the positives and only hear the constructive negative part.
No, it’s saying, Hey, let’s look at the situation holistically. What were some things that went well and where am I liking where you went with it? What were the things that weren’t so great and what do we do in the future? Okay. So it’s a different way of thinking about it, where you can bring in recognition and appreciation for the stuff that went well, while also course correcting and asking for what you need to see again, that’s not just a participation award and saying, Hey, thanks for running that meeting.
No, you’re able to get to where you want to get, and you’re not losing the positives by only focusing on the negative. Because let me say another example. If you had said that team member, Hey, we can’t get this team back together for another few weeks. Like the meetings just can’t go over like that again. You got to keep these on time. Now the next time that person might over-focus on the time, missing out the good that was getting more voice in the conversation.
And then you got to go back again and go, Nope, that wasn’t it either. Now the meeting was on time, but only you spoke. So now they feel like they’re chasing a moving target. That is such a big reason for bringing in some of the positives. They need to hear like, Hey, let’s look at the whole situation, paint the picture of the things that were working. Got it. Now, what are the things to tweak? Got it.
Now asking them, what’s your plan? Hey, so we want to end the conversation asking them with what they think they should do, because then they become the owner of the plan. So this is just a little detour I wanted to share for when there’s some construction to bring into a, a positive feedback conversation. The last thing that I want to end with is the importance of just recognizing these small wins. I know I said it already, but we cannot just wait for these huge moments to recognize work and to thank people for the good things that they’re doing.
Why? Because they might happen six months, nine months, a year apart. If you are working in a business or an industry that has long timespans between big milestones, someone might be on your team six months without hearing like, Hey, things are going well, or they’re waiting for their performance review to hear that. And that’s just, that’s too long because what happens then your team members are looking for other jobs where someone is going to satisfy that itch to feel like, okay, you’re on the right track.
So we have to find these micro moments. And these are things like commending a meeting while run or while we’re an email and saying, Hey, when we had that new team, we were like, thanks for bringing them to the team lines. That was awesome. Like I saw the person’s face light up and they really felt supported. Yep. Like love that. That is a really micro awesome, small piece of feedback that you can share with someone. They’re not getting the wrong idea thinking like everything I do in my job is great, but you’re thanking them for the thing that was meaningful.
So find those moments, be specific. If you’ve got to bring in a little bit of the constructive to frame it in the picture of what’s going well. So you don’t lose the good stuff. They don’t just throw it all out. Right. And you are going to see your team members are so much more open to when you have to have the harder conversations to when you have to course correct in a bigger way because they see that it’s on a foundation of I’m on the right track.
All right. See you next time. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning into 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. With that said, let’s spread the word. If you love this episode, please pass it along to someone who might benefit from it. See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
Why does positive feedback actually improve team performance?
When team members hear specific recognition for what they are doing well, they start to personally own that behavior and want to repeat it. They become champions of those skills and even model them for others on the team. That creates a groundswell of the behavior you want to see. More importantly, people who feel seen and valued are far more open to constructive feedback when it comes, because corrections land on a foundation of trust rather than a feeling of being constantly picked apart.
How do I give positive feedback without it feeling like an empty participation award?
Make it specific, name the exact behavior, and tell the person where to use it again. For example, instead of saying great job on the meeting, say you started with a clear agenda, brought in different voices, and ended on time. Then ask them to bring that same approach to the next client meeting. You are naming the skills, reinforcing them, and pointing to the next opportunity. That is not a participation award. That is actionable, repeatable recognition that actually changes behavior.
Do I have to wait for big milestones to recognize my team?
No, and waiting that long is one of the biggest mistakes a leader can make. If major milestones are six to nine months apart, a team member could go that entire stretch without hearing they are on the right track. That is when people start looking for other jobs. Find micro moments instead: a well-run meeting, a thoughtful email, the way someone welcomed a new team member. Small, specific, timely recognition keeps people anchored and engaged far more than praise that only comes with big wins.
How do I correct someone's performance without losing the positive things they are doing right?
Look at the situation as a whole picture, not just the problem. Name what was working first, then name what went wrong and why it mattered, then ask the person to share their plan for doing both things well next time. Putting the plan in their hands makes them the owner of the solution. If you only call out the problem, they overcorrect on that one thing and drop what was working. Seeing the full picture keeps them from chasing a moving target.
How does knowing my team member's career goals make my feedback more effective?
When you know what someone is working toward, you can frame recognition around that vision. If a team member wants to start their own business one day, you can specifically call out the moments when they are thinking like a visionary or showing entrepreneurial initiative. That feedback lands because it connects to something they care deeply about. Without that context, even well-delivered feedback can feel like criticism with no direction, and the person has no reason to stay open to it.