How To Give Good Feedback | Ep 20
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If you don't normalize giving feedback and accepting criticism, then your culture will never be one of feedback. But if you push people to be uncomfortable, eventually it will be comfortable to them. It'll become a normal part of your culture. How do you create an unshakable business? I crossed $100 million in net worth by the age of 28. Now I'm growing acquisition.com into a billion dollar portfolio. In this podcast, I share the lessons I've learned in scaling big businesses and helping our portfolio companies do the same. Buckle up and let's build.

As I look back at my business career and I look back to the mistakes that I made, which I like to look back on only to reflect upon and figure out what I learned, what I see in myself and I often see in the people that we work with and the people that we look at potentially working with is that a lot of the problems that stem in the first few years of business actually come from the leader not giving feedback.

And so I can tell you that my first few years in business, I avoided feedback. I didn't like giving feedback. In fact, I was more concerned with being liked than I was being respected and more concerned with being liked than I clearly was making sure that my employees and my teammates were growing.

because people don't grow without feedback. And so I say this because people come to me all the time. And what I often hear is like, Layla, I'm not the right person to be giving feedback because I feel terrible when I do. I get super nervous, my hands sweat, I can't sleep the night before, like all these things, all these emotions. And the first thought that I have is like, oh my gosh, I was the same way. It used to be terribly hard for me to give feedback. It was almost impossible. And I felt like every time I did give feedback and I showed up on those calls or on those Zoom calls or in person with those people, I was like, they have to know how nervous I am because I feel terrible inside.

And what I want to tell you is that nobody likes giving feedback in the beginning. And people who do like giving feedback often had to give it at some other point in their life to some other kind of people, right? And so they learned in one way, shape, or form maybe earlier than you did. And so maybe you weren't born or raised with the skill of giving feedback. And so now you're running a company and you don't know how to give feedback. You like to avoid confrontation. You don't like to talk to people if things are doing wrong. And so that's why I made this because what I want to break down is that

Giving feedback, if you do it enough times and if you have a structured way of doing it and you practice, can actually become something that you like doing rather than something that you hate and avoid doing. Because what I realized is that in the beginning, I hated giving feedback. It was like, I would literally, like I had a heart rate monitor on my, like one of those little watches and I used to look at it. It was like right before I'd get on the call, it would just spike and I could feel it and it would buzz and tell me I needed to slow down and relax. And I was like, shut

the fuck up because I'd be getting on to give someone feedback and I'd be so nervous, right? And I realized that, first off, there's some beliefs that I have changed about feedback that have helped me actually de-escalate my nervousness so I can show up to those calls more effectively. And then second to that, I want to share my framework for how I give feedback and how I structure it in a way that it's actually really productive. You can rehearse it. And then when you show up to that call, you actually know what you're going to say.

So the first belief that I've developed about feedback that's helped me is that feedback is the number one retention tool for top talent. Okay? Top talent wants feedback. What they don't want is to be in the dark about what you don't like about what they're doing. And so if I think about myself, for example, I would consider that in any job that I had, I was constantly craving feedback from my boss. And if a boss didn't give it to me, I felt disappointed. I was like, I'm not growing. I'm not getting invested in. They don't even care. They're not even paying attention to what I'm doing.

And what we don't realize is that when we avoid giving our teammates feedback, that's often what they think. They think, oh, they don't care. They're not even paying attention to what I'm doing enough to even give me feedback. And then you're like, what? Not paying attention. I see all of it. I'm just fucking terrified of giving you the feedback, right? But they don't know that. They don't know that. Instead, they think that you're just not paying attention. And so once I realized that feedback is actually a retention tool for my teammates, that was when I was like, oh, wow, the best people on my team want this feedback.

The second is that I realized that feedback is an acceleration tool for the speed of my company, right? If you look at companies that move quickly, the reason that companies move quickly is because they have fast feedback loops within all sectors. They have fast financial feedback loops in terms of like they get their financials quickly. They have fast customer feedback loops in terms of they survey and they gather information from their customers quickly. And they have fast internal feedback loops, which means they constantly are collecting information from their teams and getting feedback quickly.

And so as the boss, the one that you are responsible for driving the most, obviously the financial and the customer to an extent, but there's probably other people doing those. But the one that you have to really set the tone for is the internal feedback communication loops, right? Getting feedback constantly from the departments. How are they working well together? How are you working well with your direct reports? How are they working well with each other, right? And so putting in those feedback tools, actually you're going to accelerate growth and your company's going to move faster, right?

Because when people aren't telling each other how they're doing, if you don't know if people are doing well or not, and if they don't know if they're doing well or not, then everything's going to move much slower because people are afraid to take the next step because they don't know how well they did in the last step. And then the last belief that I had to embody was that if I don't give my team feedback and if I don't ask for feedback, then I will constantly be in the dark about my company problems and my company will move slower and be less successful. I will have less concise information for making decisions.

What I mean by that is if I give feedback to other people on my team, they're going to give me feedback. If I don't give them feedback, they won't give me feedback. And then I won't know what's going on with my company. I won't know what's going on with their department. I won't know what's going on with their team. And then I will be in the dark about everything else going on with my own company just because I didn't teach them that we can give each other feedback.

And so once I realized that, and I noticed that, one, whatever you want from somebody on your team is obviously what you need to give them. But second to that is that feedback is a way to have visibility into things. Because if you give it to somebody, they're going to give it right back to you. And that's how you get visibility into departments without sitting in on every meeting, without looking at every KPI, without looking at every spreadsheet. And so it's much easier to run a company if you can actually create a culture of feedback than it is if you don't do that.

And so one thing I'll say before I go into the framework for giving feedback is that I have gathered and I have seen a lot of different ways for giving feedback. But one person I want to give credit to is actually Matt Mokery. And Matt Mokery came on to a, I was in a business group and he came on, he talked about feedback to us and he gave a framework very similar to what I'm going to share with you. And so I've iterated on that and combined it with a couple others that I found through the many books I've read. And that is what I've used now here going forward. And I've taught my teams.

So I call this framework the five A's. Okay, what do those five A's stand for? Ask for it, acknowledge it, appreciate it, accept it, act on it.

Okay, so let me break each one of those down for you and how that's going to go in a conversation. Okay, so you need to give feedback to somebody on your team, right? There's somebody who maybe they're a great performer, but there's something that they continuously do. They go like, gosh, if they would just stop doing that, they would be that much better on the team. Or maybe if they started doing something, they would be that much better on the team. So how do you approach that conversation? Okay, the first piece is

So maybe you're trying to create that culture of feedback in your company. Here's how you can create it is you're literally going to teach. I'm going to teach you on this video. And then what I want you to do with this video is I want you to go and take this and teach it to your team. Because what people have a hard time doing is accepting feedback, is taking feedback. And so if you can teach people to ask for feedback in your team, which is what I'm going to teach you with this framework, then it's going to be much more conducive to growing a culture of feedback.

because oftentimes people can give feedback, but people have a hard time asking for feedback. And so that's what we're going to talk about today.

So in the first piece, the first A is ask for it. Okay. So what I would do is I would sit down with my team and I would explain to them that giving negative feedback or critical feedback is cherished. It is not punished. It is a gift that we are giving to each other because we're being courageous and we're building up that muscle of courage to basically tell someone something that we know they don't want to hear despite the fact that they need to hear it. Right.

So the best question that I have come upon are actually there's two questions that I really like in order to ask people for feedback. The first one is, hey, if you were CEO of this company, what would you do? Right. Because oftentimes what you're really asking is, what do you not like that I'm doing that you would do if you're running this company? Right. Or what are things that you would do differently if you're running this company? Right. And I like to gain everyone's perspective. So I like asking that question.

Now, the second piece to it, or the second question I like to ask is, what is something that you're afraid to tell me? Right. And so I think oftentimes people, you say, hey, can you give me some feedback? And they're like, oh, I don't really have feedback for you. They're like, how could I be a better boss? It's like, well, they don't know how you can be a better boss, but they do know what they're afraid to tell you. Right. And so a lot of people tend to hesitate because they're afraid to tell you. And you just want to say, listen, you're not going to hurt my feelings. I just want to know what you're afraid to tell me.

Okay. So that's the first way that you can ask for it. Now, once you've asked for the feedback and they've given you a feedback, the second thing you want to do is that you want to acknowledge it. You don't want to react to it. You want to acknowledge it. So you basically want to repeat back to that person what I heard you say. So say I asked someone for feedback and I'm like, I want, you know, tell me what you're afraid to tell me. What are you afraid to tell me about how I show up as a boss? I would just love to know. And say, they say, oh, hey, Layla, I think that sometimes you're too nice and you don't give enough feedback.

So then I would repeat back to them and I would acknowledge it and say, okay, I think what I heard you say is that I don't give you enough unsugarcoated feedback and that you would like more of that. Is that correct? That's me acknowledging the feedback that they have given me, right? So that's the second A, acknowledge it. Now, the third A, right, to take it further is to appreciate it, right? So as soon as you acknowledge and they've confirmed that what you just repeated back to them is the feedback that they wanted to give you, then you want to appreciate it. You want to say,

Thank you. I really appreciate you giving me that feedback. You know, it's something I didn't know. It's something that I've actually been trying to even work on to a certain degree, but hearing it from you is really helpful because I didn't even know it was showing up in that area of the business.

Right? And so you want to show them and you want to reinforce their behavior to give you feedback. If you thank someone for doing something that was scary for them, then they're much more likely to do it again versus if you just continue on with the conversation. Right? So thank them for it. Emphasize and continuously thank them for it. I sometimes like to thank someone in a conversation and then I like to ping them on Slack or via email later and tell them again, like, hey, I just want to let you know I really appreciate you doing that because I know it was hard for them. Right? So you want to make sure that they know that you appreciate it.

The fourth piece is to accept it. So sometimes what you're going to see is that people give you feedback and it's absolutely true and it resonates with you. There's also going to be times where someone gives you feedback and it's because they lack context, right? An employee might bring you feedback about some decision you're making in the business, but they might not know that there's something else going on. And because they lack that context, you may not actually accept that feedback.

So a good example might be like there was a time where we were in the middle of selling gym watch and an employee came to me and gave me feedback about me not showing up as many meetings. Little did they know I'm trying to sell the company, which means I'm not going to be as involved in the company meetings anymore, which is why I'm not on those meetings. And so I couldn't accept the feedback that they were giving me because they didn't have the context that we were selling the company to know why I was doing that.

And so as much as you can, giving people context if you don't accept their feedback, because what I have noticed is that most institutions

instances in which we don't accept feedback are because we realize that we actually haven't educated those people on other areas of the business that affect our actions, right? So they see you, if someone's running customer success and they give you feedback, they see you in relation to customer success. They don't see you in relation to customer success, finance, HR, sales, and marketing. So they're not taking into account all the needs of all those departments. So sometimes what you have to do is you have to educate people so that they understand why you don't accept that feedback,

And then the last piece to giving feedback or accepting feedback is to act on it, right? Giving feedback and accepting feedback are great. But if you don't do anything about it, then it doesn't really matter. And so what you want to do is you want to give that person, you want to inform them of what action you're going to take next.

So say that someone gives you feedback about how you're not giving them enough feedback, right? Then you're going to say, listen, here's what I'm going to do after this meeting. I accept your feedback. I really appreciate it. And what I want to go do now is I'm going to set up literally time every two weeks just for us to meet just every 10 minutes. And we're just going to use it as a feedback only session. I have five minutes to give you feedback. You have five minutes to give me feedback. That's the whole reason for the meeting. Does that work for you?

They'd be like, great. So it's like you actually acted on the thing that they gave you feedback on. So it actually feels right there. You've just created the biggest reinforcement loop for them. Not only did you ask them for feedback, not only did you thank them for it, so you made them feel good, but then you acted on it. So they saw the impact of their words. And that is the five A's and the framework that I like to use. I like to teach my team to use to give each other feedback.

So here's what I want to tell you. Tell your team, "Hey, I want to start using this. I want to normalize feedback in our culture." And so if you can be one step ahead of your team and say, "Listen, I watched this YouTube video. I realized that we're not giving each other enough feedback. I want to learn this framework that Layla laid out. Let's watch this video together. And then on our next team meeting, what we're going to do is we're going to go into breakout rooms. And then we're going to go one-on-one, one-on-one in those breakout rooms, and we're going to each give each other feedback."

And here's the thing. I typically do it. I do a timer for 15 minutes and then we do switch. And so this is something that I like to do at quarterly meetings. It's something I like to do on team monthly meetings and saying that what I like to challenge people on is that if I teach the team in a large setting, so say I'm running a monthly meeting and I teach them this framework, then when I would do afterwards, I would say, listen, this is what I want everyone to do this week. I want you to find one person that you're going to go ask for feedback. And then I want you to drop in the full team chat who that person was and what you got from them.

The thing is, is that if you don't normalize giving feedback and accepting criticism, then your culture will never be one of feedback. But if you push people to be uncomfortable, eventually it will be comfortable to them. It'll become a normal part of your culture. So to give you context, every quarterly that I run, typically the main activity that I do as a leadership team is one of giving and receiving feedback.

And so I typically make them a little bit different every time. But for example, this last one, I literally taught this framework because listen, acquisition.com is a new team. And so I've never even taught them this framework. So I teach them this framework. And then what I did is I paired up two people and I did 15 minutes. I said, these two people, you're each paired up with somebody. It's on the slideshow right there on the screen. Now you guys are going to go in a private room, seven minutes for one person to give feedback, seven minutes for the next person.

And then what I did is we all came back in the room and I said, I want everyone to share what they learned or anything they got that was really useful. And then I always like to go first so I can set the example for people that it's okay to share criticism that other people have about us. And then I do it again. And I say, okay, I've paired you with somebody else. You're going to go break out in different rooms and we're going to come back and we're going to share what we learned. And so it's a really simple exercise that you can do with your team. And I swear, this is one of the best things that you can do when you're growing a business quickly.