What Every Leader Needs to Determine Before Providing Critical Feedback
Dear friends,
A couple of weeks ago, I shared a letter on “The Leader’s Guide to Processing and Overcoming Negative Feedback.”
Your responses were incredibly energizing and I feel so grateful that so many of you found the insights helpful and even “healing.”
While learning to process and overcome negative feedback is important as leaders, we also need to be very careful when providing feedback.
Most of us are intending to be helpful when we share what we think of a person’s performance and how they can improve. While intentions matter, they must also be paired with the appropriate actions. Fortunately, we have science- and experience-backed strategies to help.
So how do you give feedback that could be perceived as “negative”?
The first thing you have to do is determine whether giving this feedback is absolutely necessary. You need to explore if there are more effective alternatives and whether there are deeper issues that need to be addressed.
Neuroscience research has shown that criticism and negative feedback can trigger the “fight or flight” response in our brain, which narrows its activity and hinders our learning.
We definitely want to avoid causing this as much as possible.
So what could you do instead of giving feedback?
Focus on the individuals’ strengths and get creative about cultivating those strengths.
I once had a client whose employee was struggling to improve their sales numbers. My client had tried giving feedback and advising this person before, but she hadn’t noticed any signs of progress. She really cared about her employee, but she also needed to keep her business’ growth and financial interests in mind and was feeling torn about what to do.
I advised her to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
I asked, “Is this person passionate about the mission of your business and are there parts of her job that she does really well?” She responded: “Yes!” and “Yes!”
With that, I knew there was an opportunity here that we needed to explore.
Turns out, the employee was amazing at building strategic connections and partnerships, which was an integral part of the business development process and growth agenda. She just wasn’t good at converting those connections into financial sales.
So I advised my client to help this employee harness their strength even more by creating a new position that allows her to focus on what she is really good at without being weighed down by the responsibility of what she is struggling with. I also advised my client to designate someone else who excels at (and enjoys) sales to focus on driving up sales. This required some organizational reshuffling and it needed to be framed in a way that would make the employee feel like their strengths were being seen and valued (instead of them feeling like they are being pushed aside).
My client’s eyes lit up when she heard this strategy and we developed a step-by-step plan to help her make all of this happen. And as soon as she started implementing, she found the ideal salesperson almost immediately! Not only did my client’s employee feel valued and started to thrive by building on her strengths and having more peace of mind with her new stable income that wasn’t commission-based, but the business growth started to take off with more fruitful strategic partnerships and stronger sales.
So the key point here is this (and I mean this with the utmost appreciation for your genuine intentions to help the people you care about):
The need to provide critical and negative feedback could be signaling the need to look deeper and expand your vision and creativity:
Take a step back and look at the bigger picture: Could this situation be providing you with important feedback? How could it be providing an opportunity to expand your leadership capacity, improve your workplace, and/or grow your business/organization?
Ask yourself if this person is passionate about your organization’s mission. If not, how can you help them connect more deeply with your organization’s “why” and create a workplace culture where employees stay connected with that mission?
Assess the person’s strengths and whether those strengths are aligned with the individual’s core responsibilities
Find creative ways to bridge the gap by strategically cultivating their strengths and providing them with the conditions to thrive
Remember that your job as a leader is to identify people’s strengths, activate their intrinsic motivation, and empower them to thrive as their authentic selves. Instead of placing the onus on the employee, make sure you are first taking responsibility for creating ideal workplaces and conditions for the employees to focus on their strengths and flourish.
Now, if you are already doing all of this and you determine that providing the critical feedback is necessary, we get to the how.
We want to make sure that the “negative” feedback you provide has a positive impact and promotes learning and growth. It is a delicate balance, but it is possible. Stay tuned as I’ll provide you with a detailed step-by-step guide on how to do this in the next letter.
For now, keep seeing and boosting all the goodness and amazing potential that’s already around you!
With love and gratitude,
Maliheh