226: Giving feedback without it being a laundry list

Lia (00:00)
You get it, you're a believer, you are ready to give feedback, you're giving the feedback, and then you realize, I got a lot of feedback to give. And I don't know how well it's gonna be received if every day I'm like, well, can we do this differently? And then now this, and then this. And no feedback framework in the world is gonna save you if you're always coming at your team with different things.

And so this sort of, okay, now I'm ready to give feedback and now how do I figure out what to say and when? This is the question that a lot of us run into. This in fact was a question I was asked today by a listener where she's wrestling with managing her team that has quite a few challenges to work through and she's feeling stuck thinking, I've got a lot of feedback to give but I don't want it to be a laundry list. And that is what we're talking about today on the show.

First off, I commend you for being ready to give feedback because usually what I see with business owners, team leaders, everybody in between is that we're usually avoiding giving feedback. Now, this often is because we don't want our team members to say, hey, you always have something wrong to fix or be defensive or they're just so hard to deal with. We talked about that a few weeks ago, right? On those folks that are defensive around feedback.

And so giving feedback itself, this is a challenge, right? This is why I talk about it on the show so often, but we can hit the other extreme and we're like, okay, yeah, bring it on, I'll give feedback. And we have little corrective things we wanna fix constantly. Now, this can run into, this can create, I should say, a sentiment that, gosh, nothing's ever good enough, you always have a problem with everything, you know, we never hear what's going well.

And so giving feedback still has to be done like thoughtfully and with sort of a perspective on it. Now, when you have a lot of things you wanna change and fine tune, of course just rattling them off whenever you think of something is going to bristle people. It's not surprising. That would bother most people. And if you're thinking, well, it wouldn't bother me, I wanna know, then that's fantastic. But usually 90 % of time,

Nobody likes that. So what do we do? Well, let me first start with when we kind of jump in with little corrective things here and there. The problem we see is our team members start to feel like they're being micromanaged or they start to worse rely on you and they won't do anything until they've had that corrective feedback along the way.

And this is something I've seen, have a client that runs a med spa in Florida and she was running into that very specifically. Like only when she would remind people of every little thing would they do it. they wore something that wasn't the right, like they have a, they wore scrubs in, like then someone, they followed the rules on the scrubs, but then they wore the wrong shoes. Or someone was, okay, we said, hey, be there.

10 minutes or more before your first client so that you can make sure to be ready. They came there like 10 minutes, one second before and they still didn't have time to prep. So like they start following the letter of the law. So when we're overly prescriptive or giving feedback that's corrective on too many things, people can start to be like, I'm just gonna do the bare minimum. So that's one of the biggest challenges there. And then of course, that when she was correcting like saying, hey, scrubs are good, but like those shoes aren't the right thing.

Then they're saying, ⁓ again with another thing. Now it's same thing shows up in teams, know, teams that run marketing agencies. And they were saying, you know, giving feedback on, well, you know, go ahead, send the email to the client. And they were like, this isn't how we want it. So they'd send, you know, some feedback on the wording and then the deck that was used and the email signature. And so we're giving a little corrective feedback, trying to fix a situation. And it's starting to feel like,

gosh, like, can't I just breathe and try to do it myself? Again, that's what creates this disillusionment in your team and worse, this reliance on you to be giving instructions for how everyone follows their job. So we know where things go wrong and this is what leads to people quitting or doing a bad job and that costs you so much money, time and stress. So we don't wanna have that. Well, I said I was gonna talk about how to fix it. And the biggest thing we need to do is when we have a lot of feedback to give.

is to start categorizing it. Thinking about, well, what are the sort of buckets of things that are showing up? Let's say you run a team in hospitality and you're finding folks aren't friendly related clients, the kind of dress code's all thrown off, they're showing up late, there's a lot of like arguing between employees. That could feel like five different things to have to address, right? Four different things to have to address.

So the theme around showing up on time friendliness and dress code, that could all be one piece of feedback framed around like, you know, creating like a luxury experience for clients and what does that look like? And then you frame it as an expectation around this bucket of things and included could be dress code, timeliness, friendliness, and a bunch of other stuff too. But you didn't just say, hey, that, you know, those shoes don't work. ⁓ that, you know,

Please smile when you're talking or you're not just rattling off things where someone feels like here's another thing, you're out to get me. Let's talk about a team that's in the healthcare space. Let's say you're a manager in a clinic and you're overseeing nurses and medical assistants and you're finding ⁓ maybe it's somewhat similar, right? Folks are not really being that friendly with the patients. They're not charting things right away or it's going really slowly.

or rooms aren't really kept, you know, up, it's kind of creating a bottleneck between appointments. So it's taking longer to get rooms ready for the next person. And you want to frame all that feedback, not on a laundry list of different things that have no connection, but, hey, we want to create a great client experience. If it's an out of pocket clinic, people have a lot of options. ⁓ And if it's an insurance clinic, people want to have a great experience because we want to have them coming back and feeling like they're getting the best quality of service, right? Either way. So.

we frame it in these buckets so that people can create a mental model around it. Now let's go back to that Med Spa experience. ⁓ What we talked about, you know, and what she rolled out with the team through the Opt Playbook and us coaching the team members was, hey, we want to have, like, these are our values, these are things that are important to us, having a, creating a luxury experience when people walk through the door. And what does that look like?

and then co-creating, having conversation with your team members. Okay, it shows up in the friendliness, how we communicate on the phone and how, you know, what sort of overall presentation, how we appear to clients. Then the employees started coming up with ideas. The need for giving this corrective feedback completely, completely evaporated because folks understood that. And so that's the last piece of this is your team members.

They've got to have some hook to hang on to when it comes to feedback. Why is this important? What does it connect to? It's why isn't because I said so, it isn't because I'm the boss, it isn't because I'm paying you so you better do it. That's where you get into the place where you have to be doling out the feedback and the expectations one by one by one. The why is because this is our company's vision, this is where we're going, this is what we've set out to do.

as a team member, are committing to that. And by virtue of that, you're committing to these expectations. Boom, boom, boom. Hook people into the why. If it's that we wanna create a luxury experience that people come back to. If it's that we want to be the leading in this software solution. If it's that we want to be a marketing agency that's the most sought after for Facebook ads, whatever it is. You wanna be a med spa that

you know, is people come from all over the world, right? You want to be the go-to for XYZ. It doesn't matter. Insurance company, hey, folks, we wanna be the place that really sees you and takes care of you as a, doesn't just see you as another number. Whatever your industry is, we've gotta have a why. That makes the feedback so much easier. So this client or this listener, when she asked me this and said, God, I don't wanna give a laundry list of feedback. It's the...

first thing we said was, okay, let's categorize. What are the patterns? What are the things that you're seeing? And let's start with that. And no, you're not going to give 10 pieces of corrective feedback in one day. That's not going to fly. So we've got to figure out the themes. And last but not least, we've got to be recognizing wins. We have to be building positive and constructive feedback together. We've got to be recognizing, we've got to be showing appreciation.

Because if all we are saying or the only time we're talking to our employees is when something's going wrong, of course they're gonna feel demoralized. Of course they're gonna think it's a laundry list. And of course they're going to drag their feet through everything they do. Folks, more and more it is in every single study by Harvard Business Review, by Gallup, by, know, SHRM, like the HR Association, every single piece of data about employees.

says folks want more recognition than they're getting. There were times when it was a no news is good news, when folks did their job and if they didn't hear anything, they knew they were on track. It's not the world we're in. And so if you are someone that didn't really need recognition to feel motivated, then good for you, but that's not the reality with your team members. So if we wanna reach our team members, this is real talk, you know it, if we want to reach our team members, we have got to fold more recognition in.

not participation awards, I'm always very clear about that. We're not thanking people for showing up to work today. We are finding moments where they're actually doing something great, something extra, something to move the needle, and we're recognizing that specifically. So let's say a team member had a very difficult interaction with a client or customer and they handled it really calmly and diplomatically and they resolved it. That's a great example of saying, hey, hey Jessica,

You you had that client come in and I know that they were really upset. The way that you handled that, X, Y, Z, it really bred more confidence in them and now I see that they're happy to come back and work with us. Awesome job. Specific, concrete, actionable, use all our feedback skills on that recognition. Now you've got Jessica bought in. So when you say, hey Jessica, I know you've been really nailing it with the clients. You've been rocking it with the clients and especially with the more challenging folks. This last person came in and I noticed you took a little bit of a different tone with that.

The way that you were doing it before was really working. Can we go back to that? Right, you have some currency in the feedback bank with Jessica. Now you can come back to that. So I've shared a lot with you today, but if you take one thing away, it's that you've got to create something for people to kind of contextualize the feedback around. Do not read off a laundry list. It's not going to work. And that is what's going to break the trust your team has, lower their motivation morale.

and create an environment where you're so stuck deep in the weeds. And on Real Talk Leading Small Teams, my goal is to get you out of the weeds. You have a team so you can scale yourself. That's why I talk about all these strategies. Every single strategy on the show is about scaling yourself and your time so you can therefore scale your team or your business. But if we are having to fix everything here and there and having to like catch every little thing going wrong, we're never gonna get out of the weeds. All right.

You've got this, contextualize the feedback, hook it to a why, give more recognition, and you will see you're not having to repeat everything a million freaking times. See you next time.