The feedback fix: Grow your team, grow your career with Mike Jacobson

Mike is the VP of People operations at Steno, and someone I have basically known since diapers. And in this quick conversation we talk about some of the workplace trends that Mike is seeing, and we cover some bits of advice you won't wanna miss. So enjoy my conversation with Mike Jacobson. Alright, well, Mike Jacobson, VP of People Operations at Steno. What a pleasure it is to have you on the Modern Mentor Podcast.

You have done some really impressive things with your career and I'm excited to, to pick your brain and pull through some insights. Whenever you're ready,

You know, a lot of people think of it as like, I've gotta do a compliance course and there's an information security training course and I'm just gonna click through and get to the end. And certainly we've, we've gotta do that as well. But while you're there, you should get some things that can help you boost your career, right?

You, you've already got the captive audience because they're going in there for their compliance reasons, but give them a reason to stick around that is something more transactional than just getting paid for the job that they do. Give them another set of skills that they can use to make themselves more marketable or to understand a part of the business that they don't have access to on a regular basis or improve their lingo such that they can be more relatable to clients.

There's lots of different things that we do. What we don't do is add a whole bunch of like third party, you know, out of the box content into the LMS because that would create a, why am I here listening to this person who doesn't know what it's like to work at this company type feeling. So that's one thing is we've custom created a lot of content, uh, most of the content that's there to really give people a reason to stick around and to absorb.

And we also add some carrots in there too, which are, you know, points you can earn for completing courses that you can exchange for things like company swag that you can gift to your colleagues who did a really good job. And I think when you have both the incentive and the rewards tuned properly, you can get a lot of great results. For us, what we've seen is LMS activity equals a lot of career progression.

It equals a lot of promotion that equals a lot of people going from individual contributor to manager. Uh, and that's something that I'm really proud of. I, I myself did a career transition a long time ago. I was an attorney, uh, for six years out of law school and I decided that it wasn't for me and I became an HR professional instead. And I had to, you know, do a lateral move and learn a whole entirely new industry.

I'm, I'm proud that we've created that sort of environment where people are interested in making those types of career transitions or growing in the chain that they're in already.

And yet I assume that you've brought your legal background. Well, first of all, you're working in a legal organization, but even just having a legal background as an HR professional makes you, um, it makes you stand out. It brings a different category of skills to the job. And so I would love for listeners to just be paying attention to the value of considering moves, uh, that are left and right and not always just straight up. I think there's something inspirational in there.

I did six years of litigation, um, and while I had a different image in my mind of what was what a lawyer is going to be like versus what it was like in reality, I wasn't willing to give up on it so easily because I had made this large investment in time and money and my identity. I quite literally had to call my nana up and say, I don't want to be a lawyer anymore. And she was like, what? Like, my grandson doesn't wanna be a lawyer.

So I think that was part of it too, is to your point, taking a leap and giving up on the identity that you had built toward. Because for me, what could be scarier than continuing on a path that you knew was not where you wanted to be? That that's, that's, that's what made the light bulb go on, is that I looked at what success looked like in that world and said to myself, that's not what my goal is. Um, I get more fulfillment out of helping people.

And when I did, you know, postmortems of cases that were over or, you know, helping clients avoid getting sued to begin with, that's where I really started to, to feel like the fulfillment that made me feel good about myself when I put my head on the pillow at night. In order to get into a new field, though, I think this is one of the most important facts, uh, is that you've gotta be willing to take a step either to the side or even back in order to make that transition.

Just because I had a legal background to your point, does not mean I can jump into an equivalent job in the HR world and just hit the ground running. I had to take a step back in order to give myself the opportunity to take two steps forward in a different direction in the future. That was part of the, the leap of faith that I'm glad that I did.

I can understand why people are, you know, hesitant to do that, but it started me on a path that provided a lot more career fulfillment for me, which is the a good outcome.

What I take from your story is that there can be value in exploring content that teaches you skills maybe outside of, of the particular lane that you're already in, and it helps you kind of be more thoughtful, more expansive, maybe more creative in the job they're already doing.

And so I hope people take a lesson from, um, you know, if your organization has content available, if they have a LinkedIn learning license, um, even if not, you know, there is, there is the internet that is full of TED Talks and free web webinars all over the place.

I think there is so much value in learning, and I know for, for me in my world and with clients that I talk to, a lot of times the, the biggest obstacle, Mike, is people finding the time when they may block some time in their calendar to make learning time and then another meeting comes up and that feels kind of more real or more important. And so learning always takes the back seat.

And so before we get to my second official question, I just wanna ask, do you have any advice for people for whom that is the issue? How do you create a discipline around doing learning on some sort of regular cadence and prioritizing it?

So I think, you know, for each person you've gotta find what is the window of opportunity that you know, you can have some peace and quiet to concentrate. That's part of it. The other part of it is what you were talking about before, which is what are the skills that you need to go where you want to go? I think that's the other part of the equation.

The skills that you want are sort of, you know, the, the ones that you know about that are within your reach, that are within your realm and your role. But if you have a different role in mind and if you have a different career goal in mind, right? I wanna be a project manager, I want to be an hr, I want to be a manager one day, there's different skills associated with each one of those paths.

And I think in order to make yourself a strong candidate to stand out among a crowd, which is often, you know, hun hundreds of applicants, you gotta show the actions that you've taken to bring that interest to life as opposed to saying, I'm interested in that, that seems interesting. You've gotta make something happen.

And the other is there's the strategic feedback that you need to give to let somebody know how their career is progressing and where they stand within the role that they're in now, and what opportunities they might have to earn more money or more opportunities in the future because of how different those two things are. The cadence is really important of how often you do them and the mindset that the person is in when they hear it is important too.

So what I struggle with and what I would always love to get some advice on is like, how regimented should that be versus how much safe or free space rather, managers should have to come up with what works best for them and for their teams.

For us right now, we're sort of at one end of the spectrum, which is managers do it their own way and we've gotten very good at that because each manager has a different context and our teams are fully remote and they come up with the cadence that works best for them and for their teams. What gets lost in that though is that not everyone's doing it on the same schedule and therefore we don't have like a pool of, of feedback data results to look at in any one moment.

It's sort of like a revolving, uh, cycle, if you will.

Like, there are a lot of questions around feedback and we know what an important element of, of the workplace it is and of improving and growing over time. Just a couple thoughts off the cuff when it comes to feedback. Um, I think first and foremost before getting into cadence is really focusing on quality and capability when it comes to giving feedback.

I know, uh, back in the day when I used to be an HR person and I would run my business partners through talent assessments at the end of the year, I used to hear a lot of feedback that kind of had a lot of buzzwords and nothing particularly crystal clear about it. I used to hear a lot about this person really needs to be more, more of a strategic thinker. Um, but when I would press the leader on that, what, what does that mean? How does one know when one is doing strategic thinking?

And so, you know, something that I love working with organizations on is just helping to bump up their feedback giving skills. Uh, there's a model, I don't know if you're familiar with the SBI model, the situation behavior impact model. That one is my favorite where I tell a leader or a peer. If you're giving a, um, a piece of feedback to a colleague when you're giving a piece of feedback, um, talk about this situation first. So simply, what were the facts of the situation?

What are, what did you observe? What did you witness then offer a particular behavior that was good or bad? So not, um, I would've loved for you to be more of a strategic thinker in that conversation because that's not helpful. We need to focus on observable behaviors. So something like, you know, I noticed that while the client was talking, you were simply getting ready to say whatever you were gonna say next, and it felt like you weren't listening.

Um, and when you listen and reflect back to the client what you heard, that shows them that you're really engaging, you're really paying attention, you're really a part of building the solution. Um, and the impact there is that when we don't actively listen, um, we're telling the client that we're less interested in what they have to say and we're more likely to not win that business.

Right? So I love to spend time with leaders making sure they're giving feedback that is really clear and actionable. And that obviously speaks to more of the, the tactical side of things. And I don't generally tell managers that there's a particular like number of pieces that you need to give, but really building a practice for themselves around both critical and positive so that their employees regularly have a sense of how they're performing on a day-to-day basis.

Um, lemme just pause there and get a reaction.

What you don't want to do is do it too infrequently because that's not gonna seem as actionable. You know, you give me feedback about the thing that happened three weeks ago, and you don't wanna be non-specific, which is what you said before, because then there's no anecdote that comes to mind where they could say, okay, with that feedback, how might I Hyatt have done that differently? So the tactical, I think is really important both on the detail, the anecdotes, and also on the timing.

The strategic really needs to be a reflection of, of that, right?

Like, based on all the tactical feedback that I've given you, my strategic feedback, and you don't have to phrase it that way, but the, you know, once a month, once a quarter, once every half year, I'm noticing that when I give you feedback, you decline in your performance after that, or that when I give you critical feedback, then you don't speak up as often after that or that you tend to get bogged down in the details of a project. And that tends to make you seem sort of like exhausted.

And what I would wanna see next quarter is you getting a little bit more proactive with the project plan to avoid those burnout moments, you know, in, in, in advance. That's different. That's not specific anecdote, that's like, here's my 30,000 foot view of all the work that you've done and all the feedback that I've given you and how you've responded since then.

And the person might be sitting there thinking, I never said I wanted a promotion. I'm actually really comfortable in this role. Or, you know, I wanna continue expanding in this role, or I wanna stay in this role, but, you know, tackle clients in a different industry or I'm actually interested in making a, a career move into a different part of the organization.

And so I think the biggest opportunity for managers that I see in this space is having more conversations that are grounded in questions about somebody's ambitions than I would say if you are a, a, a leader in an organization, make sure you are doing that regularly with your team members. And if you are a citizen and individual contributor, make sure that you're making your, your aspirations known and you're advocating for yourself in terms of what you want, as well as what you don't want.

Your job as a manager is to add the fertilizer and to take care of the plant and put, to put it in an environment where it can flourish. And that means giving it fertilizer, which is the feedback, right? To, to tell it to your, to your point, what is your perspective on what the person needs to do better to get where they want to go in their career. Without that, they're gonna stagnate, and this is where the quote, people don't quit their company, they quit, their managers come to mind.

If I'm not getting what I need from my manager to grow, at some point I'm gonna say maybe I want a different manager.

So my call to action for anyone who's listening is, if you've got a top down one size fits all performance management system in your company, I'd be concerned that people are putting effort into it and not getting the return from that effort that they would hope for. And that could be because it's not often enough or because it's not specific enough to the point you made before or because the people who are running it aren't skilled enough to give quality feedback.

It could be a combination of those three things. Three companies ago, company shall remain nameless. We did a once a year performance review system, uh, process and managers worked on it for like two months. And by the time you got to the end of it, it was like, thank God it's over. You know, so I, if, if that's how your employees feel about performance management, then it's a huge waste of time and you should rethink it. You should scrap the whole thing and start over if it's that bad.

But more importantly, give managers, uh, the, the free space and empower them to run it the way it makes sense for their team and give the some standards that they should hold themselves up against that are consistent across all company.