On Feedback

Company culture is a living, breathing organism you have to nurture. In a world where input and recognition are more important to today's workforce than money and title, a culture that values growth and development is well positioned to recruit and retain the best talent. Personal development starts with feedback.

The key to becoming expert at giving feedback is making it habitual and insisting on receiving it in return. You have to give feedback at every one-on-one meeting you have, whether with your manager or your direct report. 

“The key to becoming expert at giving feedback is making it habitual and insisting on receiving it in return.”

Everyone worth a damn needs their manager's support and wants insightful information about their performance. Your responsibility as a manager is to empower your team to become their best selves. When you deliver specific, constructive feedback on a regular basis to your team members, and create an environment where that same level of feedback is flowing back to you, you dramatically increase the team's likelihood of achieving superb performance.

There are significant benefits to giving two-way feedback at every one-on-one. Most crucially, you eliminate surprise. Managers and team members know where they stand, what's working, and what isn't. As a result performance reviews become a non-event, and ideally can be minimized to the lightest exercise possible. Meanwhile, performance patterns emerge quickly. Crucially, all this builds trust. Rather than awkwardly acknowledging weaknesses twice a year, the manager (and by extension the company) is constantly demonstrating that they care about personal development.

Never forget that positive feedback is absolutely necessary and should be delivered just as frequently. I need to be given thanks and told my contribution is important. The challenge is that giving positive feedback is relatively easy, and it is, unfortunately, easily forgotten. Personally, I like the discipline of trying to pair a measure of constructive criticism with legitimate praise. And vice versa. 

All great managers prioritize developing their team members, and all growth businesses need them to develop as quickly as possible. Consistently providing constructive two-way feedback develops intrinsically motivated employees that are invested in each other, and is arguably the most valuable investment of time a manager can make. Feedback can and should be the cornerstone of any world-beating company culture.

On a Management SLA

What if you published a management SLA for the whole company to use? 

Team members would have transparency into the company's management philosophy and know what kind of leadership and commitment to people is valued. New managers would know what was expected of them. They'd know upfront the gaps in their management skills that need development. The company's organizational ambition and its commitment to developing internal leadership would be clear.

Organization design's primary purpose is to provide a framework for unleashing your team's creativity. Whether you choose hierarchical, holocratic, flat, or something else, you want roles and expectations clearly understood and easily communicated. A management SLA provides a base level of consistency across all the company's teams, regardless of function, and outlines a clear set of leadership criteria that all teams can checklist against.

What might your SLA include? Perhaps frequency and content of one-on-one or performance reviews. Perhaps the need for a strategy offsite or regular team social events. Perhaps the role of team meetings or stand-ups. Whatever works for your org, if you can't write it down in a simple, digestible form that demonstrates consistency across the company, you have work to do.

When I drafted a management SLA at Squarespace and handed it off to HR to run with, the org was growing fast and new team leads were emerging just as rapidly. These team leads deserved a framework they could lean upon, and all team members needed to have a consistent experience in regards to feedback and professional development. Going forward this will help senior management evaluate team leadership across the org.

In scaling a company the most important question is what is the least amount of process and structure necessary to achieve our goals. You have to intrinsically understand the business AND the org AND the people in order to create an environment for people to do their best work. I chose the language of an SLA because it was language our engineering and customer care teams understood. By making it public, the SLA makes it safe to speak up when your manager isn't providing you the support you deserve, while also guiding the curriculum of any leadership and development programs the company is creating.

On Walking and Talking

My most productive one-on-ones don't take place in the office. They happen on the streets of Manhattan, where two miles at a brisk pace gets the blood flowing, clears the brain for creativity, and lowers defenses. On the sidewalk bullshit seems to melt away and real connections can be made. 

Walking for a meeting focuses you to get to the point quicker. Undoubtedly this is because exercise is relaxing and a change of scenery is liberating. It is far too easy for the noise of an open floor plan and the limited confines of conference rooms to start sucking the life out of you. The best part is that a walk requires you to step away from a screen and leave your phone in your pocket. 

I'm also a huge fan of the walking interview for these very same reasons. The casual and friendly nature of a walk is one of the fastest ways to get past the mutual sales mode of an interview and size someone up. 

October in New York is almost over and it's going to be chilly soon. Go take a walk while you can still enjoy it! 

On One-on-Ones

Every one-on-one is a personal development opportunity. 

It is a manager's responsibility to be regularly available for (and not to miss) a one-on-one and a team member's responsibility to show up and own the agenda. The meeting is owned by the employee because it is her professional development we are focused on. We're not here for a status update – email can handle that fine – but rather to open the pathways that lead to repeat success, removing blockers, and providing a safe environment to nurture not-fully-baked ideas.

My expected agenda is straightforward. First, focus on success. Discuss your wins since we last met. How have you moved the business forward? Be sure to have shared any necessary KPIs or project updates one day prior to meeting face-to-face. Second, air your blockers and frustrations. The most valuable data I can capture is how the org and, more importantly, I am preventing you from being successful. Third, and this is the fun part, what do you want to spitball? Use me as a sounding board to think through ideas, no matter how zany, before you are ready to present them to the team. Lastly, discuss the needs of the team and how you can contribute to addressing them.

Frequency should not be dictated by a recurring event on the calendar, though bi-weekly is a good pace and you should never go four weeks without a one-on-one. Sometimes you need to meet weekly, other times monthly. If I reserve the proper amount of office hours each week, my team members can pull the one-on-one as needed. I recommend booking an hour. It's better to use ten minutes and leave time over than to only book 30 and find yourself not getting all the face time you deserve.

I like to keep a shared Google Doc for each team member. It's easy to add a new agenda to the top of the doc, and to take notes during the meeting for reference. Obviously, it's also convenient for noting items that need to be covered at the next meeting. Notes and follow-through are critical in all meetings, big and small.

I'll discuss my role in providing you feedback at these meetings in a later post. You should never have to ask for it.