In today’s minisode, we finish our series on How to Give Feedback and we're going to talk about how to embed feedback as a cultural phenomenon within your team, your department and your organisation, and how by doing this you can drive visible, massive performance and change.

Chief, if you haven't listened to Part 1 (preparing like a coach) or Part 2 (tools and strategies), please go back and listen to them first as it will give you some vital context to the final episode. We've also got the FREE STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE on giving feedback.

So today we want to talk about how to foster a culture of feedback. across your team. There's three big things I really want to hone in on.

1. Be supremely easy to give feedback to

There's a few things I want you to consider here. First is, ask questions from your team about how you can be better. As I said in one of the delivery methods in the previous episode, if you can focus this in on one small aspect of your performance, people find it much easier to give feedback to you.

For instance, yesterday I was catching up with a graduate of the Chief Maker Mini MBA. I was having coffee with her and I said, “Hey, what is one thing we could do to make it 1% better?” 

Of course, she was super comfortable giving me that feedback. But if I had said, “What's anything we can do to be better?” it's too vague, it's unspecific, a bit harder, and she might be a bit worried or she might have taken it the wrong way.

So, ask specific questions. “In that meeting that we were just in, would you give me a rating out of five on my ability to influence? And just one thing I could have done better when presenting the slide deck.” You're asking them for their advice and their counsel. “What would it take for you to give me a five star rating as a leader?” That's the bit where it makes it easy for the information to come to you via feedback.

The second part about that – and this is so important – is when the feedback comes, you should take it lightly, easily. It's like water off a duck's back, Chief. If someone says to you, “I think the level of influence in that meeting was about a three. Maybe we just went a bit fast at the beginning and we could have let them speak more.”

You’re more likely to accept that feedback and agree that the performance was average, and then go on to fix it. So, it’s important that you demonstrate how to receive feedback. Don't bring the emotion, just store it up, make a change, bottle it, whatever you've got to do to see the feedback for what it was – a performance improvement tool.

The other way to be supremely easy to give feedback to is to share stories about times you've been given feedback to get better. You're normalising the process of giving and getting feedback and that it really helped you. Like my story in the first episode of this series about how Chad gave me some heavy feedback, and while it stung at the time, it has been the best I’ve ever received.

Another example is that recently I sent an email to one of the CEOs that put some of their people in the Chief Maker MiniMBA, and I asked them, “What’s one thing I can do to make this program better for you as a chief?” And he said it would be great to get more updates throughout the program as to what people are working on. And I was like, that's really easy. I already send out emails to the graduates, to the participants every week so I can summarise that and send it on to you as well. It was a fantastic bit of feedback, super easy to implement, he got that the next day and he was happy. So he knows I'm easy to give feedback to, and you know what? He'll give it again.

Be open about your own performance ratings. If you get an annual performance review and you get a rating of three and a half, tell your team and discuss it with them. Because as a leader, their performance is your performance. So be comfortable saying things like, “We've got to be better at this, or I can be better like this.” Ask them what they think of the rating or of the feedback. They will have some insights in how to improve. 

All of this is just about making yourself really easy to give feedback to in order to embed this as a culture in your team. Being difficult to give feedback to means people will stop giving it completely and you'll have no idea about your true performance and reputation.

2. Create a process for your team to give feedback to each other

One way you could do this is to pair people up. In a team meeting, you could say, “Here's a couple of questions I want you to answer please. We're going to go around the room and ask what's one thing I appreciate about you? And one thing I need from you in order to achieve the vision?” Or, “What's one thing I can do to help you in your role?” There's a bit of feedback right there because it tells you where the gaps are for someone being able to perform and where you might have had a blind spot.

So when you create this process where it's easy to give feedback, particularly on small items, really simple stuff, it just starts to create this flow of communication feedback across your team and that really fosters that culture.

3. Create a learning culture

Chief, think about your whole team and say to yourself, “What is their speed of learning right now? As a group, are they learning new things? As individuals, do they talk about podcasts? Are they talking about books? Do they talk about any other programs they're on right now?”

If everyone has stopped learning, I absolutely guarantee feedback will be null and void. And so one way to step up the learning is to share a podcast episode with the team and encourage them to listen to it and then have a chat about it in a few days and how it might impact them as a team or as an organisation. It might not even be about work, it might be about parenting, it might be something that you know is a hot topic for them right now.

The reason you do this, Chief, is neurological. We know, through the work of Norman Doidge around brain plasticity, that our brains can change. The neural pathways can shift, and the way they do that is by learning and evolving. So when you're doing things like simply watching a short video or listening to a podcast, you are shifting their brain into more of a growth mindset where it’s evolving and rewiring and it is amazing how quickly things can change.

The vital element: trust

Remember, if you don't have trust or they don't have trust with each other, feedback is not heard.

So, tell stories about what's going on in your life away from work. Listen to your favorite music together. Get an Airbnb and go away for a night together as a group. Cook for each other. Tell stories about the best moment of your life, the hardest moment of your life, the moment you were most proud, something nobody knows about you.

When you get to this place of needing to give and receive feedback, and there's trust that's built up, it is literally like glue. Without trust, we can't really ever have a learning culture in our team. 

So, Chief, that brings us to the end of our three-part series on giving and receiving feedback and creating a culture in your team. I trust that this guide will help you to build your ability to give feedback and foster a culture across your team.

Stay epic,

Greg