Today was my first day back at the office after a much deserved vacation in the Guatemalan jungle. A trip that on one hand allowed me to disconnect a little bit from the daily grind and enjoy nature as well as time with my family, and on the other hand put to the test my employer-employee relationship with my team members. I had limited access to calls and internet and could only use a laptop at night when at the hotel, so team members had to do their best communicating with clients, updating their work in your project management suite and organize their day by themselves. All in all I think things went pretty well. Even though they might have taken a few longer than usual lunch breaks, we delivered everything we needed to that week, so in my book it's a win.
We did come back this week with a scheduled quarterly feedback session, which I also think went very well.
This is how I structured it so that it wouldn't feel like an interrogation.
start with a question: May I give you feedback?
While I didn't word it exactly like that, the idea was to give our team members the opportunity to opt in to the conversation. My thinking was that if it's a "voluntary" thing, they'd be more relaxed and feel like they're part of a dialogue. So the question this morning was...
Hey, I have a few meetings lined up this morning and there are a couple of things I'd like to catch up on, but do you think we can have a short feedback session at 3:00pm to talk about this weekends show?
We had a live show over the weekend, so I had very specific things I wanted to touch on, which brings me to my next point.
Data point (Specific is Terrific)
Now for this part. I didn't want to say something like
Hey, I need you to be more focused and be more organized
Which is rather ambiguous and could leave a team member feeling like they're being personally attacked. I decided to give very specific examples of things I like and things that can be improved upon.
I started with the good things first to ease into the conversation.
When we worked on Scaling's lyric video, I like how you animated the text and you tried different LUTs to some of the shots. I didn't request that specifically, but I think it adds a nice bit of flare and I appreciate you being proactive and providing some options to the client.
After giving some praise, I also bring up things that I think could use some improvement. For example, regarding being proactive...
We had a show on one of the stages this weekend, and you took it upon yourself to help the band with soundcheck when you were instructed to run the cabling. Soundcheck is a duty that is for the sound engineer and because you were touching his equipment, he became a little annoyed and we were late connecting the cables to the stage.
Ask questions
I don't want feedback sessions to feel like monologues or lectures, so I try to include questions to make the conversation more dynamic and to drive commitment as opposed to compliance.
Things like
What's your take on the situation?
Or
How do you think we could have done that differently?
This session was not intended to be a two-way feedback session, but I do want them to always feel like their opinion is welcome. In the future, I will actively request feedback from them so that I can get their take on my leadership style and things I can improve on. I think leaders should always be willing to receive feedback from their team too.
We are constantly learning the art of being human and being human to other humans can often be challenging. I think that by showing team members that they're important, they're needed and they're helping the organization reach its goals, we can create more engaged employees and having engaged employees leads to better results, both important ingredients for growing startups like yours and mine.
