Just Thoughts #35: Feedback and Team Performance Frameworks - Part 1.
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The first rule of reading these thoughts is to ask yourself:
Why should I think this way?
Headlines this week:
Quick Recap
The Premise
Feedback Framework
Intro
The Framework
Asking For Feedback
TO BE CONTINUED IN #36
Giving Feedback
Receiving Feedback
Application
Quick Recap
A quick recap on performance thoughts from previous Just Thoughts you want to keep in mind when you’re reading the frameworks described in this post
From Just Thoughts #32: Thoughts on Performance
High performers are not born. They are made. → Spend time on effective onboarding and documentation
Caring about the development of your people cannot be substituted by any tool.
Spending time on an “organizational system” outweighs the need to define policies and specific corner cases. → They are a part of it, but you must define your Heart-Beat-Hustle first.
From Just Thoughts #33: The 1-on-1 framework for better discussion
1-on-1’s are a way to “keep the beat”, but they must fit “the beat”. That is, the team meeting cadence and content inform the 1-on-1 cadence, not the other way around.
From the “deliberately developmental organizations” framework,
Adults can grow, and rank does not have its usual privileges → Feedback from the managed can make the manager a better leader and the managed a better professional by seeking support from the manager.
Everyone is HR & “Interior Life” is what is managed →. Supporting your co-workers is not limited to those in leadership positions or those in a “people function.”
Timescale for Growth, Not Closure. Weakness is a Strength; error is an opportunity → Everyone is encouraged to constantly be a better version of themselves in every situation, not just in a 1-1’n setting.
The impact of managing your organizational or team practices and the culture employed will be more significant than trying to run your 1-1’s to perfection.
If performance is managed only during 1-1’s, you’re making things hard for yourself.
Marry someone you can be friends with even after divorce, as you should hire people you’re willing to develop after you have to part ways with them. —> With this attitude, caring for people doesn’t conflict with caring for the quality of the work.
The Premise
We’ve previously discussed the “philosophy” and “the system” to put the previous content in perspective. In this blog post, we’re giving you some tactical insight on how to act in the system and tools to manage your system overall.
The feedback framework in this blog post will help you create a more inclusive communication style. However, before we go there, here’s a controversial statement: the level of trust in your organization outweighs communication styles.
The level of trust in your organization outweighs communication styles.
If you know the people you work with will put your needs before theirs, you’ll get used to how they talk to you and sometimes even accept it. The problem is that building that type of trust with people who are seemingly different from you is hard without an inclusive communication style, and we all know diversity breeds better business results. A very “edgy” communication style and many acronyms or speeches unique to the organization without proper induction processes will make it hard for any new person to integrate, regardless of background.
The problem is building … trust with people who are seemingly different from you is hard without an inclusive communication style.
Hence, if you’re a modern-day leader or a “Modern-DEI” leader, as they would say at deidei, you should take time to understand the biases at play in society and the biases you decide with. It would be best to start with an unconscious bias exercise and work on it by spending time with people different from you. Furthermore, if your team or organization has a unique communication style, you should work on onboarding practices to properly introduce people to the communication styles and language used.
This is not to say that hate speech, toxic masculinity, and racist remarks should be accepted or deemed “acceptable” in any environment. Instead, it’s worth pointing out that high-performing teams that don’t employ inclusive communication styles might exist. However, such high-performance teams will never have physiologically healthy environments, nor will they have it easy to integrate new members. In Just Culture, we’ve covered series like The Bear and Slow Horses that showcase these seemingly high-performing teams.
My friend Juho Nenonen, interviewed in Just Thoughts Podcast #1 and who’s made a profession out of “psychological safety within teams,” would likely be able to argue that you’d need that safety for diversity to manifest in meaningful ways. He’d also be able to point out flaws in the choice of words and nuances in thinking for an enriched discussion, like the fact some studies show “too much psychological safety” hinders high performance.
However, I’d put this in the bucket of “lack of accountability.” Nick Cases explains this phenomenon, which is deeply rooted in game theory, in their game, The Evolution of Trust (as discussed in Just Thoughts #32, Thoughts on Performance). There is an optimal amount of “forgiveness” that any functioning relationship or human system should have to function in a way where everyone wins.
With these thoughts in mind, let’s jump into the feedback framework.
Feedback Framework
This framework is based on the work of Katri Junna, co-CEO of Netlight, and the original cultural foundation built by the first management team of Smartly.io, which was very fond of Kim Scott’s Radical Candor framework at the time of inception.
If you’re building your framework, you should know the following aspects.
Any feedback framework aims to create a better feedback culture in your team or organization.
All frameworks are flawed, but they give people a vocabulary for what “bad” and “good” feedback are within your context, so you don’t get lost in translation.
Please beware of the Feedback Fallacy; feedback can fail regardless of how well it’s executed.
Nothing is worse than arguing perfectly executed shots on either side of different tennis courts. This means you can make arguments without creating a shared understanding of the vocabulary used. Additionally, the system you build should support personal growth, and teaching how to coach and listen may be more impactful for the well-being of your organization than teaching people how to give feedback.
Using any feedback framework aims to create a better feedback culture in your team or organization.
A good feedback framework consists of three elements;
How to ask for feedback
How to give feedback
How to receive feedback
Without all three, achieving the framework’s goal of building a better feedback culture within your organization will be challenging, and mastering all three is an essential skill for any modern-day leader.
Asking and finding the right ways to ask will improve the quality of the actions taken based on the feedback. Giving it well lowers the risk of defensive, dismissive, or deflected reactions, and receiving it well will invite more of it in the future. It’s the essence of a virtuous or vicious cycle.
There are many feedback frameworks to choose from and many more yet to be built, but regardless of what you’re learning or educating, make sure you cover all three aspects of a great feedback framework.
Intro
After leaving Slush, I joined Smartly.io, known back then for its impeccable organizational- and feedback culture. Under the management of former CEO and founder Kristo Ovaska, accompanied by a management team consisting of Tuomo Riekki (Co-Founder of Focal and Zero), Anssi Rusi (CEO at Supermetrics), Otto Hilska (CEO and co-founder of Swarmia), and an extended leadership team involving members who are now part of the organizational analytics startup Teamspective, and performance AI startup Taito.ai (Kristo’s new venture), it had an incredible foundation for building better feedback and leadership practices.
Before solving the feedback development issues, it’s worth noting that one of the company's early values was “We’re all full-stack,” meaning that Smartly.io was hiring people who could handle multiple roles, everything from coding to customer success to coding in its early days. This meant you were hiring coders who could sell. As such, most of everyone was familiar with the agile concept of “retros”. From the Agile Manifesto;
"At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly."
When you combine this practice with a strong bias for opt-in transparency in everything (all communication and organizational metrics should be available to everyone), this methodology manifested practices in multiple forms at Smartly.io at the time of joining. Here’s a list of examples;
On Mondays and Fridays, weekly all-hands meetings were held, during which anyone in the organization openly challenged leadership and presenters.
After every customer call, sales call, and customer event produced, Smartly team members asked for and gave each other feedback.
Every app-down event that affected the business triggered a routine retro of events to avoid future failure and to the discussion results reported in an all-hands session.
Everyone in the company had access to an intranet “wiki” containing meeting notes, essential business and product-related information, and a business intelligence system.
Results of employee engagement surveys were delivered in full to the entire company, mainly including unfiltered comments.
Full—and multiple-day events entailing refactoring of culture, working practices, and other work-related discussions were held at a biannual cadence and early on quarterly, smartly called these Future.io’s.
Unfortunately, the current Smartly.io doesn’t have these practices referenced anywhere online. Still, I found this little piece of writing by fellow former Smartlie Nick Ang highlighting how the culture was positively perceived.
Practices I lobbied into existence within the system to further support the culture before we created the feedback framework;
Management team meeting notes in fairly detailed form (what is being discussed and not discussed is highlighted) were released to the entire organization weekly. This helped team leads and VPs force more meaningful discussions at the management level and helped levels beneath the C-level to lead with added context. It also reduced bottlenecks in communication—inspiration was taken from Team of Teams and a practice we employed at Slush before joining Smartly.
After board meetings, the board chair relays what the board discussed in the previous meeting to the entire organization. This is related to the philosophy of the last point and “demystifies” the board, breeding trust in leadership—one of the most essential factors in high employee engagement.
Whenever the 360 feedback process was run as part of the performance framework in the organization, each leadership team member had to stand up in front of the organization during an all-hands, summarize their feedback, and share their action report—holding the leadership team accountable and having them lead by example. This breeds trust in leadership and inspires the organization to take the process seriously regarding personal development, not just as something that serves the organization.
Whenever people engagement survey scores came in, they were categorized by leader (person managing others) in the organization, and the quantitative data was distributed to all individuals in question. This forced transparency and accountability in addressing issues. Without blaming but aiming to understand why scores were what they were through discussion, peers, not just company management, could help each other more effectively.
By highlighting these practices, I hope to paint a picture of the communicatively demanding position leaders are placed in these environments. The leaders who can’t operate in this environment are
Manipulative individuals who genuinely do not care about people
Those who take challenges personally (when they are not meant to), and can’t receive feedback constructively.
Leaders who don’t put any thought into what their values or principles are and lack a sense of integrity
Those who always need to be the ones who speak first and listen later.
The environment requires leaders with high integrity, as you can’t hide “you do not know things” in these environments. It would help if you also had conviction deeply rooted in values or well-reasoned principles to generate momentum when faced with many internal and external challenges. This may seem like a generic description of leadership capabilities, but this is to emphasize that authority will not come with its usual privileges in high degrees of transparency. Finally, a lot of information and opinions will be passed on in these environments, constantly being the one speaking, and you won’t be paying attention to what’s going on.
Hence, before trying to implement a feedback culture or train individuals on feedback, ensure your environment isn’t occupied with these individuals in management positions. No training will help your situation. It may just be that one person is the reason you want the training in the first place, and solving such a problem doesn’t happen with training. It’s done with whistleblowing practices, a code of conduct, and disciplinary actions. All of these practices were in place at Smartly, and combined with robust operating practices deeply rooted in the company values, it was easy to start building practices and training to ensure the culture wouldn’t degrade regardless of the speed of growth.
The reason for taking the time to create and train everyone in feedback was that as the company grew, more people with zero understanding of retros entered the organization without proper induction on the subject of feedback. Even if the notoriously rigorous recruitment process at Smartly filtered individuals who couldn’t receive or give feedback by nature of the process, people had started to forget or felt they lacked the tools to handle “feedback” constructively.
At best, feedback training is held whenever new people join, when people enter managerial roles, and before any review cycles in the organization are organized, regardless of the framework used, which became the practice at Smartly.io.
The Framework
The original version of this framework had only the giving- and receiving feedback parts, not “asking” for feedback. I also added elements, such as the difference between appreciation, praise, recognition, and feedback, to emphasize that the framework is about developmental feedback. A simple “Good Job” is not an actionable piece of feedback, even if someone would label that feedback.
I’ve also discussed whether likes, reactions, and other quantitative data are feedback during my training sessions. While these may indicate something, they fall outside the scope of this framework, and it’s for another one to account for this sort of feedback.
Furthermore, I’ve highlighted that positive attention is 30 times more effective than negative attention and 1200 times more effective than no attention. As social beings, we humans need attention. The worst we can do is ignore people, which is why nagging and negative attention still seems to work, as we give people attention.
This phenomenon with attention also explains why simple “good jobs” feel better than nothing, but throwing out “good jobs” whenever warranted is not enough to breed high performance. These notions are discussed in Marcus Buckingham’s and Ashley Goodall’s Nine Lies about Work, a highly recommended book for anyone wanting perspectives on leadership in the modern world.
Asking for feedback
Asking for feedback lowers the threshold for giving it. If everyone constantly asks for feedback on every action, presentation, meeting, project, etc., you’ll have a fantastic foundation for building a great feedback culture. IMHO, This is why Smartly.io built such a great culture; everyone constantly sought input to improve, and leadership set the example, both from customers and internally.
To master the art of asking, you’ll need to build the habit of doing it in general and be mindful of who you ask, when, and what you ask.
Build the habit of asking for feedback, and be mindful of who, when, and what you ask.
Who to ask?
When it comes to developmental feedback, you should ask people whom you worked closely with, and for long-term development, ask people whom you trust and who have known you for a long time.
Whenever you doubt how your actions have been perceived, you should ask the people present in the situation. If you think you’ve failed or upset someone, it shows empathy if you circle back—referencing Brene Brown, the author of Daring Greatly and other works on empathetic leadership.
I’ve taken the time multiple times to discuss something that bothered me, only to find that the counterpart had even noticed something was off in my behavior. I have also always been particular about who I ask for feedback from; when I’m writing about a subject, I want to talk to a subject matter expert, or sometimes I’ll choose a random but trusted audience to gauge how content is perceived.
When to ask?
Feedback is like milk, not like wine. It doesn’t improve with time because people may not recall the details as time passes. Hence, it’s usually best to ask for it whenever things are still fresh in mind. However, when it comes to long-term developmental feedback, you might give people time to think and not catch them in the middle of something else.
It would be best to be mindful of your state of mind, the nature of the context, and the situation you are in. Asking for feedback publicly may be welcomed and seen as an act of courage, but other times, you might miss someone’s feedback because they don’t want to share it in front of others.
When I started at Smartly, I asked everyone for feedback about the all-hands sessions I handled. No one said anything constructive or actionable about what they wanted to see changed, not even when asked in private. However, I hadn’t held them yet myself. Without anything actionable, I did something entirely out of the box, threw everything away, and did a stand-up with a comedian. Suddenly, everyone had much to say about the good and the bad, what they wanted to keep and what they never wanted to see again.
What to ask?
Do you have any feedback? And all you get is silence. We’ve all been there. Regarding the choice of words, it’s good to know that “some feedback” is better than “any feedback” because “some” has a positive connotation, implying there is valuable input to be shared.
Adding “because” and explaining its importance and why you're asking that specific audience is a better call to action. “Do you have some feedback for me? I need it from you because I want to improve.” According to the Xerox study, adding the word because makes people more willing to comply because they are given a reason, regardless of how compelling or informative the reason is.
These tricks aside, I love to ask, “What did you think of X or Y?” Whatever it is, I want feedback. Then, ask if you’ve had to rate the performance/action/work on a scale from 1 to 10, regardless if they’ve said it was good or bad. Then, ask them, “What would take it closer to a 10?” instead of “Why did you give that number?”. It usually yields insight into improvements that are far better formulated than otherwise.
TO BE CONTINUED IN #36
I received feedback on the length of my posts, and even with the most avid readers trying to keep up with my speed of producing content, I decided to cut this post in half. Launching the rest later may also give room for some additional inspiration to apply the framework, as I plan to join the Slush Side Event: Performance Management in The Era of AI - Lunch with Taito.ai, Accel, and OpenAI. As described in Just Thoughts #30, there is a stage program this year that caught my eye about Performance Management Systems and how they’ve built them in Europe's most valuable company.
PART 2 of the feedback framework will entail giving feedback, receiving feedback, and using team development frameworks in addition to applying the given framework.
I'm talking about Slush (this thing I helped create that is still ongoing) since my feed is blowing up memories, and “I’m going to be there, are you?”. Here’s a meme of my colleagues describing a lot of things, but most of all, my dyslexia, which at times can make for some funny writing 😂
Until next time! The next Just Podcast will feature Chisom Udeze, 6 x Serial Founder and diversity trailblazer in the Nordics!
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