What Is Your Team Afraid to Tell You? | A Bit of Optimism: Feelings at Work | PART 3

A Bit of Optimism - Simon Sinek

Simon Sinek explores the transformative power of feedback in workplace culture, revealing how fear of discomfort leads to silence—despite knowing what’s wrong. Drawing from military practices like the Air Force's 'spears

Key takeaways

Simon Sinek learned from the U.S. Air Force a 'spears' technique where people invite critique ('Throw spears at it') to improve work without taking it personally.

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) There are really small changes that people can make leaders and also just everyone on teams can make that will make everyone else's lives feel better. It's like the thing that people are side-texting texting me like, oh my God, can you believe that he just did this and that? It's like, well, no one's telling him. So how is he supposed to fix it? I'm obsessed with the fact that all of the information about how I can grow and improve is often, it's in the room and in my blind spot. And the only way that I can figure it out is by asking for it and by receiving it well. If you have spinach in your teeth, you'd want someone to tell you, right? Sure, it's an awkward three seconds, but helpful for the rest of the day. So why is it that when someone on our team is missing deadlines or dominating meetings or doing that one thing that drives everyone crazy, nobody says anything to them? Instead, we side-texting our colleagues, we vent to our friends, or we carry a quiet resentment for months. But do we say anything to the person to try and fix the issue? No, because that would be too uncomfortable. Giving someone feedback is one of, if not the hardest things to do. We don't want to upset people. We don't want to start a fight. And even if we do give the feedback, we can't even be sure that it was properly received. Here's the good news. There are simple techniques we can learn to give us more confidence to have those uncomfortable conversations and when we do, for them to go well. Instead of taking a summer hiatus, we are presenting. a special five-episode series of A Bit of Optimism. To go deep on human skills, the things that help us connect, collaborate, and succeed in any human relationship. That's why I invited Alex Simon to join me. She's a founder of LifeShop, where she teaches emotional intelligence. And over these five episodes, we will tackle some of the messier interactions, like having hard conversations, people pleasing, listening, and taking accountability, and, of course, this one, giving feedback. Because in this age of AI, sure, the AI can write your performance review, it can draft the talking points. But feedback only works when a human being looks another human being in the eye and says, I care about you enough to tell you this. That part is still very human. So here's what you can expect from this episode. First, I'll share a simple technique that I learned from the the U.S. Air Force that has completely changed the culture at our office in how we give and receive feedback. It turns criticism from something people are uncomfortable with into something they more than tolerate. They actually want it. Once you hear this technique, you'll become obsessed with it, just like I have. Next, we explore a deceptively simple way to say a hard thing without blowing up a relationship. And finally, I'll share an amazing story of a leader who I admire who learned the hard way how feedback works, when it's appropriate to give it, and how to give it in a way that people can actually hear it. She thought her feedback would help people improve their performance. It turns out there's much more to understand about human dynamics than that. So let me start with my first bit of feedback for you. I care about you and I want you to be the best best feedback giver and receiver you can be. And if you enjoy this episode, please remember to subscribe. A Bit of Optimism. Let's talk about feedback. Feedback is one of those underappreciated things in a company. Everybody knows that you have to give it. Everybody knows at some point you have to receive it. People like getting good feedback. A lot of people don't like getting bad feedback. And a lot of people don't know how to give it and a lot of people don't know how to receive it. And both are teachable. I had a colleague who I needed to give feedback to. And like most people, I tend to give feedback the way I like to receive it. I like it plain and simple. Just tell me what you need to tell me. I despise feedback sandwiches, something generic and positive, something really specific and constructive, and something generic and positive. That's supposed to make somebody feel good. Just tell me what you need to tell me, and let's just be done with it, right? And so that's how I give feedback. Turns out, not everybody likes to receive feedback that way. Who knew? Who knew? So I worked with somebody and I needed to give her some feedback, and I gave it to her. It did not go well. In fact, it became a fight. Well. Yeah. And what I was hoping was a relatively quick and easy feedback session, ended up being an hour of de-escalation. It was rough. And then it happened again. You know, months later, I gave some feedback, did not go well. It became a fight and an hour of de-escalation. And I said to her, we have to figure this out, because I have to give you feedback. And I can't go through this every time. And I know you don't want to go through this every time. And she said, feedback's fine, but I don't like the way you give it to me. And I'm I was like, well, then how do you want me to give it to you? And she said, I just need to be prepared. Just say, can I give you some feedback? It's going to be really hard to give you. I need to be mentally prepared so I can take a deep breath if it's going to be hard. I went, okay. She goes, and sometimes I want to schedule it. I'm like, and that's it. She's like, yeah, that's it. I'm like, fine. So in the future, I was like, hey, I need to give you some feedback. It's going to be uncomfortable. Can we do it now? And she'd be like, yeah. Or she'd be like, can we do it on Thursday at 3 o'clock? I'd be like, Yeah, I can do Thursday, 3 o'clock, you know. And me simply adjusting to how she wanted the feedback, she could actually take more intense feedback than almost anybody on the team so long as she was prepared for it. And that's when I realized, that's when I learned, that we have to teach people how to give it, and we have to allow people to ask for it the way they want it. And if we get it right, I mean, it helps everybody, and when we get it wrong, it literally could completely undermine any kind of relationships or productivity or joy somebody has at work. What if you learned about what feedback is, how it works, how it's received, how it's given? Well, maybe I can start by saying how completely feedback-obsessed I am. So my first job out of college, I was a management consultant, and the firm that I worked at was obsessed with feedback. You had feedback with your direct supervisor every week. You had feedback with everyone else on your team, every other week. You had feedback with the partner on your case once a month, like a direct time. And it wasn't called feedback. It was called PD professional development. And it was a huge part of the culture. And for me, it was normal because my first job out of college. I thought every job had that. And I was talking to one of my best friends from college. Like we had a year or two into being like working in our 20s. And she was describing some horrible situation she was having at work. I said, well, why don't you bring it? off in your feedback session. She was like, what are you talking about? And I said, the next time you have feedback with your manager, like next week, why don't you bring it up? She said, I have feedback with my manager once a year for my performance review. And I said, that's bananas. When are you supposed to bring things up? Like, how are you supposed to fix things? And she said, we don't. It broke my brain, like, because it had been such an integral part of the culture. And it worked so well. I just found it inconceivable that not everyone could have access to that all the time. And then I quickly learned, of course, that most companies don't have strong feedback cultures, and there's so much feedback avoidance, and then you're missing the gold mind of information that is, like, what's working well for you, what's not working well for you. And then you're kind of repeating the same mistakes over and over again. It broke my brain then. It breaks my brain today. To me, it's like the simplest and most powerful intervention that any company or a person can do. One of the worst examples I ever saw of it, which is the avoidant part. There's a company, very large company, 100,000 employees, right? It's a company that you've of. And they were so obsessed with having a nice culture and everyone was nice to each other. And everybody was so nice. The way they interpreted nice was they never gave anybody feedback. And any feedback they gave was Pablam, you know? And so if somebody was underperforming, instead of sitting down and having the hard conversation with them and trying to like help them out, they would just move them from team to team. They would just get bumped and then they would be underperforming and they would get bumped to another team. And people had entire careers. Like they were there for years just going from team to team to team. And if you You're the underperformer. First of all, you're not an idiot. You can see that you keep getting moved. So you're like, clearly my career is going nowhere. And you're not getting the feedback, which means you continue to be an underperformer so that it ends up destroying people's self-confidence. So then they don't have the self-confidence to leave and find another job. They don't have the self-confidence to raise their hand and be like, can somebody please tell me what's going on here? And it's just the whole thing ends up being this huge, passive-aggressive culture. Everybody's nice and nobody tells you anything. They gave plenty of good feedback. but they weren't willing to give difficult feedback or uncomfortable feedback. To me, it's like food in your teeth. I am always, I pride myself on being the first person to tell someone when they have food in their teeth. Are you checking your teeth? You don't have anything. I would have. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. And you know I would have. I do. To me, feedback is like the higher stakes version of that. If I had chocolate all over my teeth and I was walking to like a client meeting, I would expect my team to say, Alex, you have a ton of chocolate in your teeth. And so why would I not expect them to tell me like, oh, by the way, the way that you ask questions makes people feel like this. And I know the answer, because people don't know how. And when you don't have the skill, then you just don't do it or you do it badly. And people, once they reach a management position, you know, congratulations, you're now, you know, in a management position. What training will I get in my middle management? Oh, we'll give you new business cards. Oh, no, no, no. There's no training. But now you have to have the least annual feedback sessions. Oh, and you're going to do 360s and you're going to do monthly meetings. And even if you're like a really well-intentioned young leader and be like, you know what? I'm going to do PD. I'm going to do personal development every week with my team. But nobody tells you how to do it. Okay, so that's one reason is that we don't know how. We don't know how. What do you think are the other things that stop us from being? We don't want to hurt somebody's feelings. Yeah. We would rather kind of hurt their feelings in a subtle way where they're being confused all the time in the long term. Well, that's passive aggression, right? Yeah. And I think there's also power dynamics, which is, you know, we view feedback as something that is given down the chain of command, but rarely up. And, you know, I appreciate companies that do 360s when they're done properly, when they're done well, because everybody has to know. One of the best feedback loops I learned about is actually done by the Army Rangers. There's three levels to Army Rangers School. At the end of each one, there's an evaluation before you can make it to the second one, and then an evaluation, before we make it a third one, then the third one, and then you can graduate. At the end of each track, they have three evaluations. One is very empirical. Did you perform the tasks within the time frame required? Right? It's data. Yes, no. You did it in this time. You failed. You passed. Right? Very, very simple. The second one is your teacher, the instructor. Does the instructor think you're good and ready to go to the next level? And that used to be it. And they discovered that they had this thing called Spotlight Rangers, which people who were like, they were freaking machines out in the field, they did everything. They were the fastest. They were the best. They were incredible. The instructors love them. They're like, this kid's going to be a great ranger one day. I love this kid. But then when the spotlight was turned off, that person was an asshole. But nobody knew because there was no mechanism. Yeah. And so they implemented the third thing, which was peer, peer review. So now you need to pass all three. You need to empirically be good at your job. The instructor needs to think you're good. And the other ranger candidates evaluate you. And the way they did the evaluation was absolutely incredible. How they do it? I will tell you because it's absolutely incredible. I love seeing you sell it up. It's one page. So you have to fill out this form multiple times, depending if there's 12 people in the class. You fill it out 11 times, right? And the first thing you do is they have the values of the organization written down and you have to evaluate each ranger candidate if they're upholding the values based on your assessment. Then you have to rank all the rangers in terms of best to worst. I'm not sure I like that part of it, but I get it. But then there's my favorite, favorite, favorite question that they asked on every evaluation. would you go to war with this ranger? Would you share a foxhole with this ranger? What's a foxhole? It's a hole in the ground that you just sit and wait all day. Sharing a foxhole with somebody, the business equivalent would be like, would you pitch a new piece of business with this colleague? Would you get stuck at an airport for six hours with this colleague? Right? It's that equivalent. And what I love about that is, oh my God, yes, I'd go to war with this person because they're a machine, they're brilliant, look at their skills, incredible. Would I share a foxhole? Heck no. And it was revealing of character. Yeah. And it was just one page. And they gave it to them when they were tired because they found out that when they retired, they were more honest. Wow. Yeah. And you had to be a good person as well as being good at your job, as well as being good at managing up, in order to make it to the next level. And one of the things they told me was they also evaluate how somebody receives feedback. That actually goes into the evaluation. So they sit down with each ranger and be like, so we've got your e-vails here. and your colleagues think you're an asshole. And if the Ranger goes, huh, well, that's not good. All right. Okay, I'm going to work on that. Thank you for that. Versus, I know what happened. There was this one incident on third. I know why they said that. Who wrote that? Yeah, who wrote that? I know why they said it. It's not a big deal. I understand where that comes from. We're good. You know? Yeah. So it wasn't just the giving of the feedback. it was the ability to receive the feedback. It's an amazing anecdote because it really does show what happens when you build a culture where those things matter. Yeah. There's a conceit here, which is there's no one way to do feedback. There's no one way to do 360s. There's no such thing as a perfect feedback mechanism. And you want well-rounded feedback. You want to have multiple feedback systems because it fills in the gaps. And the feedback system that you choose should fit the culture as well. You know, the forced rankings definitely is important for Army Rangers. It's probably not important for most companies. In fact, I would actually recommend against it. But feedback fundamentally is difficult. Yeah. Why do you think it's so difficult? It's hard to give. It's hard to hear. Especially if you care about your work, it's never good to hear that you didn't do something well. Or it's very hard to tell somebody that there's a behavioral issue. It's hard when it feels so personal. It's hard. And I think it's hard when it feels personal. A lot of feedback is personal. Yeah. And I think to your point, you've brought up a couple times a beautiful distinction between taking, this is about you as a person, this is a character judgment or a character assassination, versus this is a behavior. And I think it's so much easier when we frame things as behaviors, those things we can work on. But I think the problem is when we don't get feedback, it's really easy for us to believe that something is about someone's character. That's something that can't change. And you receive it as such. Yeah. I think