In building high-performance culture companies, leaders want to promote values that instill accountability and drive growth. This can only happen with a timely and consistent environment for giving and receiving feedback.
Many leaders are simply inconsistent with their feedback, though. Usually, it’s because they ignore or undervalue it or overdo the process and come on too strong.
In episode 31 of the Best Places to Lead, Kim Bach graced our presence to share her expertise in helping leaders engage their people and grow their organizations. She is the current SVP for Customer Success at Daily Human, an agency that helps businesses deal with turnover and disengagement crises.
I’m excited to share the top three business lessons I’ve picked up from our engaging conversation with my fellow leaders:
Business lesson #1: The important step to start a culture of feedback in any organization is for leaders to model the way.
Leaders must go first.
If you’re leading an organization to cultivate a feedback culture, you should take the first step of receiving feedback, not the first giving one.
As an advocate of servant leadership, I’m aligned with this and agree that it’s the role of leaders to model the way. This means that you, as the leader, should step up and say to your people that you want to grow and that you want everyone in the team or the company to grow.
To accomplish that, you ask them to start telling you how to improve as a leader. This is an opportunity for you to gain a unique perspective on your actions and some of the behavior you might be missing or ignoring.
By embracing feedback, you empower your people to hold up that mirror.
Business lesson #2: To sustain the feedback culture, leaders must build trust, nurture relationships, and commit to growth.
After modeling the way, leaders can transition to giving feedback. This is an important step in how feedback impacts your people and drives performance.
Building trust and nurturing relationships are the best ways to sustain this culture in your organization to ensure feedback works.
This way, your people will know you care about them and trust that your feedback, however heavy, is to help them grow into the best version of themselves. It also means balancing the positive and the negative feedback.
Business lesson #3: A predictable and consistent environment is where a feedback culture flourishes.
Leaders must create a predictable and consistent environment to allow the feedback culture to flourish in any organization.
This psychologically safe environment is where leaders improve how they give feedback to their people.
A predictable and consistent feedback process ensures employees know what to expect. Otherwise, the process of giving and receiving feedback is likely to falter.
About Best Places to Lead
Your company has the potential to be great. The leader’s responsibility is to unlock that potential – or doom it to mediocrity.
On the LIVE Best Places to Lead show, you’ll learn the hard-fought lessons from the front lines earned by business leaders who have already had their teeth bashed in and lived to tell about it. We’ll share the tips, tricks, mindsets, and frameworks that allow great leaders to lead differently. Register to attend the live show, ask questions, and level up. It’s every Thursday starting at 3:30 pm ET.
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