Good Leaders Ask for Feedback
By: LaTanya C Walker
This week at Wyld Lynx, we have been thinking a lot about feedback. We shared a lot on social media this week about how feedback can build trust and engagement with your team, as well as how to give useful and clear feedback. It is important to remember that the feedback process should be two-way. We have to both generously give feedback and open ourselves to receiving feedback. As a manager, you can make or break your team as with an outsized influence on employee engagement. According to a Gallup study, managers account for 70% of variances in employee engagement. Your employee engagement levels are important because they directly affect your team’s productivity, profitability, and employee turnover rates. Imagine being able to make a positive impact by just asking for feedback.
As a leader, sometimes getting feedback is not a simple task. You have probably heard the phrase, “The higher you go in an organization, the less truth you hear.” That can be true if leaders are not deliberate in creating feedback channels that work for their current organizational climate. Demonstrating openness to feedback at a leadership level often means not waiting for it to come to you but asking many people, in many ways, and often.
Like every employee, leaders can use feedback as a development tool that can help shift your Johari window, expanding visibility into blind spots. For leaders, asking for feedback is not just beneficial to your professional journey; requesting feedback as a leader boosts engagement and trust within your team even more so than just giving feedback. It sets a precedent for honesty and candor, improves and builds trusting relationships, and you become the example for your team on the value of being open to feedback. Seeking feedback from your employees can also bring clarity to opaque situations. Once you see exactly how you show up, you can start making meaningful improvements across your organization.
In a study of 51,896 executives, “those who ranked at the bottom 10% in asking for feedback (that is to say, they asked for feedback less often than fully 90% of their peers) were rated at the 15th percentile in overall leadership effectiveness. On the other hand, leaders who ranked at the top 10% in asking for feedback were rated, on average, at the 86th percentile in overall leadership effectiveness.” The best leaders appear to ask more people for feedback, and they ask for feedback more often.
The level of openness and candor with which feedback is given to a leader indicates a level of trust between the leader and the team. Sharing feedback is often interpersonally risky, and the higher the degree of trust, the lower the risk of being honest.
As with any relationship, the more the giver of feedback believes they will be heard and there will be no repercussions, the more direct and honest feedback can be solicited. There are also ways to get feedback in low trust environments as well. So what is the best way to ask for feedback as a leader?
Asking for Feedback in a Low Trust Relationship
There are many reasons that workplaces can be low on trust, and they are not all are bad. Low trust can exist in new teams as well as toxic environments for very different reasons. So be honest with yourself in evaluating the trust level of your team. Are you a new team working together for the first time? Are you a new leader taking over an existing team? Is there a toxic climate among the team that we are working to improve? These situations may result in a low trust relationship, where creating safety and building trust is an essential part of how you ask for feedback.
If you have a low level of trust in your organization, consider ways of requesting feedback that provides anonymity to the workforce. Questions and prompts to solicit leadership feedback can be embedded in culture surveys for large organizations, collected by a third party such as an executive coach for medium-sized teams, or gathered through a 360-feedback model for smaller teams.
Asking for Feedback in a High Trust Relationship
High trust relationships are the best-case scenario. You are a well-established team often high performing, with good team collaboration, accountability, and communication. In a high trust relationship, asking for feedback can be fruitful. In high trust relationships, ask for feedback directly in one on one sessions. Some suitable methods are skip-level meetings, regular one-on-ones with direct reports, and directly to individuals as part of a debrief post presentations, workshops, and off-sites.
In one-on-one and skip-level meetings, directly asking individuals what you should start doing, keep doing, or stop doing — the SKS model — is a suitable method for soliciting feedback on behaviors and actions and offer insights into how what you do impacts others’ ability to execute successfully. As part of a debrief, asking for feedback on how you performed or participated and whether it contributed to successful outcomes for the group can lead to significant input for the next session.
Conclusion
Most teams are somewhere in the middle, trending low or high on trust. A combination of tools will be necessary to solicit feedback to build a better team environment and a more open culture.
Pulse employees at all levels and across demographics to collect as much feedback as possible. Gathering feedback broadly across your organizations will offer insights into the unique data of your organization. Engaging in two-way feedback is essential for an organizations culture transformation.
About the author
LaTanya Walker is a consultant whom emphasizes the value of managed organizational change and the alignment of people, processes, and systems to build effective teams and organizations. With over 20 years of experience in project management, change management, and organizational effectiveness, LaTanya has the expertise to support organizations through transformational change.
