When giving feedback, stick to the big stuff and avoid offering your opinions on the details, unless you’ve specific expertise. And even then, think twice.
Instead, just ask questions. As a senior leader, your job is to drive innovation by helping others get better at making well-informed decisions. Not to replace their decisions with your opinions.
Here’s a 2 minute audio clip from an interview with Bob Iger (Disney’s CEO) and Venture Capitalist Chris Dixon, talking about giving feedback (source: a16z podcast).
In it, Iger stresses the importance of concentrating on “only the stuff that would make a big difference”, often holding back pages of notes on “the small stuff.” Dixon similarly has a rule to “never give specific product feedback to entrepreneurs”.
It’s great advice for leaders that want to build high-performance, innovative cultures.
The risk/reward ratio when offering subjective feedback on small details just often isn’t worth it. Or very smart.
However much you see things differently, unless your opinion’s based on objective insight, or specific expertise, it’s unlikely to result in a better outcome. So keep them to yourself. Because the downsides are that you:
- Unintentionally make their work worse performance wise, even though it makes more sense to you personally.
- Absolve individuals and teams of their responsibility for the outcomes of their work.
- Demotivate them, by eroding their agency and sense of purpose.
- Send a very poor cultural signal - “In this company, the right peoples’ subjective opinions can trump the considered work of experts we hire.”
I’m absolutely not saying let the details slide. I’m saying senior stakeholder feedback isn’t the best way to get the details right. And it’s sure as hell not scalable.
Instead, ask questions. Get teams to walk you through their thinking. Understand how their approach is responding to customer insight, in a way that will benefit the business.
If they can’t do that comprehensively, because their understanding of the business’ strategy is confused or their understanding of customer needs and desires are too shallow… that’s the fundamental problem your influence should be spent on fixing. Not poking holes.
Fix that, and watch the details improve dramatically.