Co-written by Matt Mochary and Misha Talavera

Video of Justin Kan (Twitch, Atrium) talking about giving and receiving feedback (5 min)

• Table of Contents

Receiving

Frequent, transparent feedback is critical for building a strong culture and a thriving business. Feedback is instrumental in building trust. Without trust, communication breaks down. Building a culture of feedback and transparency starts and ends with the founders.

Critical feedback, in particular, should be cherished. Your team members are in the trenches every day. They have knowledge about the company that you do not have. Only if you open up the door to negative feedback will your team feel comfortable giving it.

Think about it from the other side—it can be quite scary to criticize someone who has power over them. They might feel they're risking their job!

If you do not proactively collect feedback, you will quickly find the following problems emerge:

• You will be in the dark about your company's problems: If you act defensively every time your team brings up an issue, they will soon stop bringing that valuable information to you, and you will wither away in your ivory tower.
• Operations will grind to a halt: When people cannot share things openly, communication breaks down; when communication breaks down, operations slow. This problem only gets worse as your company grows, and as it grows, it becomes even harder to change that culture.
• Your best talent will leave you: A-players have no patience for defensiveness and amateurishness. If you aren't mature enough to listen to your people, face your problems, and work on fixing them, your A-players will find the founders who listen.

Therefore, if you are to receive real, honest feedback and improve and keep your team communicating, YOU must make an effort to seek it out. Do so using the five A's:

1. Ask for it

Make sure your team understands that giving you negative feedback will not be punished but cherished. It is essential to say this, preferably in a one-on-one setting. When asking for feedback on the company in general, it is helpful to ask, "If you were CEO, what would you change?" You can do this in person or through an anonymous survey.

When asking for feedback about himself as a manager, Lachy Groom, formerly of Stripe, asks, "What feedback are you afraid to give because you think it will hurt my feelings? Please tell me that." Even then, many people hesitate. I like to add, "Don't tell me. Please think about it. Do you have it in your brain chamber? Yes? Now please tell me."

Let your reports know that until they share truly negative feedback with you, you will think that they are simply withholding, and you won't be able to trust them fully.

Note: It is not enough to say, "Give me feedback anytime." None of your reports will ever actually create the time and space to do this. Instead, you must create this time and space. I do so in the last 5-10 minutes of every meeting I am in, whether 1-1 or team meeting. And I do it in writing (I ask each participant to write down their feedback to me in real-time in our shared Doc) so that I can refer back to it forever. I recommend that you do the same.

Many meeting owners send a survey after the meeting asking for feedback. Please recognize that this is close to useless. People will not carve out the time to do so. And will not be motivated to give honest feedback as they have no idea if it will be read or understood.

2. Acknowledge it

Confirm that you heard it correctly by saying, "I think I heard you say …" Summarize what they said or wrote. Then say, "Is that right?" If they say "Yes," you can proceed. If they say "Not quite," ask them to repeat it until you can summarize it correctly. Once you have correctly summarized what they said, you can even go deeper by asking**, "Is there more?"**