← Build with Leila Hormozi
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
As I look back at the years I've been doing business, which is almost seven years now, I can tie everything and every mistake back to really one thing that I didn't do in business. And that thing that I didn't do was I didn't give people feedback. A lot of the problems that stem in the first few years of business actually come from the leader not giving feedback. My first few years in business, I was more concerned with being liked than I was being respected and more concerned with being liked than I clearly was. Making sure that my employees and my teammates were growing, because people don't grow without feedback. What I often hear is like, layla, I'm not the right person to be giving feedback because I feel terrible when I do. I get super nervous, my hands sweat, I can't sleep the night before. Like, all these things, all these emotions, the first thought that I have is like, oh, my gosh, I was the same way. Giving feedback, if you do it enough times and if you have a structured way of doing it and you practice can actually become something that you like doing rather than something that you hate and avoid doing. So the first belief that I've developed about feedback that's helped me is that feedback is the number one retention tool for top talent. Top talent wants feedback. What they don't want is to be in the dark about what you don't like about what they're doing. In any job that I had, I was constantly craving feedback from my boss, and if a boss didn't give it to me, I felt disappointed. I was like, I'm not growing. I'm not getting invested in. They don't even care. They don't even pay attention to what I'm doing. And then you're like, what, not paying attention. I see all of it. I'm just fucking terrified of giving you the feedback. And so once I realized that feedback is actually a retention tool for my teammates, that was when I was like, oh, wow, the best people on my team want this feedback. The second is that I realized that feedback is an acceleration tool for the speed of my company. If you look at companies that move quickly, the reason that companies move quickly is because they have fast feedback loops. Within all sectors, they have fast financial feedback loops in terms of, like, they get their financials quickly, they have fast customer feedback loops in terms of they survey and they gather information from their customers quickly, and they have fast internal feedback loops, which means they constantly are collecting information from their teams and getting feedback quickly. As the boss, the one that you have to really set the tone for is the internal feedback communication loops, getting feedback constantly from the departments. How are they working well together? How are you working well with your direct reports? If you don't know if people are doing well or not, and if they don't know if they're doing well or not, then everything's going to move much slower because people are afraid to take the next step because they don't know how well they did in the last step. And then the last belief that I had to embody was that if I don't give my team feedback and if I don't ask for feedback, then I will constantly be in the dark about my company problems and my company will move slower and be less successful and I will have less concise information for making decisions. If I give feedback to other people on my team, they're going to give me feedback. If I don't give them feedback, they won't give me feedback, and then I won't know what's going on with my company just because I didn't teach them that we can give each other feedback. Whatever you want from somebody on our team is obviously what you need to give them. Feedback is a way to have visibility into things, because if you give it to somebody, they're going to give it right back to you. And that's how you get visibility into departments without sitting in on every meeting, without looking at every KPI, without looking at every spreadsheet. And so it's much easier to run a company if you can actually create a culture of feedback than it is if you don't do that. And so one thing I'll say before I go into the framework for giving feedback, one person I want to give credit to is actually Matt Mokeri. I was in a business group and he came on, he talked about feedback to us, and he gave a framework very similar to what I'm going to share with you. And so I've iterated on that and combined it with a couple others that I found through the many books I've read. And that is what I've used and I've taught my teams. So I call this framework the five A's. The first A is ask for it. So what I would do is I would sit down with my team and I would explain to them that giving negative feedback or critical feedback is cherished. It is not punished. We're building up that muscle of courage to basically tell someone something that we know they don't want to hear, despite the fact that they need to hear it. There's two questions that I really like in order to ask people for feedback. The first one is, if you were CEO of this company, what would you do? Because oftentimes what you're really asking is, what do you not like that I'm doing? That you would do if you're running this company. And I like to gain everyone's perspective, so I like asking that question. The second question I like to ask is, what is something that you're afraid to tell me? Oftentimes people, you say, hey, can you give me some feedback? And they're like, oh, I don't really have feedback for you. They're like, how could I be a better boss? It's like, well, they don't know how you can be a better boss, but they do know what they're afraid to tell you. A lot of people tend to hesitate because they're afraid to tell you, and you just want to say, listen, you're not going to hurt my feelings. I just want to know what you're afraid to tell me. So that's the first way that you can ask for it. Now, once you've asked for the feedback and they've given you a feedback, the second thing you want to do is that you want to acknowledge it. You don't want to react to it, you want to acknowledge it. So you basically want to repeat back to that person what I heard you say. So say, I asked someone for feedback. Hey, Layla, I think that sometimes you're too nice and you don't give enough feedback and I would acknowledge it and say, okay, I think what I heard you say is that I don't give you enough Unsugar coated feedback and that you would like more of that. Is that correct? The third a is to appreciate it. So as soon as you have knowledge and they've confirmed that what you just repeated back to them is the feedback that they wanted to give you, then you want to appreciate it. You want to say, thank you. I really appreciate you giving me that feedback. You know, it's something I didn't know. It's something that I've actually been trying to even work on to a certain degree. But hearing it from you is really helpful because I didn't even know it was showing up in that area of the business. And so you want to show them and you want to reinforce their behavior to give you feedback. If you thank someone for doing something that was scary for them, then they're much more likely to do it again versus if you just continue on with the conversation. I Sometimes like to thank someone in a conversation and then I like to ping them on Slack or via email later and tell them again, like, hey, I just want to let you know I really appreciate you doing that. The fourth piece is to accept it. So sometimes what you're going to see is that people give you feedback and it's absolutely true and it resonates with you. There's also going to be times where someone gives you feedback about some decision you're making in the business, but they might not know that there's something else going on. And because they lack that context, you may not actually accept that feedback. There was a time where we were in the middle of selling gym launch. An employee came to me and gave me feedback about me not showing up as many meetings. Little did they know I'm trying to sell the company, which means I'm not going to be as involved in the company meetings anymore. I couldn't accept the feedback that they were giving me because they didn't have the context that we were selling the company to know why I was doing that. So sometimes what you have to do is you have to educate people so that they understand why you don't accept that feedback. And then the last piece is to act on it. Giving feedback and accepting feedback are great, but if you don't do anything about it, it doesn't really matter. You want to inform them of what action you're going to take next. So say that someone gives you feedback about how you're not giving them enough feedback, right? Then you're going to say, listen, here's what I'm going to do after this meeting, I'm going to set up time every two weeks just for us to meet. Just 10 minutes. And we're just going to use it as a feedback only session. I have five minutes to give you feedback. You five minutes to give me feedback. Does that work for you? You actually acted on the thing that they gave you feedback on. Take this video, go over it a few times and then tell your team, hey, I want to start using this. I want to normalize feedback in our culture. Let's watch this video together. And then on our next team meeting, what we're going to do is we're going to go to breakout rooms and we're going to each give each other feedback. I do a timer for 15 minutes and then we do switch. This is something that I like to do at quarterly meetings. It's something I like to do on team monthly meetings. If you don't normalize giving feedback and accepting criticism, then your culture will never be one of feedback. But if you push people to be uncomfortable, eventually it will be comfortable to them. It'll become a normal part of your culture.