Here at SpotlessMind, we are obsessed with the question, “How do you make teams high-performance?” and we start with ourselves above all. It would be too funny if we were the “shoemaker’s children going shoeless”—as too many firms are—and while we try to appreciate humor, we’re too dedicated to the cause of “eating our own dog food” to appreciate that sort of humor.
That’s why today, I’d like to share one approach to how we manage our own team, which might be useful for anyone else in our attempts to make our own team high-performance: we create various ways to give feedback that are appropriate for different criticism styles. Let’s unpack that.
One challenge we, like all teams, have is that different individuals on the team have different styles of giving and receiving feedback.
Solving this challenge is critical to making any team high-performance because:
- If team members can’t criticize others, it becomes near-impossible to solve non-trivial problems.
- If team members criticize others in ways that aren’t conducive to healthy co-working (by each individual’s personal definition of “healthy co-working”), those individuals tend to lose enthusiasm quite quickly, which makes their enthusiasm plummet far faster than it can be measured—because all classic measurements of employee morale are deeply lagging indicators.
- Striking that right balance when criticizing—of criticizing each individual in a way that the criticism will be clear, strong, and internalized, yet not demotivating—and doing that for each individual is no easy task at all.
These three reasons, taken together, should show that this is a challenge harder to solve than you might think at first glance. A younger version of me would say, “Just tell it to them, clearly but with kindness,” but the older version of me realizes: not only is doing that deeply hard (for both the criticism-giver and for the criticism-receiver), but each person is so different that this often doesn’t work. For example, many people—myself included—need to be told a criticism directly, strongly, and unambiguously to really internalize it (because, in my case at least, I frame everything so optimistically and positively when I’m feeling optimistic and positive about something that I’m too likely to discount it if it’s wrapped in too many euphemisms).
Indeed, dealing with different opinions on non-trivial matters is one of the core causes of low team productivity, and no team productivity strategy that doesn’t take that into account is worth its weight in dust.
So how do we do that, here at SpotlessMind?
There are a few parts to our approach. Let’s list them:
The first part is that we can be touchy-feely, as needed. Just listen to the other person, and we teach everyone on our team to try to listen first, and to explain themselves in a way that the other person is most likely to understand. There’s no way around using your instinct and your sense of smell for that. Practice makes perfect, hopefully.
The second part is effectively our general guidance on the first part: as a team, we value empathy—yours truly even wrote a book on empathy—and one of our trademark approaches, which we teach employees when they’re first hired (and indeed, we tend to hire people who have this approach), is to be strong with others and to deal with disagreements when the disagreements are still small—but to do so with empathy. Being clear and strong does not mean you have to be an !@#*&$%, nor to imply anything negative about the other side. Here’s one of our small techniques we teach our team and advocate: to reframe disagreements from the perspective of the other person, assuming that the other person is both smart and a very good person—and tell it to them before criticizing them.
The third part is that we have two in-house sorceresses, whom we all go to for advice on how to best bring up critical but difficult issues with others. Team, team, team—everyone on your team should play different informal roles—we can help you do an informal role report of your team, just ask!—and the role of the person who understands people on an intuitive level is a gift and very important. Note that such a person would work in HR in an ideal world, but more often than not, they don’t.
The fourth part is where it gets most interesting, and it has a few steps to it—and it’s the secret sauce that brings a touch of magic that even sorceresses can’t! Let me walk through them, and you’ll see where I’m going.
The first step we use is to model the personality of each team member, using—cough, cough—our own SpotlessMind approach. Of course, you can approach this with other systems as well—no pressure to use ours; even starting with a written, informal analysis of each person is better than nothing.
The second step is to map out how each individual prefers to receive criticism, and to combine that with tips on how to make sure it’s received and resonates with that person. This could be an addition to the doc you made in the first step. Of course, our system can do this as well—and of course, still no pressure to use it at all. You can use this as an excuse to practice your handwriting!
The third step is to write a public-facing version of that “How to Give Criticism” document, which can easily be shared. And—am I a broken record yet? Will anyone younger than a Millennial even know what a “record” is? And if they don’t, will the cliché even make sense to them? I guess people still understand “cut and paste,” even though no one above the age of 12 literally cuts and pastes paper together—of course, you can do this yourself. A Google Doc for each person would serve just fine. It’s important to write this in a way that the individual in question will approve of and want to share, yet still get the key tips and suggestions across to the reader, as well. Writing is much easier when only one of those two sides needs to be pleased. (That’s why my writing this article is so easy: I’m only trying to please myself, and no one else—not even you, dearest reader!)
The fourth step is to share those Google Docs with everyone else on the team. Don’t forget to update the sharing settings appropriately. And here’s a trick: put it into everyone’s email signature! That way, everyone who receives an email from that person can immediately scan the document and know how to criticize them. They may or may not, but it’s a start.
Fun tip: We didn’t invent the idea of putting a document on how to deal with a personality type in someone’s email signature. We learned about it from two people who work for the same Fortune 100 company that mandates it among its employees, so now you can, too.
Of course, unless they’re one of those infamous bureaucracies, in which case you might want to do the precise opposite of what they do. But want to know more? Just send me an email and let’s have a virtual drink—I can tell you more!
