How do you give your leader feedback? (+ a very special anniversary!)
Today is a very special day.
Today, Monique, our Chief of Growth, celebrates a decade with our company.
I asked Monique to collaborate with me on a blog post about how to give your leader feedback, which you will find below. What she doesn’t know is that I added a little bit to it! (Surprise, Monique!!!) Before we get to her amazing advice, I want to spend some time celebrating Monique and talking about the impact she’s had on me and on our company.
I met Monique through her boyfriend—now husband—Tim. Tim accepted an internship with Student Maid and was helping us build a scheduling software called MaidSuite. Tim’s internship happened to start in the summer, around the same time as Student Maid’s busiest season. We needed extra help cleaning student apartments, and Tim told me that his girlfriend, Monique, might be able to help. We hired her for the summer, and that’s where our journey together began.
Monique completely blew us away with her get-it-done attitude and incredible work ethic. After our busy summer season, we offered her the option to stay on the team year-round and have a flexible cleaning schedule. She quickly became one of our clients’ most-requested team members and worked her way to becoming one of our head trainers.
Monique studied interior design at the University of Florida, but after taking a lackluster internship that didn't provide her with the learning experiences she hoped it would, she started to question whether interior design was the path she wanted to take. At the same time, we were starting to gain traction with MaidSuite. Monique made the decision to stay on with our team after she graduated from UF and join Tim in growing our scheduling software company.
If you’ve read Permission To Screw Up, you know that we had some hard moments with MaidSuite. My partner in the company, Josh, passed away suddenly, and we eventually decided to end our operations. Tim went on to build a meaningful career and pursue other passions, but it wasn’t the end for me and Monique. After seeing the impact that she’d had not only on Student Maid but also on MaidSuite, I had other ideas of where we could focus her tremendous strengths.
At the time, I was just starting my career as a speaker. My life was busy. I was traveling a lot, I was juggling giving talks while also leading Student Maid, and I needed help. I remember I was walking through the produce aisle of the grocery store when I called Monique with an idea. I asked her if she would help me manage the personal things happening outside of work so that I could show up at my best at work. I admired how detailed and organized she was, and I thought she could really help me. When she accepted the position, I remember doing a little cheer by the apples and bananas.
After a year or so of that, it became obvious to me that Monique had outgrown the role, and where I really needed help was managing the speaking side of the business. We hired someone to take over her position, and Monique became the driving force behind all speaking business operations. She traveled to events with me, she worked with clients to secure contracts, she helped me develop content. And as that business grew and took me away from Student Maid, Monique led the Student Maid team when I couldn’t be there. She was the leader who helped them through obstacles and challenges and helped us feel connected even when I was miles away.
Today, 10 years later, Monique is my right hand in the business. As the Chief of Growth, her job is to be my thought partner and to create and drive the strategy that brings our vision to life. Among some of her biggest accomplishments: launching Permission To Screw Up, achieving a goal of paying off our business debt five years early, helping me make the decision to sell the cleaning side of the business and go all-in on leadership development, achieving complete financial transparency in our company, and creating all the systems our team uses to communicate and collaborate on bringing our vision to life.
But even more than that, Monique has had a tremendous impact on me. She has become one of my closest friends. She’s seen me in my worst moments and my best ones. She’s given me tough love and pep talks. I feel completely safe with her, I feel like myself with her, and I feel like there’s nothing we can’t do together.
Monique, when you read this, I want you to know how much I love you and how much I realize that I would never be the human I am today without you. Thank you for being such a great friend and one of the brightest lights in my life. I’m so lucky to have you, and I truly don’t have words to express how much you mean to me.
And for you, dear reader, I know this is turning into the longest blog post ever, but I want you to experience Monique’s impact just like I’ve been able to.
One of her greatest strengths is her ability to give me feedback. Her feedback is what has changed our company and made it into the organization we have today. I asked her to answer some questions about what she’s learned about giving a leader feedback, and I hope you can learn from them!
Here we go:
How do you prepare for a feedback conversation with me? How do you deliver that feedback? Do you ever struggle with giving me feedback, even though we’ve been working together for 10 years and have a high level of trust?
I put a lot of thought into my feedback conversations with you. I know that if I’m able to communicate well and articulate my points clearly, it will usually be a simple conversation due to the trust we have built over the years. My feedback usually includes phrases along the lines of, “I don’t think you meant to . . .” or, “You may not even realize that . . .” because I never want to assume the worst. I come from the angle of assuming the best, ALWAYS. I believe I have built a strong foundation of trust with you because when I give you feedback, I always come from a place of wanting to help. My end goal is to make your life easier, to make your work more efficient, and to remove the frustrations in your day. I find that giving you feedback has become more comfortable over the years because you listen and are willing to at least consider a new way of thinking about something. I think it would be more difficult to give feedback to a leader who wasn’t as humble or willing to admit mistakes.
The times I struggle giving you feedback are when we are talking about things we just aren’t aligned on or have revisited several times but still don’t agree on. In those moments, it's important for me to be patient and not come into the conversation expecting one result and then leaving disappointed because it didn’t happen. I know that these tougher conversations require time for each person to process and then even more time for actions or changes to be made. But the key is that we always come back to them. When we aren’t aligned, we hit pause and then revisit in a week or two and see how we feel then.
That being said, we know we are never going to agree 100% on everything. The beauty of a team is the difference in perspectives. Where we agree and are always in alignment are our values. How we get somewhere might be the place where we have different opinions. I think the important part is having the level of trust to be able to talk openly about where we each disagree. Sometimes, we agree to disagree and still support each other. But because we agree on the overall values of our company, we can have these conversations without hurting our relationship.
What is your approach if I’m not receptive to your feedback or if I don’t act on the feedback you’ve given me?
I’m thinking of a conversation we had recently where I felt like you hadn’t been receptive to my feedback. We were talking about whether our email newsletters should go out on a set cadence, even if that means they go out while we are on Break Week. You had expressed many times in the past that you believe that in order to honor our word about being 100% off during Break Week, we can’t schedule anything to be sent out when we are on a break. But I disagreed. My perspective is that there’s something powerful about demonstrating what it looks like to prepare content ahead of time so that you can truly unplug during breaks.
Because this is a conversation we’ve had a couple times, I did two things: 1) I sat with my feedback to make sure I could clearly articulate WHY I disagreed. I told myself that if I realized that it truly didn’t matter in the long run, then that would be a sign to let it go. But if I realized that I felt strongly or like my feedback would have a big impact, that would be my sign to bring it up again. And 2) Because I felt my feedback mattered, I shared why I thought it did and why you should think about it more. So, I sent you a voice message via WhatsApp (our preferred method of communicating outside of meetings), and I simply said that I disagreed with your position, and I explained why. Then, I asked if we could keep the conversation going. By that, I am implying that 1) the conversation isn’t over and I am open to further discussion, and 2) it’s important to me to understand your perspective and try to find a middle ground.
Whenever I bring up feedback like this that might have an impact on your workload, I always put myself in your shoes and think about it from your perspective before I give it. When I know that my feedback might result in overwhelm, I ask myself how I can get to the end result I’m hoping for but also make it an easy yes for you. Many times, that looks like coming to you when I have thought out how to get us from where we are to where I want to be without overwhelming you and in a way that removes the obstacle. With this situation, we eventually found a solution that we both agreed on. For me, it was totally worth it to keep pushing this conversation until we found our common ground. Sometimes, it takes a lot of patience from both of us to find it, but when we do, it makes it so much easier to move forward, and we get to a better result!
From years and years of experience, I know that when you push back on an idea, it’s rooted in either a limiting belief or a vision you hold strongly that I need to adapt to. Either way, continuing to have the conversation and being willing to keep an open mind usually helps us get to a solution. For example, any time I want to introduce something new, I know it will be a struggle: This is when I receive the most resistance from you. I have come to learn over the years that the resistance is not always about my idea itself but the process of implementing it. I know that you get bogged down by details, so your resistance likely stems from feeling overwhelmed just by trying to understand what it would take to make my idea happen. We’ve talked about this many times, and you have gotten better at communicating your resistance. In the past, you may have said something like, “I’m not sure we can do that,” but now, you say something like, “What you are saying sounds amazing. I would love to get to that point and be able to work that way, but I just don’t know how.” What I hear in that response is that if I can make it happen, you are on board. And I am always ready to meet that challenge!
What advice would you give to someone who doesn’t yet have this relationship with their leader or whose leader isn’t receptive to feedback?
Your leader is a human just like you are! They get overwhelmed and stuck, and there is probably more going on under the surface than you realize.
Over the years, I believe the biggest impact and change in our feedback conversations has been in how I communicate with and understand Kristen. I have learned to communicate not just the change itself but the end impact and goal I’m trying to achieve, and that has helped a lot. My advice for anyone giving feedback to their leader would be to get to know your leader better. Understand what they are wanting, what is adding stress or frustration to their work day, and how you can align your feedback or ideas with helping them solve those pain points. Start small and prove to them that you are there to help and can be trusted. Be willing to be wrong and show that your motives are selfless. I truly believe great leaders want you to enjoy your job as much as they want to enjoy theirs. And the magic happens when you can find a way to align those things.
See what I mean? Isn’t she amazing?
Happy 10 years, Monique. Here’s to the next decade!
With so much love and hugs,
Kristen
P.S. Looking for a way to invest in yourself in 2022?! We’d love to invite you to join our monthly coaching group. You can find all the deets here!
WHILE YOU’RE HERE . . .
I’m so excited to be launching my new monthly newsletter, Life Outside of Work! I get so many questions about the things I do to set myself up for success. From my morning routine and workouts to my skincare and even the clothes I wear, each of these things helps me show up as the best version of me each day, and I’m excited to share more of them with you. If you’d like to learn more about what I do outside of work to help me be the best human and leader I can be, sign up here and I’ll see you there!
