The Leader as Coach: Providing Safe Feedback

In today’s high-stakes business environment, a leader who masters the art of coaching can guide individuals and organizations through their most challenging situations. During my own career as a managing director, CEO, and now a coach, I have seen how valuable this can be. I also know that, although it takes many skills to coach well, one of the essentials is the ability to provide feedback that others will embrace, not ignore.

The problem that confounds many leaders who want to coach is that when they offer feedback, it is received as criticism, not support. Often these negative feelings are generated, because the coachee senses that the person offering feedback has an ulterior motive that is more in their own interests than in the recipients. People have amazing “bullshit” monitors that detect if someone is lying or if someone’s intent is other than what they say it is. But there are some simple solutions for providing effective feedback.

Check Your Intent  

The first step in giving feedback that actually helps someone learn or do better is for you as their coach to be entirely clear with yourself about your intent: the intent is to help them. Before you offer feedback, really investigate whether your intent is to enable and open them up to possibility. If you are in any doubt, wait until you can be entirely certain of your positive intent toward the person you are coaching. This also applies to extreme situations when you might be angry, surprised, or shocked. Knee jerk feedback is rarely taken well.

One-to-One Feedback

Here are other steps that you can take for offering feedback, especially when coaching someone one-to-one.

1. Start by telling someone what you think, authentically, they are really good at. Give examples and offer praise for the times when they have brought about demonstrably positive results.
2. Move onto what you think that they would benefit from by doing more of. This could be accentuating or amplifying behaviors or improving their capabilities.
3. Move onto what you think that they would benefit from by doing less of. 
4. Finally, think of anything that they should start doing that they are not doing at all that would be to the benefit of themselves or others and what they should stop doing that is unhelpful to themselves or others.

The advantages of this structure are many. Often feedback is nuanced and can vary depending on whether it is based on strengths being under or overused. It can also depend on whether someone is simply having a good day or a bad day, or whether they are under pressure or stressed. By using the structure, you allow for these contexts and for the fact that feedback can sometimes highly dependent on circumstances. It also avoids the sole focus on what someone needs to address or improve by addressing those in a more rounded and subtle way.

Courageous Conversations In Group Settings 

Given the fact that most teams are time poor and do not spend enough face-to-face time together, it is often a good idea in team meetings to allow the space for peer feedback, which in a group setting we call “courageous conversations”, because it requires everyone to get out of their comfort zone to give each other feedback with the sincere intent to help each other become better leaders. However, as the team coach and leader, you will want to make sure that you create the right conditions for these conversations to be impactful and safe to have.

To do this, I suggest that you divide the team into pairs giving them unfinished sentences to facilitate their individual one-to-one conversations. Examples of unfinished sentences you could suggest, include:

• Something I really respect about you is . . . . . . . .
• Something I think that you could change that would help you is . . . . . . . .
• Something you could change that would help me is . . . . . . . .

In a team setting, each person would have the opportunity to speak to each member of the team one-to-one to address the unfinished sentences. Surprisingly, these one-to-one conversations can be done quickly while remaining extremely useful and impactful. I suggest taking between three and five minutes for each person in the pair.

In conclusion, giving feedback opportunities the proper structure that keeps it safe, digestible, and yet honest and helpful is a skill that benefits leaders, individuals, and teams alike.

Written by Luciana Nuñez.
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