The Blessing of Useful Feedback

I'm in the business of helping highly capable people match the strategic vision they want to achieve. By extension, that means I get to work with some of the best people in the whole world. Yesterday, I got to work with leaders in our big training program on their capstone project, the summation of a year of hard work. What an absolute honor. I got to do even more service by talking with the team who stood to learn even more after presenting, and I was thrilled. I want to explain why.

The Best Rarely are the Best at Every Facet of Their Universe

The team I was fortunate to talk to after their capstone presentation were four of the brightest in the company. We trust these people with some of the most critical missions our organization has. One works on one of our best selling apps. Another provides the life's blood to every organization under our corporate banner. The third leads the most critical team we have to make the biggest difference in 2025. Yet another works to keep our "bread and butter" revenue extending apps thriving. All top shelf talent.

Their capstone project didn't knock the doors off our team of judges during their presentation. That had a lot of good ingredients. It just didn't come together in the end. They did not reach first place. What a delightful opportunity, because that means these people get another chance to take different approaches the next time they come against similar challenges.

The best have deep core experiences and target sets. They expand their wins by learning and absorbing and learning and trying new approaches and learning and seeking variations and enrichment.

The Absolute Honor of Giving Feedback

I am blessed in moments like this. Blessed with the opportunity of telling high performing leaders that they didn't hit the bullseye. Because now I have every opportunity to work with them and come up with new ways to reach the goal, better chances to develop their next level of challenges to hit their mark, and a great opportunity to forge learning paths that will put me ringside when these leaders find that gear, lock in the right approach, and absolutely crush the target in front of them. How lucky!

The night after providing that rough feedback, two of the four people sat with me at dinner. We laughed and told stories and poked fun at each other and talked about absurd moments in our lives. It was a real treat. Our harder conversations from earlier were behind us, and now we were focused on the task at hand: fun and celebration.

It reminded me yet again about one of my strongest beliefs about leadership: I care too much about the success of the people in my charge to waste their time with inappropriate kindness. Or more accurately: I think useful feedback is far more kind than platitudes and sugar coatings. Sugar gives you cavities.

Today is a New Approach

It was professor Anthony Kiedis who said, "Complete the motion if you stumble." Words to live by. I had a great day yesterday. I saw many people present the summation of all their hard work, and I saw a vast span of who nailed the assignment and who came away with new learnings.

Every new day is day one. Today is day one.

I'm excited to work with the exceptional leaders and talent that I do and I'm grateful to be able to contribute in ways that I know might improve our leaders' chances to be an even more capable contributor to our mutual success. After all, I count on these people to get me my pony. My poor very lonely pony.

Chris...