The Importance of the Feedback From Your Team

“Great vision without great people is irrelevant.”
                                                           Jim Collins

In this article I will discuss the importance of the feedback you get from your team and argue that such feedback is the most important for your success as well as the success of the company.

Going through our careers we have all experienced the effects of feedback. Even if you had never received a feedback from your supervisor or colleagues at work, at least during your education you were given some sorts of grades you can gauge yourself against. Some of us had great mentors and teachers who helped us a lot with their feedback and contributed significantly in shaping of our career and even life.
We all need some pointers to know “where we are”; what we are doing well and where we can improve.

In the beginning of our careers there are usually a lot of senior people around us and it is rather easy (or at least easier) to find a mentor and someone who will give you some sort of feedback, even if you are not entitled to it in a formal process. Most of the companies, however, do have regular procedures of giving feedbacks from managers to their subordinates.

However, the higher in hierarchy you go the less and less senior people you have around you. In some senior positions you are left only maybe with one more person hierarchically “higher” than you and in some cases (CEO) none within the company.

Even though CEO has supervisors in one form or the other, experience shows that that does not function so well always (you can read more about it in INSEAD Knowledge article “How to Stop CEO Failure” by Philip Anderson. In this article he points to the lack of feedback and mentoring to top level positions. 

Once you reach a senior management positon in the company (C-level or some other independent highly ranked position) you really do not have seniors in a sense of “supervisors” like you had before around you anymore. Yes, there is plenty of people with more experience and knowledge around you (in fact you should aim for as much as you can), but they are not hierarchically senior to you and in terms of them giving you honest feedback, it might be a significant challenge.

This challenge is the subject of this article (post): to show the importance of receiving feedback “from below”, from your subordinates and to explain how to cultivate the culture that encourages such feedback. The importance of it is in the fact that when you get higher and higher in organization more and more is at stake and “feedback from below” might be the only real feedback at your disposal. So I would argue that “feedback from below” is the most valuable feedback you can get.

Still, the cultures where honest feedback “from below” is encouraged and cultivated are very rare.

There are many reasons why your subordinates will not give you feedback and why that feedback might not be honest and hence useful. In this text, I will not try to give you “tips and tricks” how to get honest feedback because, in my opinion there is only one way to do it (I will explain it in the conclusion of the article), instead I will try to enlist the reasons why that happens, what are some of the reasons why employees tend not to give “feedback to the top”.

Nobody ever told them to do so
Sometimes the most obvious answer is the right answer. In some cultures (Croatian culture is such example) it is not customary to give feedback to your superiors, only to listen to them and obey. This kind of culture starts even in our schools. Students are not expected to contribute or participate in the classes, but only to “sit and listen” in most cases. They are not expected to question given matter or debate with the teachers.

So the obvious reason here of why your employees are not giving feedback to you is that they think they are not supposed to so or they think they are not allowed to. Solution might be simple here. You just have to tell them so explicitly and explain why it is important and what the purpose of this type of feedback is. Although it will be simple to verbalize that, the real change, a cultural change where they give you feedback will take some time.

Your subordinates are being opportunistic (political)
Once you are a senior manager your direct reports are also managers. Those are people who advanced through their careers as well. It is very likely that they are pragmatic and opportunistic to a high degree, even somewhat “political” i.e. that they will not tell you honest and full feedback on purpose. To a certain extent (more or less) they will steer the feedback they are giving to you in order to benefit themselves in the first place, not to benefit you. In this case the solution is not as simple as telling them to start giving you feedback. As it is not very likely you will change them so quickly. Here you have to work with them for a much longer time to gain the trust and to change the entire culture.

Assuming the “all knowing boss”
Very often people want to assume that you, as a boss, know everything better than them and they believe that you are “always right”. This kind of culture is very often created by both the supervisor as well as the subordinates. It is very often that manager and subordinates create some sort of unspoken agreement and rule to behave in this way. For employees it is some sort of coping mechanism to run away from taking the responsibility and sometimes it is again just a cultural thing: “it has been done like this always”.

In one way it is even somewhat natural, as they want to see a role model in you, someone who they aspire to and even admire to a certain extent. They are not aware of the fact that you need feedback as well and that you need it from them especially.

Fear
In most cases, unfortunately, people are simply afraid to give honest feedback. We are all instinctively conditioned that we react negatively on any negative feedback as we tend to take it as an attack on us instead of free lesson given to us.
Good news is that this is very easy to detect, but the bad news is that it is not so easy to correct. Still possible though: again with time and patience.

Be truly honest and consistent
No matter how many different reasons there are the solution is never simple. It is not simple as it requires significant culture change and change is never easy.

As I have mentioned, you cannot win anyone’s trust in a short amount of time. And if you are calculating and trying to use manipulative tips and tricks just in order to simulate trust, you will be exposed in one way or the other and will lose that trust, probably never to win it back again.

So the safest way to get an honest feedback from your team is just to be patient, honest and consistent throughout time. Of course you need to emphasize and encourage your team to give you honest feedback, you also need to take some measures (e.g. “tips and tricks”) but you must be sincere as faking it will not work.

Conclusion
There are many articles, books and studies that teach you different methods on how to get an honest feedback from your employees and everyone emphasizes the importance of listening. But you cannot just decide to start listening and immediately expect to get the result. The process of building a bond with your team in order for them to give you an honest feedback is somewhat that is a matter of a lifelong learning and leadership lifestyle in a way.

You need to start practicing and encouraging feedback from your employees from your first management job and then expand on it. If you do so, then once you get to the top level “lonely” positions you will still be able to learn and have feedback even though you will not have a mentor or supervisor within company anymore and will probably avoid “the failure” from the before mentioned article.