The Ultimate Coda Handbook for People & HR Teams

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The Ultimate Coda Handbook for People & HR Teams

The Ultimate Coda Handbook for People & HR Teams

Notes

Susan's Fast Feedback

Fast Feedback

July 2022

Overview

This is a basic feedback program for companies who:

Want more feedback in/across their org

Don’t want to introduce or solely rely on a larger-scale infrequent cadence program

I developed it on my team at Uber when we grew from a team of two to 50+ in less than two years. It helped me achieve several goals:

For leader: Gave me as a leader higher-volume and higher-quality feedback quickly.

Psychological safety: Ensured feedback didn’t fester or build up. Gave the team permission to share feedback in all directions by normalizing it as part of the day-to-day.

Team development: Enabled faster ascent for individual contributors to become team leaders.

Speed: Improved speed of team execution.

Documentation: Enabled me to keep a robust ongoing record of the person’s feedback areas, such that I was able to reference it during review cycles, promotion conversations, or in the rare case that an employee needed to be terminated.

How to

Cadence: Bi-weekly or monthly.

I used to start with every other week for the first 6 months of a reporting relationship and then move to monthly in perpetuity. You can start with monthly but be careful not to let those sessions get canceled or moved around too much, or the monthly cadence will dwindle to quarterly.

Calendar: Schedule a fifteen-minute session at the end of a 30-minute calendar block.

E.g., 10:15-10:30 or 1:45-2:00 NOT 10:00-10:15.

Doing this will ensure that the conversation doesn’t bleed into a full 30-minutes, but that it is truly is fast and efficient.

Format: Use the structure “start”, “stop”, “continue”

Be specific about the behavior that you want the other person to change or continue.

Reference specific examples that you’ve documented in a single place (e.g., private Coda doc, Gdoc, Notion doc).

Getting good upward feedback

Share openly with the individual and/or in a team setting what you as a leader are working on, according to you, your coach, your board, 360 feedback, etc.

Wharton professor Adam Grant found in his research that criticizing yourself as a leader to your team increased the psychological safety within a team for a full year! (Source:

Adam Grant interviewed on The Knowledge Project⁠

; I recommend the full interview but for this reference start around minute 24).

Gives opportunity to create psychological safety by enabling the leader a forum to share what they’re working on.

Bi-directional

Each person in the reporting relationship shares feedback with the other person.

Asking for upward feedback repeatedly (ie, monthly), and then listening to it without defensiveness builds a trusting working relationship.

Many leaders say they want feedback, but working through this structure effectively will prove through your action that you actually want feedback.

If your team member is hesitant to provide feedback to you, continue to share what you know you need to work on directly with them, and continue to ask.

What next?

Keep in mind that there isn’t always a specific next.

High performers: tend to make gains very quickly and you’ll be amazed at how they improve and ascend in your organization.

Give them more responsibility, and remember to adjust what you give feedback to them on as their role grows - e.g., for an EA, you may give feedback on attention to detail; when you promote them to an operations coordinator, your feedback should also be more sophisticated and broader in scope to reflect the change in their role because presumably they’ve mastered the feedback on attention to detail you previously gave. They need new feedback to master their new role.

Low performers: simultaneously, employees who can’t or won’t work on feedback for whatever reason will soon become obvious because you’ll share similar feedback repeatedly and as you write it down yourself, and then voice it over to them, you’ll quickly hone in on those struggling employees.

Ask them what’s preventing them from acting on feedback. They may not agree, they may not understand the severity of the gap, they may not know how to work on it and need to problem solve with someone.

Feedback to you:

You won’t always agree with the feedback shared. That’s okay. Thank them and tell them you’ll reflect on what they’ve said.

Please don’t react with defensiveness or explanation; that will lower the probability that you get any meaningful feedback in the future.

Actually consider what learning there might be (there won’t always be!). You can always share with the person that you considered their feedback, even if you aren’t able / don’t want to act on it in a short timeframe.

Template

Below is an excerpt from my Evernote notebook on fast feedback.

I had a single note for each employee. I added new dates as the conversations stacked over time. I referenced the notes in the conversation so I could include all the specific examples.

You may want to send the feedback to employees after each session, which simply requires a copy/paste into email with the subject line “fast feedback mm/dd/yy”.

The benefit here is that there is no ambiguity in what you said versus what they heard.

An additional benefit is that all this feedback is automatically papered in the case there is ever a termination or employee complaint, and doing this from the beginning normalizes this.

I had an additional note to document feedback from each employee that I also added to over time as they shared feedback with me so that I could reflect over time, share with my coach, etc.

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