As a leader, you might think you’re more approachable than you actually are. Maybe you have a warm and outgoing personality, but the reality is, your title might make people think twice about fully speaking their mind when they disagree with you.
Asking for feedback is part of growing as a leader and building an emotionally intelligent team where everyone feels valued. But just one in four employees believe their ideas matter to their boss. And when they feel unheard or unacknowledged, it has a major impact on the company. It also undermines your growth.
First, let’s examine why it’s so crucial to get honest feedback from your employees. Then, we’ll explore how to invite this input.
Why You Need Feedback from Your Team
Asking for feedback will make people view you as more trustworthy. When employees feel their leaders seek their input before making changes, they’re 7.4 times more likely to trust them to manage challenges. And when you gain insights from your team, you’ll become aware of your blind spots, find ways to improve processes, and strengthen your leadership style.
The consulting firm Zenger Folkman conducted a study of 51,896 executives to find out how asking for feedback affects leadership. “Those who ranked at the bottom 10% in asking for feedback were rated at the 15th percentile in overall leadership effectiveness,” they explain. “On the other hand, leaders who ranked at the top 10% were rated, on average, at the 86th percentile in overall leadership effectiveness.”
What was happening here? The leaders who didn’t fear feedback — or who asked for it even when it felt uncomfortable — gained insights about their blind spots. They learned to overcome weaknesses instead of letting them hold them back for years.
In all likelihood, they also gained input on how to improve business operations as well. Employees often have nuanced ideas about how to strengthen processes and initiatives, because they work at a very granular level in a specific function.
Operating a business is incredibly complex. As founders, we sometimes overlook things that impact the company. We believe we need to have all the answers, but that’s not true. While we do have to make all of the decisions, we need input from others to help us make good choices.
Similarly, 94% of leaders say innovation is crucial for their business’s success, but just 14% feel confident in their company’s ability to innovate. What’s missing here? Often, they’re not hearing employees’ ideas.
Just as importantly, asking for feedback will help you build a culture grounded in teamwork. Being asked for their opinions makes people feel valued.
So, how to get honest feedback from your employees? We’ll dive into that next.
Inviting Honest Feedback from Your Team
As business owners, we usually give a lot of direction but don’t spend much time asking for suggestions. It’s time to change that.
So, how to get candid input from people? Let’s go over some questions to ask to get feedback from employees, along with other key pointers.
Foster Psychological Safety
First, make sure you’re creating a safe space for making suggestions. Challenging your boss’s ideas, even in a polite way, takes real courage. People aren’t going to speak up if you don’t encourage them to. If you’re managing a virtual team, it’s especially vital to make an extra effort here.
This all boils down to psychological safety.
In the typical workplace, people are afraid to speak up because they don’t know it’s okay. They want permission to prove they can contribute at a higher level. If they don’t feel safe, they revert to being a task completer. So, talk regularly about how much you value candid feedback when people offer it. And show real appreciation when people voice their ideas. Most importantly, ask for it, as we’ll talk about next.
Once, while we were working on promotion for a landing page, my executive assistant Xie pushed back against a suggestion the marketing director brought up. When she found out it was actually my idea, she thought she’d put her foot in her mouth for a moment. But I said I was glad she’d spoken up. I didn’t want any bad ideas I brought to the table to make it through unchallenged. Now, she understands that I want her candid opinions and feels more comfortable sharing them.
Ask Specific Questions
When you ask for feedback, it feels like a problem-solving session. Strive to listen with curiosity instead of defensiveness.
Ask for a suggestion about how something specific can be improved, as Zenger Folkman suggests. This works better than asking a general question like “How am I doing?” because it directs people toward giving actionable input, as they assert. Plus, it shows you’re not just looking for compliments. You could ask, “How could I have improved that client meeting?” or “What would make that training more effective?” Then use their suggestions for the next one.
Grab a pen and a sheet of paper, and brainstorm some questions to ask your team. Jot down the names of the people you work with closely, and write down three things that each of them could give you feedback on. This exercise will help you ask the right people the right questions, as Russ Laraway writes in Radical Candor.
Give Credit; Take Blame
When I became the owner of my insurance agency and started cultivating my leadership abilities more intently, I read a book by Lincoln. In it, he discussed the importance of always giving credit but taking blame. That’s one of the most crucial tenets of leadership. At the end of the day, if something negatively affects a client or the company, the responsibility falls on you. When you embrace this mindset, it increases your team’s sense of psychological safety and makes people more willing to share their opinions.
Champion Good Ideas
Good ideas often fall flat because no one takes initiative to champion them. Instead of letting them get lost, take note of good ideas and elevate them. As a team, brainstorm ways to enhance them. This gives people positive reinforcement for sharing ideas, making them more likely to offer more.
Consider Cultural Differences
Different cultures have differing ways of sharing feedback. Some, like American culture, take a more direct approach, while others share feedback more subtly, as Erin Meyer writes in Harvard Business Review. At the same time, American culture tends to protect the recipient’s self-esteem, couching “negative” feedback in positive observations, while people in countries like the Netherlands and Russia get right to the point.
So, consider whether your employees are used to being more blunt and straightforward, direct but polite, or subtle and indirect when sharing feedback. Practice reading between the lines and listening to nuance, then asking follow-up questions in an interested, nonconfrontational way.
Share What You’ve Learned
Tell the team about feedback you’ve received. This will boost accountability, as researchers write in Organization Science. In turn, this plays a leading role in fostering psychological safety, showing everyone that you’re genuinely committed to your own growth.
Take Action to Use the Feedback
Tell people what steps you’re taking. You don’t have to use every piece of feedback, but at least consider it. Make a plan for implementing good ideas.
One important note: Surveys can be a useful tool for collecting feedback anonymously, and they’ve grown popular in recent years. But beware of relying too heavily on surveys, as Gallup says. They can’t replace authentic conversations, and when these discussions aren’t happening, surveys don’t address the root of the problem: lack of psychological safety, or employees’ belief that their opinions don’t matter.
Now you know how to encourage your team to give you honest feedback. And that can be a real game-changer not just for you as a leader, but for your company as well.
As I discussed in a recent post, our VA Annabelle gave her company invaluable feedback on how to improve client retention — and it worked. Great feedback can come from unexpected places, and being receptive to it will drive growth. So, as you work to build your team, keep giving and receiving feedback that makes you stronger both individually and as a company.
Ready to expand your team? Get the ball rolling by setting up a discovery call. We’ll discuss how a virtual assistant (or an executive assistant) can enhance your operations, priming you for growth. We help our clients hire people who not only possess the right technical skills but are also an excellent cultural and personality fit.