Feedback geben, das wirkt

0:00Most companies and most entrepreneurs and founders are scared to give petty feedback. >> Oh, >> because if like I might notice you making a slight error. >> Yeah. >> But it feels petty to point that out. It feels like I'm some kind of rude dictator. >> Yeah. >> Why is that so >> important? And how do you create an environment? >> I'm totally good. >> Yeah. [laughter] A lot of people aren't. I I've had lots of managers on my teams and they don't want to offend people. Their central focus is too much on being nice. And it's

0:27>> dude kind not nice. It's one of our one of our one of our cultural, you know, I wouldn't say it's not the one on the site, but things that are repeated internally all the time. Con, not nice is one of the big ones, which is that you're actually being unkind to someone by not maximizing the likelihood that they succeed in their role. And people don't lose jobs because typically because of one thing, it's usually a hundred small things. And so if we can immediately fix those hundred small things, most people want to do a good job and most people want to succeed and most people want to move up. And we can maximize the likelihood that those things occur if we help them. And this is where the culture is there. If on that first day, like I said, we say, "We're going to work through the script and we're only going to get through a third of it. I'm going to stop you 30 times to correct you." We've already kind of set the expectations of how things go here.

1:13>> Like we will fix things and we will fix them fast. And it's understanding the difference. And I we teach our teams this is what is the difference between an insult and criticism. >> So criticism is a discrepancy between actual and desired. So, you were supposed to be on time and this week you were late twice and so that is the discrepancy and you're lazy is the insult. And so, the judgment that's associated with the discrepancy is insulting someone. Pointing out the discrepancy is purely criticism and that's objective. And so, if you want to improve the team, remove insults, focus on criticism, and tell them what to do instead. And so, the easiest way to think through this, I think, is stop, start, keep. So, I'll tell you a real story. So, we had um we had a we had a a director level, so a relatively high person um in the organization who was having um behavior issues. Uh oh, said differently, everyone thinks you're a dick. And so, he ended up making his rounds of the executive team uh and having a sit down with all them because he was really proficient at the scale.

2:16He was high performer, like good at what he does, just no one liked him. And so, um, he talked to four different executives and the behavior didn't change. And so, he finally came to to my office and he was like a little bit worried and he was and he was like, "Am I going to get fired?" And I was like, "No, HR will fire you if you're going to get fired, not going to meet [laughter] with me." Like, what are we talking about? Um, but when we sat down, I said, "Okay, I want to be clear. Uh, I want to decrease the likelihood that people call you a dick in the future." I said, "Does that sound like an agreeable goal?" And he said, "Yeah, I don't I want that." I was like, "Okay, good. I also don't care if you are a dick. I just care that everyone else thinks you are. And so I just want to minimize likelihood that I get drawn into this ever again. So the reasons that they are calling you a dick. We need to dive into that because every other conversation you'd had with, you know, some of the leaders was just like, "Hey man, stop being a dick." And the thing is is what do you do with that? Nothing. You just get insulted and then you have nothing to do. And so instead, it's like, okay, when you cut people off when they talk, stop, start, keep doing. Do this instead. Shut up. So when someone else is talking, wait until they finish. And if you're not sure, ask if they're done.

3:28He's like, "Okay." When uh you give unsolicited advice on how they should run their department, don't or ask if they want it. if they say no, don't say anything. And so we identified three or four behaviors that he was doing. And I said, just do this instead. And literally the next week, we were like, what happened to him? He's like a new man. And the thing is is that he wasn't a dick. He just didn't know how to behave. And so if you want to teach, teaching has to come from conditions and a behavior. And so if you're trying to get someone to be different, you have to give them the conditions under which they need to change. So when someone says this, if this occurs, there's a condition. and then this is what you need to do. And so the vast majority of training that exists does none of that.

4:14It's just people shouting at each other, insulting them and saying, "Hey, you need to level up. You need to you need to get, you know, you need to increase your performance. What does that mean?" And so I think one of the easiest ways to identify the actual behavior, that's actually the tough part is like, why do I think he's a dick? Why do I think she's lazy? Because I want to insult them, but that's not so how do I help her? It's like, okay, why am I describing her this way? Okay. So, when I slack, she's she tends to be slow in her response. So, sometimes it takes an hour, sometimes three hours. I'm like, "Okay, so I'm going to gather that data and be like, okay." So, when I talk to her, I'm like, "I'm going to have this this branch of data." The next thing is when I get stuff uh you know, projects from her, they are incomplete. I feel like they're not all the way fleshed out. I'm like, "Okay, that's the second second bucket." Um, the next one is that when she shows up on Zoom, she looks disheveled. I'm like, "Okay." So now when I talk to Sandy, I'm not going to say, "Hey, Sandy, you look lazy. Need you to level up a little bit here.

5:11Otherwise, we're going to have issues and have to put you on a PIP, performance improvement plan." Right? Instead of saying that, just put her on the performance improvement plan without saying it's performance improvement plan and just say, >> "When you show up on calls, change your background to like the the standard company setting so we don't see your bedroom, right?" And and make sure that from the waist up, you look professional. And what do I mean by look professional? Have a collared shirt and put your hair back.

5:37>> Okay. [clears throat] Now, some people like, "How does that work in woke politics?" No idea. Deal with it in your country. But like, you should have a culture where you can say stuff like that. The second thing is that right now, I need you to turn on Slack notifications and I need you to respond within within 10 minutes. Okay? During work hours. After work hours, fine, but you know, 9 to5, you have to respond within 10 minutes. Do you think you can do that? Yes. And so, the end goal here is like I will get everyone to stop calling you lazy. Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10-stage road map from zero to 100 million plus that less than 1% of companies finish I've now done multiple times. And so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as headcount increases that you need to get through. And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business, what the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it, and then what steps we actually took to graduate. And we've done this across software, physical products, uh service businesses, brickandmortar, all of this.

6:30And it works. And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.comroadmap. Just enter your info and it'll spit it right back to you.