Capability 12 · Lead Others
Give Feedback & Hold the Standard
One founder went from a single sideways comment and months of silence to a standing feedback rhythm — the firing that was quietly brewing became a turnaround instead.
Founders say
“I noticed he hadn't closed anything in two months. I mentioned it once, kind of sideways… and then I didn't say anything else until the day we let him go.”
Where you are today
- Feedback only happens when something has already gone wrong — so everyone flinches at the word.
- You hint at a problem once, then go quiet; months later it ends in a firing that shocks them.
- The hard conversation gets rehearsed in your head at night and never happens in the room.
Where you’re headed
- A standing feedback session with the key people in your orbit — structured, bilateral, normal.
- In-the-moment feedback lands within 24 hours, cleanly, without a month of buildup.
- Performance problems move up an explicit dial with a number and a date — no silent escalation to fired.
Why this matters
Feedback is a dirty word only because of how we use it: rarely, and only when something bad happened. You get rid of that by normalising it — a regular cadence and a regular structure — until feedback stops meaning trouble and starts meaning attention. And when you do need to course-correct, remember that people respond far better to a picture of a positive future than to an autopsy of a broken present: "next month is going to be our best month ever, because you're going to make more calls than ever" moves someone that "you've been underperforming" never will.
What this means
- Make positive and corrective feedback a normal part of your operating cadence.
- Challenge missed commitments clearly and early, in a way that changes behaviour.
- Separate care for the person from clarity about the standard — and catch issues before they become resentment, politics or performance problems.
What good looks like
- Feedback has a rhythm and a structure — Keep / Start / Stop, both directions, short doc prepared, roughly 50 minutes split between your KSSs and theirs.
- You distinguish the two types: someone rude in a meeting hears about it within 24 hours; patterns like proactivity or attention to detail are collected over time and brought to the regular session.
- When someone needs to improve, you know where they're actually stuck — insight, motivation, skills, practice or accountability — and work that, instead of repeating louder feedback.
Where founders get it wrong
- The nothing-to-fired jump: one oblique mention, months of avoidance, then a termination that surprises everyone — including you.
- "You always do this." Generalisations trigger "no I don't" — defensiveness, not change. One situation, one behaviour, one impact.
- Delivering anything critical over Slack. The characters don't carry the emotional weight of a call — praise in public, criticise in person.
The two paths of performance
The happy path is development: find where the pipeline is constricted and coax rather than tell — "What's the number one thing you want to improve right now?", "What happens if nothing changes?", "Where do you see yourself in this company, and what's the main gap between here and there?" Get them excited about the gap and they do the rest. The unhappy path is accountability: an explicit, graduated dial from a casual mention to a final warning, attached to a timeline — so the difficult conversation happens in steps, instead of never and then all at once.
For the conversations at the hard end: two minutes of prep before any of them, the four-part sentence when emotions are tight, and a clean playbook for the day the dial runs out.
What you can do right now
- Book the standing KSS session. With your cofounder and each direct report. Both sides bring a short doc; split the time bilaterally. The cadence is what makes feedback stop being scary. KSS Feedback →
- Deliver the one you've been sitting on. Use Situation, Behaviour, Impact — one concrete moment, what they did, what it caused. This week, not next month. SBI Feedback →
- Locate the stuck person on the pipeline. Before prescribing training, find the constriction: do they know? Are they willing? Can they? Are they getting reps? What holds them to it? Development Pipeline →
- Put a number and a date on it. If it's the unhappy path: "you're at a five, I need a seven by end of month" — and name what happens next on the dial if nothing moves. Accountability Dial →
The toolkit
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