Give Feedback & Hold the Standard

Feedback is a dirty word only because of how we use it: rarely, and only when something bad happened. Hear "can I give you some feedback?" a handful of times a year, always after a mistake, and of course the word means trouble. You get rid of that by normalising it — a regular cadence and a regular structure, until feedback stops meaning trouble and starts meaning attention. The structure that works: a standing Keep / Start / Stop session with the key people in your orbit, both directions, short doc prepared by each side, roughly fifty minutes split between your KSSs and theirs. The cadence is what does the magic — by the third session, nobody flinches.

Distinguish the two types of feedback, because they run on different clocks. Someone rude in a meeting hears about it within 24 hours — cleanly, without a month of buildup. Patterns — proactivity, attention to detail — get collected over time and brought to the regular session, where there's room to actually work on them. And whatever the type: never deliver anything critical over Slack. The characters don't carry the emotional weight of a call. Praise in public, criticise in person.

The nothing-to-fired jump

The hook above is the failure mode I've watched most: one oblique mention, months of avoidance, then a termination that shocks everyone — including the founder. The silence isn't kindness; it's the cruellest available option, because the person never got a real chance to change. The other classic is the generalisation: "you always do this" triggers "no I don't" — defensiveness, not change. Keep it to one situation, one behaviour, one impact: what happened, what they did, what it caused.

The two paths of performance

The happy path is development: find where the pipeline is constricted — insight, motivation, skills, practice or accountability — 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.