Joe Hirsch is an award-winning educator, global keynote speaker, and bestselling author. As the creator of the FEEDFORWARD™ framework, Joe teaches organizations how to replace judgment with curiosity, shift from blame to partnership, and create fearless feedback cultures built on trust and growth. Joe has spoken to over 30,000 people across 25 countries and helped leaders from the Fortune 500, NFL, and even the intelligence community use the power of better conversations to strengthen results and relationships. Joe is also the host of I Wish They Knew, a podcast that explores ideas that deserve more attention, from work and wellbeing to learning, leadership, and loss.
Joe joined host Robert Glazer on the Elevate Podcast to share how to give excellent feedback and help others improve.
—
Listen to the podcast here
Joe Hirsch On Giving World-Class Feedback
Our quote for this episode is from Ken Blanchard. “Feedback is The Breakfast of Champions.” We’ve been diving into this theme of feedback lately, particularly with the launch of my new Difficult Conversations course. I’m super excited about our guest, Joe Hirsch. Joe is an Award-Winning Educator, Global Keynote Speaker and Bestselling Author. He created the FEEDFORWARD framework and teaches organizations how to replace judgment with curiosity, shift from blame to partnership, and create fearless feedback cultures that build on trust and growth.
He’s spoken to over 30,000 people, I guess that’s a good-sized stadium, across 25 countries, helping leaders from the Fortune 500 to the NFL and even the intelligence community use the power of better conversations to get better results and relationships. Joe is also the host of I Wish They Knew, a podcast that explores ideas that deserve more attention from work and well-being to learning leadership and loss. Joe, welcome. It’s great to have you on the show.
Bob, great to see you again.
I know you said you stumbled into your first classroom filled with fears. Can you walk us through that experience and how maybe it shaped where you ended up?
The Personal Struggle With Receiving Feedback
I’m an educator by training and still very much at heart. One of the things that I was not good at was actually getting feedback. I gave a lot of it, but when it came time for me to receive it, I put up blinders. I put up borders. I did not want to hear the uncomfortable truths about myself. It took things getting pretty bad for me to realize that something had to change. It was hurting my relationships. It almost cost me a job that I loved.
I spoke about this in one of my TEDx talks, and it really came to a point where, if not for someone asking me a simple but powerful question, I probably would have gone over the edge where I couldn’t have come back. The question was, who do you want to be? That simple question of asking me to think about the person I wanted to be, that simple feedback prompt got me to think not just about the person that I was at the moment even am, but who I could be.
From that moment on, I try to understand the reasons why we’re so fearful around having these candid conversations. What is driving that fear? Why was I so resistant? Ultimately, understanding that with the right mindset and skillset, we can change the very tone and trajectory of those conversations from fear to joy, from resistance to receptivity. It’s something that everyone can do, especially leaders who, frankly, stumble into their jobs. Many of them are ill-prepared to have these conversations.
You know this. They don’t know how to begin. They’re great owners, they own the problem, but they’re not great operators. They don’t know how to act. That’s what I try to help them do in my work is how to have a conversation that is fearless, that is candid, that is caring, and that ultimately makes their next conversation their best one yet.
I don’t know. We use the word joy. I’m not sure anyone loves getting feedback. Maybe they start to appreciate getting feedback. Was there some single core of this feedback that you were ignoring? Was it lots of different things or was there a core theme around it?
I think that I was so confident that what I was doing was right, my interactions with colleagues, my interactions with students, even. The way I approached my work was with a supreme sense of confidence. Nothing that I did was wrong. It must have been the other person. That real lack of insight, over time, it compounds. People stop wanting to interact with you. It chips away at your relationships. It dings you’re standing in your organization. All that happened to me.
Truly, I reached a point where if it wasn’t for some really candid, caring, but emphasis on the candid, feedback, I probably would not have engaged in that process of self-discovery, which I do believe led to a joyful of result. It was hard, but it was joyous because at the end, I realized something about myself that I wouldn’t have learned.
I think for a lot of folks out there, joy doesn’t mean fun in this context. Joy means the ability to move forward with confidence in yourself, but also a sense of competence, knowing that you’re able to listen to the signals around you, that you’re able to take those insights. They’re all around us. We just have to open ourselves up to them. If we do that, I do think there’s joy in feedback because it will help us become better versions of ourselves. Better employees, better leaders, better spouses, better siblings, better educators. I think the joy comes from knowing not just the information, but having a sense of what we can do with it and having a way forward to become better.
Joy comes from knowing not just the information, but what we can do with it—and having a way forward to become better.
The Danger Of Ruinous Empathy (Caring Without Candor)
The candid and caring two by two matrix, that’s right out of Kim Scott’s. I think you do need both. She rightly pointed out, it’s funny, what gets the most attention is the obnoxious aggression. That’s candid without caring. I think what’s equally as dangerous is the caring without any candor, which is as she calls it, ruinous empathy, which is like, I’m just not going to tell you that there’s toilet paper hanging down from your shirt because I don’t want to embarrass you as you walk into a meeting.
We see a lot of that. We were talking about this before the call and I know you focus a lot on giving effective feedback. Why do you think feedback so often fails to produce growth and as part of the problem that like, literally in school and work or whatever, no one ever tells us how to do this or that there’s a best practice for doing this?
We have a lot of bad modeling. Unfortunately, the way we are trained to receive feedback and the people who give it to us, and as we watch them share it, those become our models. Those models become hardened over time. For a lot of people, feedback is something to do to another person, not for another person.
It’s about you. This bothers me. The famous story of Kim Scott was Cheryl Sandberg being like, “You’re not coming off in this meeting. Good. I want you to come off better because I think you’re really smart.”
Kim and I have had a number of conversations about this. She was on I Wish They Knew sometime back like Bob Glazer. One of the things that we have agreed on when it comes to the caring piece is that you don’t just have to care personally about the other person’s success, which is part of what Kim’s framework is about. It’s also about making those intentions known to the other person. It’s making that intention of caring explicit.
I think that’s where a lot of us go wrong, because maybe the manager who gave you your first piece of feedback cared about you, but if the manager didn’t tell you why they cared, and the reason for their caring, the impact on team dynamics, the impact on your relationship with your clients, the relationship between you and your team members. If they didn’t make that clear, then the person who’s getting the feedback just feels like they’re being dumped on. Obviously, people only share information that they think is important to them, but we have to let others know that it’s important for us. Not just for me. For us.
Feedback As A Character Assault Vs. Actionable Behavior
It’s always about the other person. I coached our team, we had a client service organization, and when they wanted a new scope or a new thing, I’m like, “Tell them why it’s bad for them.” No one cares that you have to work harder because you’re like, “Yes, Mr. Client, I could go attack those three new markets, but we don’t have any more scope, so which three markets do you want me to stop doing?” They’re like, “No,” or, “We can add,” “No,” versus like, “That sounds like more work.” It sounds callous to say, but people are focused on themselves. So much of it is wrapped up in character attacks.
I saw a top children’s psychologist speak at a YPO event and she said something that always stuck with me. She said, “Never tell your kids that they’re smart or that they’re not smart. You’re either telling them they’re not smart or you’re giving them blank approval. You can tell them that things they did are smart, are not smart. That highlighted for me a lot of these things come as character assaults and don’t feel like something that you could fix.
Two of the pieces of feedback I got in my early twenties, which were super helpful, again, just blind spots and sucked to hear it at the time, but my first one was like, “You need more gravitas. If you want people to take your ideas seriously, you need a little more gravitas and less casual and you need to develop this.” In that context it was, “I think you have ideas worth sharing.” It was a little like the feedback Kim got. You don’t want to say every other word. It’s taking away from the message.
That same person also brought 360 feedback from me. I’m pretty sure I’ve shared this on the show. I’m an ADD person. I am always in thought in my head, particularly when I’m walking. Even my family, to this day, “Didn’t you hear the conversation we just had?” I was like, “Were you talking to me?” If I was on the other side of the room, and the conversation wasn’t directed to me, I did not hear it. I promise you.
A bunch of my colleagues in my twenties said, “I think he’s rude.” I was like, “Rude? I’m the opposite of rude. I always talk to people and go out of the way.” When I went into the actual feedback, it was basically that I would walk by people in the hall and not acknowledge them or say hello, and I realized I didn’t even see them. I was in my own world. That was important. I had to pay attention to that. It was their perception that I was being rude or playing some standoffish game. I was just probably building some business in my head and running through the hall. It was important to know that.
The Choice To Know What Others Think (Blind Spots)
Ray Dalio, the co-founder and former CIO of Bridgewater, he said something that really stuck with me and it was this. You get a choice. You get a choice to live in a world where you know what other people think about you or you don’t. What would you rather? If we don’t get those insights, if we don’t make it permissible for others to share that feedback with us because of the blinders and the borders we put up, then we’re not going to know about the worst parts of ourselves so that we can reach the best parts of ourselves. Until someone told you, “Bob, I think you need to engage more with other people,” there was a gulf between how you saw yourself and how others saw you. You were the same guy, but you weren’t the person that others saw. That’s why I think it’s important.
In my advice on, on to leaders on receiving feedback, and we’ll talk about both because I think they’re different skills and both need to be taught. You don’t have to agree with it, but you should listen to it and absorb it. You said, now it’s known, and I know people feel that way. I got a piece of feedback in my organization after the 2016 election. It was not dissimilar to now but tempers were a little high. I was like, “Whatever happens tomorrow, on Tuesday, the sun is going to come out. Just take a deep breath and move forward.” I thought that was a really nice apolitical message that the sun will come out tomorrow.
All of a sudden, your inbox got lit up.
One person was incredibly offended because how could the sun possibly come out on Tuesday if this other candidate was elected? I heard that and I don’t agree with it. I would say the same thing again. Sometimes I think what we’re looking for is what’s the sample of 1 versus 10 people saying the same thing. This is why I don’t like anonymous feedback, because some people try to make themselves really heard. I always like to know in the organization, am I dealing with one person?
We were a remote organization. Is there 1 person out of 100 that wants an office and they just need to get a new job or is this 1 person showed up on 10 anonymous surveys acting like 10% of the company that we need to get an office? I think that anonymous feedback should be reserved for safety and other things, or where it’s not being addressed, but particularly when people used to submit, like, “My leader’s horrible and is killing the culture of our team.” I need to know who your leader is to do anything about that.
I put that back on the organization. I think if the organization doesn’t make it possible for others to feel the psychological safety to actually go and share put their name on their feedback, I think that needs a cultural fix. If we don’t know what others are thinking about us and they don’t feel like they can put their name on that feedback, we’re really back to where we were before. That’s a signal that is not strong.
Yes, anonymous feedback, generally unhelpful. Frankly, I think it’s on us to create the conditions that allow for these courageous conversations to take place to say, “I feel a certain way. I want to tell you why I feel this way. I want to be humble enough and curious enough to listen to what you have to say in response but I stand by my impressions. I’m prepared to be wrong, but I also want you to understand how I feel.”
I think when you’re actually taking the feedback, and as someone who thinks quickly and tries to process, and you can tell when I have a thing to say is to actually just listen. People can tell when you’re formatting a rebuttal or whatever. You could disagree with all of it, but I think you just need to keep a relaxed face and try to listen and be like, “I just want to make sure I understood. Is this what you were saying? Thank you.” You can go back and process and decide what you want to learn from or throw out.
I think also taking that moment that there’s that power of the pause, to let it sit and not to react, but to reflect and then to take that feedback and actually shop it. Go to people who you trust and say, “I just received this kind of feedback. Have you seen this too? Is this a signal that that is projecting elsewhere?” When a person does that, they give themselves the benefit of time and space, de-escalate the initial reaction, the charge that starts, and then you gather more information and insights.
I think the best part of doing that is that now you can take that feedback, really process it carefully, judiciously, and then go back to the person who gave it to you and say, “I’ve actually been thinking about what you said. I went to a few other people who I know and who know me and ask them if they see the same thing. You know what they said.” I actually want to thank you for sharing that feedback with me, because they didn’t share it with me, but you had the courage to do so.
Bob, I think it’s super important that when you find those feedback champions in your life, the people who are actually courageous enough to share that feedback with you, you want to keep them close. You want to make sure that they can continue to feel comfortable sharing that feedback with you again and again, because there are so few people in our lives who are willing to share it. When you find people like that, you want to keep them close.
When you find feedback champions—the people courageous enough to be honest with you—it’s vital to keep them close. Make sure they always feel comfortable sharing feedback with you again and again.
You need your dissension team. I can’t remember if it was Tim Ferriss and Adam Grant were talking about this, and it was like you know who your yes team is. You need your no teammate. I see a lot of conversations sometimes. One of my core values is respectful authenticity. I’ll tell you the thing that maybe everyone else doesn’t want to say in a very kind way.
I know some people I’m related to where I see them discussing, and they’re calling all their friends for the opinion that they want for the reinforcement and that doesn’t really help you. I think you need the panel that’s going to call your baby ugly when it’s ugly or say like, “Joe, I just did this and I told this person this. Do you think I made the right decision? You’re my friend,” and you’re going to be like, “Yeah,” because it’s just easier to answer that way.
I think if there is a mutual understanding between you and this other person, that we have a compact with each other. When I know something about you that I think is important to share, I will share it. You can count on me for that information. When you come to me asking me for my candid take, I will give it to you. I expect the same in return. Creating that two-way pact with the other person means that there is mutual understanding. There’s mutual buy-in. You’re going to be candid with each other. You’re going to be real with each other.
Think about your spouse. The best relationships that I know, and I would count my relationship with my wife as one of those relationships, thankfully, is that people can really count on the other to tell them the hard truths, the unvarnished things that we don’t necessarily want to hear about ourselves. You don’t want to hear it, but it’s important to know because, like I said, you get a choice in life. You can go through this world knowing what people think or not. Wouldn’t you rather know?
I heard someone once say, he said it, but it was someone else’s. It’s the front of the t-shirt or the back of the t-shirt. Would you want to know what’s on the back of your t-shirt that everyone around you can read?
When we’re in the jar, we have a hard time reading the label, just to extend that metaphor. We don’t have insights when we are in that moment. Especially if you’re a leader, it is so important not only for your own leadership growth, but to model this for everyone on your team to let them know that you want this feedback and you expect it. You welcome it, you recognize it, you reward it, and most importantly, you act on it. When you do that, they will feel comfortable doing the same, asking you, asking someone else on the team for that.
When we’re in the jar, we can’t read the label.
Seeing that you behave differently. Describe the FEEDFORWARD model to the audience.
The FEEDFORWARD™ Framework (Partnership, Not Power)
FEEDFORWARD was a term that appears in the research literature probably about 40 years ago in the context of feedback conversations. Marshall Goldsmith, the world’s number one executive coach, popularized the concept.
That’s where I’ve heard it.
Marshall really does deserve credit for the FEEDFORWARD model. With his blessing, I try to unpack that and its scientific underpinnings. Marshall wrote the foreword to my book, The Feedback Fix. FEEDFORWARD, for Marshall, is a very simple practice of quickly generating feedback insights from the people closest to you. Asking them about a problem you are having, listening to what they have to say, thanking them for their insights and then moving on. It’s like speedback, in a way.
What I tried to do with FEEDFORWARD and with Marshall’s blessing and support is to look at what is really driving this fear of feedback. Why do people feel so reluctant and resistant to move forward on these conversations? What are the things that are holding us back? Once you identify all of the weight that is holding those conversations down, that is holding people back, you can start to understand the things that will create more joy, more life, more frequency in these conversations, so that we can stop focusing on what was and instead on what can be.
FEEDFORWARD really comes down to some very simple elementary truths. When you have these conversations. It should be about partnership and not power. It should be about helping drive relationships and not just sharing reports. It should be about giving people a sense of their own agency and not just focusing on their accountability. Most importantly, Bob, it is about helping people see a future that they can be a part of and a partner to, and not a past that they can’t change.
When you operate with this mindset of, “I’m here to unlock an insight, I’m here to open a door, I’m here to pave the way,” that’s different than going into a conversation with someone saying, “I’m going to tell you on what I think and sell you on why I’m right. I expect you to do everything I say.” That leads to defensiveness, that leads to deflection, that leads to the fear, that leads to the aggression, all the things that we know happen to a person when a person feels they’re under attack when they’re judged by someone else’s feedback.
However, when you approach differently as a partner, this is where the dynamic shift, and it’s no longer about my view and what I think and me telling and selling you on what I think is going on here. I’m here as a partner to listen, to learn, to approach with humility and curiosity, to genuinely ask you for your insights, for your ideas, to seek your input, and to create something together that is shared, that is purposeful, that is driven by action. That ultimately is owned by you and not me, because I can’t change you. I guess I can. I can force a change by imposing consequences and penalties and being a leader, but we know that doesn’t work very well.
It doesn’t work for your leadership, and it doesn’t work for your team culture. I could instead be the leader that instead of imposing my will, gives you the will to improve. I do that by genuinely approaching as your partner, by building something together that you own. You own the change because it’s yours. When you own that change, guided by me, but not owned by me, then that is something that is more likely to succeed because you’re invested in that plan. You’re the one who came up with that idea. You’re the one who’s going to own it. That’s the job not to make ourselves smaller. Some leaders say to me, “Joe, this won’t work. I have to retain my power and my position as their leader,” but that’s not true.
I can choose to be the kind of leader who doesn’t impose my will, but gives you the will to improve—by showing up as a true partner and building something you own, because the change is yours.
That’s just not about the other person or making them better.
It’s a totally misguided approach.
That’s a boss, not a leader. A leader doesn’t need power.
Exactly, because you are not surrendering power. You’re building your influence, and most importantly, you’re building capacity in another person. You’re making them closer to the leadership.
I wrote a book on that, so I love that notion. Let me ask you, there, I feel like there’s a subtext in that too, that’s not as explicit, but I think as part of it in the back versus forward. You are looking back on something to improve the future, not to litigate the past. The whole point should be, “This is what happened on the client call yesterday and it got you into trouble. How do we improve your response so that you don’t have that happen in the future?”
Therefore, my belief is feedback’s got to be fast. I just had this conversation with another guest who’s very against the quarterly and six-month check-ins. My rule is like, I think 3- or 6-month check-ins are fine to recalibrate, but there should be no new information. If I’m listing all the things from six months ago that Joe did wrong, that feels an attack. Why wouldn’t you tell me that I’ve been making the same mistakes for six months?
The Problem With Infrequent Feedback & Time Lapses
There are so many problems with that. There are so many issues. First off, I only find out about things that are going wrong six months after they’ve happened. A, I can’t change the past, and B, I’ve probably hardened my habits.
It’s because I’ve gotten really good at it.
You’re an expert in doing the wrong thing. It’s utterly futile to wait. That’s one of the big problems of our feedback models nowadays is this time lapse between the time that something happens and the time that it’s talked about. You said something, Bob, that also I think is really important. If this is about building a relationship, then if you know me, like me and trust me, why don’t you just come out and tell me? It leads the receiver of that information to wonder what does this other person really think about me? If we communicated with our spouses the way some managers communicate with their teams, we would all be in couple’s therapy. For real.
I have that same analogy to this example. It’s so funny that you say that. How does it work when you with your spouse or partner when you don’t have the hard conversation and you don’t have it again? There’s the inevitable blow-up six months later and you list all the things they did wrong for the last six months? That’s what happens. You did it here and you did wait. You didn’t tell, like, “How does that work for you?”
Neurologically, there are some really damaging things that are happening when conversations become retrospectives on the past, when you’re telling me about things that you think happened, because I’m human, I have naturally forgotten about these things. By the way, so have you. That forgetting curve, that memory researchers identify, that very sudden steep loss of information, the moment we learn it. You go to a training, you learn something new, you then forget it the next day, that loss, about 50% within the first 24 hours, studies and steepens over the next several days. By the time a week goes by, it’s almost, by some estimates, a 70% loss of recall. We don’t remember at all.
That probably helps us get by, right?
Yeah, you can forget the unpleasant past, but it doesn’t build a productive future. Now, when you and I are having this conversation 3 weeks, 6 weeks, 6 months after it’s happened, we’re just frantically trying to recreate events that neither one of us really remembers. The frequency of feedback is so critical. In fact, there’s a study that I just love that came out of NASA that shows the power of frequent conversations and how they’re even better than finessed conversations.
NASA was trying to improve air flight safety. They were running simulations and they had three people in a crew, the pilot, the co-pilot, and another quality control person. What they learned in these simulations, it’s not just whether someone shared candid feedback and that could be acted on and made useful, but it was how often those conversations happened.
Even if it wasn’t great feedback, the fact that these conversations were happening more regularly and that cadence of feedback was built, those teams with the higher frequency feedback cycles made fewer errors and prevented more disasters from occurring. The lesson for us is pretty straightforward. Keeping planes in the air, that’s easy. Having these conversations, that’s hard. What we need to do to overcome that difficulty is just to have these conversations more often. The key I find in having these conversations is just to keep talking. Just have them.
The key to having these conversations is simply to keep talking.
They’re lighter and simpler in the moment. Just a quick example of quick feedback. We had an example with the books from our book launch. They’re just super backed up at the retailer. People ordered it as part of a thing, and they’re really backed up even though they ostensibly got it for free. They’re reaching out like, “Where’s my book,” with this implication of, “Did you screw me?” The person on my team was writing back and saying, “It will reach to you this week. Sorry, there’s been some hiccups,” or whatever.
I like, “That’s fine,” but my feedback is like, “I think we need to say we placed these orders three weeks ago. They were with the retailer, and I’m sorry, but they have had inventory problems.” What you don’t want it to sound is, “You just told us that we didn’t send you your book and now we’re sending you your book.” That has a different connotation. In the moment, that’s just a quick simple thing. It’s like, “All good,” but on the next one and on the next one, we did that. Three weeks later, it’s a more complicated sit-down situation. There’s something about when we let time go by too, we have to insert it, and then we combine it with other stuff versus a super quick fix.
I said why, too. For me, this is a brand thing. The response that you’re going to get at this week, and sorry is great, but I still think the person could perceive that you didn’t send it until I asked you. I don’t want that. If I caught you. I also explained my why on that too. I’m not great at this in general. I’m not being finicky on this, and when you explain the why on that, for me, it was about what’s the why for the brand or the customer service that when we don’t say that, it might sound like, “You caught me and now you don’t worry. The book’s in the mail.”
Some things get better with time. Feedback is not one of those things. We can either pay now when it’s not as expensive or pay later when it is. When you let those conversations lapse, the cost of having that conversation just goes up tenfold. The longer the wait, the shorter the memory, the higher the cost. It’s costing us our relationships. It’s costing us our results. Frankly, it doesn’t have to be this way.
If everyone entered into these conversations with 2 key principles, 2 key assumptions, the person who’s having this conversation with me is doing it because they care. The person having this conversation is having it with me because they want to see something happen. That combination of caring and also commitment, there has to be some action that follows this.
I want to help bring this information to your doorstep. I genuinely care about you. I’m giving you my why. I’m giving you my reason for caring. That is missing a lot of times in these conversations. Now that I’ve shown you why I care and what is happening and being direct and candid, now it’s time for us to get constructive. What are your ideas on what happens next? I could tell you what to do, I could fix it for you. When it comes to FEEDFORWARD, it’s really about the framing and not about the fixing. We have to frame the issue for the other person.
Some things get better with time. Feedback isn’t one of them. We can either pay now, when the cost is low, or pay later, when it’s much higher.
I’m going to ask you a leading question that I need to hear this answer to over and over because it’s probably my biggest mistake. In the history of a relationship or a work or anything. Have you ever seen a difficult conversation put off that got easier?
No.
I literally can’t think of one.
I thought about that because I was thinking about myself and difficult conversations that I’ve had to engage in where someone brought a difficult issue to me. We talked about that at the start of the show. I don’t think it gets better. I think we might pretend it gets better.
That’s a future. I wrote a Friday Forward on this. We kick it to future self, which makes it extensively better for present self.
It doesn’t get better. It’s the illusion of improvement. It doesn’t get better because some things just don’t work themselves out. If you have a knot in your shoe, that knot is not getting un knotted without your involvement in that. That literally happened to my kid. We’re going to school. He got a knot in the sneaker. He’s like, “Whatever. It’ll work itself out.” I’m like, “It won’t. Let’s deal with that now.” This is the thing with these conversations. If we don’t address the difficult issue now, if we don’t share the critical feedback now, we will pay later.
Human nature and psychology is going to encourage us, and I still do that to burden our future self because it’s a future pain versus a current pain. I can think of a conversation that I’m about to have in a work context with a partner that should have happened six months ago, and it’s going to be not more fun or easier now.
It won’t. If anything, when we delay and dodge those conversations, ultimately, it really dings a relationship. We have then lost the opportunity to show the other person that we truly care about them because if you really care about someone, you’re going to communicate with that person. Not talking is also communication. If we don’t communicate with other people, then we basically, implicitly signal that they’re not worth our conversation or our time. That’s hard to get back.
The style of how you do that matters too. We talked about these fake conversation workshops, and after watching the total mess that they were, I actually learned, and I haven’t hired anyone. I’m less involved in the business for a long time, but the last time I had to have one of those conversations, after watching how badly the crap sandwich went when people tried it, which is for those of you who don’t know, it’s the compliment thing I really wanted to say to you. The person is so confused. The last time I had to have a termination conversation, I just started with, “We’re going to have a tough conversation and then I want to tell you what I want to tell you, and then let’s talk about next steps.”
I think what you open with sets the tone for the whole thing, versus if you just start flailing from the beginning, you might think, and that’s where these things came from, is people would say, “I thought we were on the same page.” I would go look in the performance system for what they had written. You might think you’re on the same page in your head. There’s a study that’s done that when people are tapping music on a table, they think 90% of the time, the other people would know what song it is and they only know what song it is 1% of the time. You might think you were super clear about this feedback, but they totally missed it.
The “Feedback Wrap” Model (Candid, Caring, Clarifying)
I also agree that the sandwich doesn’t satisfy, but I have something that I think does, and I like to share this with clients. Praise sandwich, no good. Praise sandwich, not great. Feedback wrap, very good. Maybe some of your audience is getting like, “I think I want that for lunch. That sounds pretty good.” The WRAP is the framework that brings together all the things we were talking about just a minute ago. The idea that we can have candid, caring, connected conversations that don’t pull punches, that don’t hold back. Here’s how.
W. You talk about what’s happening and where it’s happening. You give that problem a zip code. R, reason, but not just why the person was rude for interrupting in a meeting or why your interactions with clients were unproductive but your reason for caring. I care about you, Bob. I care about our relationship. I care about your relationship with our team members. I want to share this because I care about you personally, like we said earlier. A is affect. This is where you move from blame to contribution. Instead of judgment, replace it with curiosity or description. You can say, “It seems to me like this has now happened as a result. Instead of judging you, it’s me. I have this feeling now.”
The client was questioning your judgment.
These are not declarative statements. These are assumptions. These are curiosity. Lastly, and this is the most important piece, the P is prompt. You don’t tell and sell. You listen and learn. After setting the stage, telling them what’s happening, where it’s happening, your reason for caring, the impact that it’s having on others, what do you think we should do next? What are your ideas? I genuinely want to hear.
Are you even hearing what I’m saying? Do you see this differently? You listen and you learn. Two things may happen when you do this. Either the person will come back and say, “I had no idea. Thank you. I honestly didn’t know that.” That happens some of the times, but I’ve workshopped this enough to know that it doesn’t happen all the time.
The person might come back and say, “What are you talking about? You’re totally off base,” and may launch into a whole rant on why you’re wrong. Something positive just happened because now you know. There’s more to this than the person talking over someone in a meeting or unproductive relationships with clients. Whatever the issue is, there’s a self-awareness piece here. There’s a personal issue here that is underlying all of this, and you’ve just uncovered another insight. The WRAP is candid, caring and collaborative, but it’s also very clarifying.
It’s gluten-free and less calories than the compliments.
It’s high protein. You won’t hate yourself when you’re done. It’s like when you eat a bag of chips, it feels good in the moment and then you’re like, “I hate myself.”
I totally forgot. What’s the word? I’m so used to the bad word. What’s the word for the compliment sandwich?
Praise sandwich. Literally, most used words don’t serve us. That’s another example of a model that we’ve inherited from our managers. I understand why people do the sandwich. It’s generally risk-free. You’re disguising what you really mean to say, and you’re dancing around the issue. It seems harmless, it seems low risk, but you’re not serving the issue. You’re not serving the relationship. It’s a miss.
They totally miss it. The person misses what, because there’s this negative thing, and they’re like, “Two to one,” because here’s where it kept showing up. After, we’d be like, “You need to have this 90-day conversation with Joe. In the first 90 days. It’s not looking good, and he needs to really clean it up,” or whatever. They’d be like, “I have the conversation,” and then 30 days later, it’s still a mess like, “Sit down with Joe and tell him it’s over.” They’d be like, “Joe was totally blindsided.” I was like, “How was Joe blindsided? You had this other conversation.” Eventually, I started watching these conversations and I was like, “I get it. Joe didn’t hear what you wanted him to hear.”
We’re wired to not even focus on the bad part. We’re wired to only look for the good. Two to one and recency effect. There’s a host of reasons why, neurologically, we are wired to ignore your critical feedback when it is sandwiched. That’s why the real tragedy of this is that you, when you lead with that sandwich approach, think you’ve served the issue. The person who gets the sandwich thinks they’ve dodged a problem, “We’re cool, everything’s fine,” and neither one of you has really done anything to move this forward.
You’re both just going through the motions without making any meaningful progress. It goes back to that thing we’ve been talking about. We said it a few times. Do you want to live in a world where people know what you think about you or not? If you sandwich your feedback, you are not serving the issue, you are not serving the relationship, and you are not helping the person improve or get better.
You need a priming opening. “I need to tell you this and I know it’s going to be a little hard,” or, “I want to talk about what’s next.” Whether it’s personal or professional, I think you need to anchor it from the front so that you get people to know what it is they’re listening to, which is basically the WRAP. I know one of your workshop models focuses on asking better questions rather than giving more answers. That sounds that’s a big part of the p at the end. What are some good examples of questions that open people up instead of shutting them down?
Asking Better Questions: “Why Not Higher?” (Rate & Reflect)
If you and I are engaged in a difficult conversation, and I want to help provoke an insight for you, I want to be that person who can listen and can learn, I’m going to just simply ask you, “I love this technique. It’s super powerful.” You say, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how do you think that call with the client went?” You’ll say, “Seven.” I say, “A seven. That’s great. Seven’s great. Why not hire?” That question, why not hire, is a technique that is used in motivational interviewing. A friend of mine, Michael McQueen, who was on I Wish They Knew some time back talks about this as rate and reflect technique. It’s a great technique. This idea of why not hire, a simple question, gets them to think about what could be preventing that from being an 8, a 9, a 10, without it being judgmental. By asking that question, it’s their own estimation, and they own it.
What if they say ten? In your mind it was a 5 and they say 10.
If someone comes back to me and says 10, and I’m thinking 5, I’ll say, “Why’d you think it was a ten? Get them talking. What, not why. When they start talking about the what, they may start to realize for themselves, “I didn’t actually come back with a timely response with a client and no, I was interrupting the client and I was ten minutes late to the call and I had to cut it short.” “Maybe it wasn’t a ten.” “Joe, maybe it was more a seven.”
“Now let me ask you the question again. You mentioned some things here. What do you think could have made it better? What do you think could make it better next time?” My job is not to tell and sell, is not to be the person that is prescribing a solution, but instead the kind of person that can describe a situation, show them where to look, don’t tell them what to see, and be the person who opens that other person’s mind to the possibilities that may not be obvious to them, but are there, if only they can pay more attention to them. That’s our job. Help them pay more attention.
There’s also an opportunity there to be coaching and Socratic. Let’s pretend this is a sales call. Joe’s a fricking ten. Joe, in our process we talk about we have the call, and then client engages a follow-up or ask for a follow-up. Did they ask for a follow-up? You could point out some of the things that in our rubric, a ten would be they told you what they wanted the next step.
I think when you concretize this process, you have standards, you have metrics. There’s a way to evaluate this. Every educator knows you can’t measure if there are no standards of measurement. Therefore, if there are no standards, then the measure is meaningless. I think that’s true when it comes to these conversations. We should decide, and I think it could be a shared exercise among leaders in their teams, what are the measures of success for this project, for this call, for this interaction?
Once we agree on what success looks like, let’s hold each other accountable to that. Let’s have the courage to be candid with each other and to say, “This didn’t meet the measure. We’re falling short.” To work with each other and support each other from a point of, “I want to focus on what’s strong, not just what’s wrong. I want to help you because I care about you and I care about our success, but I owe this to you and I owe this to us. I’m going to tell you what I’m seeing. Tell me if you see it differently. I’m prepared to be wrong because I want to make things right.
I think I should use that line in my marriage, even when I don’t believe it.
I’ve used it many times and it works. It’s different since sleeping on the couch or not friend.
She would look at me and be like, “I appreciate the sentiment, but I’m skeptical.”
These relationships have to be authentic. That’s why the more you have these conversations, and I think this has been a through line in our conversation. The more frequently you have these conversations, the more natural they are, the more impactful they are, the less guesswork there is. Ultimately, the more constructive they become.
You’ve coached everyone from CIA officers to NFL coaches. Have you seen any trends of communication mistakes that just carry across these industries? The coach and the CIA operative, what mistake do they both make?
It wasn’t an NFL coach. It was someone in the NFL front office, but same basic idea. I think everyone is still operating with a sense of fear. It’s the fear of hearing uncomfortable truths about themselves. We all have ego preservation. We all want to defend ourselves. It’s how we’ve been evolutionary development of how we are. I think the difference between the people that I see successfully navigating these conversations and those that don’t, it’s the willingness to engage in the hard work of learning about yourself.
At the top, we talked about this idea of joy. It’s not pleasant to learn these things about yourself, but if you can somehow manage the courage and the conviction to listen to these things, to act on these things, there is joy, I promise. There is the joy of becoming a better version of yourself, of knowing that others see you as someone who is willing to roll up their sleeves and do the hard work of self-improvement, of wanting to get better. Doing that, not only because you want to be a better person, but you want to serve your clients, you want to serve your company.
You want to not just drive a bottom-line result, but a top line relationship. I think this is the differentiating quality among people who engage in fearless conversations and those that don’t. Are you prepared to listen to the hard truths about yourself. The people that you described, some of the people that I work with, they’re at the top of their game. They’re literally pulling great trades, multimillion-dollar deals at the highest levels of sports, or they’re protecting our country from threats from outside.
They’re doing amazing things, but at the end of the day, they’re still afraid. They’re afraid to learn what’s wrong about themselves. With the right framework, we can shift those dynamics, not just what’s wrong, but what’s strong. Not just what happened in the past, but what can be changed in the future. Not just a result or rating, but a relationship. All of this comes down to us. We get to be the people that help others navigate that change.
If we are the ones who are fearless enough to help others see a different side of themselves that they may not have known or don’t want to get to know, if we are the ones that can change the tone and the timing of these conversations, if we are the ones that can change the dynamics from feedback to feedforward and to look out at who these people can become and to see them for their potential and their possibilities, they will do the same. These conversations won’t get easier overnight. They won’t change overnight, but they will get better each and every conversation.
Joe, I have a client lead for you that I’d like to share with you here. The New York Jets front office desperately needs to improve their taking feedback from fans and the entire city. I’ve never seen a group of people more despondent in my entire life.
What a sad state of affairs. As a Philadelphia Eagles fan, I can tell you that one thing that the Eagles have done very well that has resulted in great success is I think the willingness to speak hard truths. If you look at the team culture, they care deeply about each other, but they also communicate fearlessly with one another. That starts at the top. Jets fans, I feel you, I know what it’s to go years without success, but maybe you’ll take flight like my birds.
Can’t change the top. That’s the problem with the Jets. For all the leaders, business owners, the audience of this show, they’re either a lot of team leaders or CEOs or entrepreneurs, if you could encourage one action this week to start building a more fearless feedback culture for them in the next conversation that they have, what would it be?
Ask one person one thing that you could do to improve. If we shrink the change, if we shrink that process of improvement to just one thing. We’re very specific and targeted about it, and I go to one person who I know is well-suited to address this one issue and I let the person know I’m looking for guidance on one issue, people are mostly willing to help us. If they know that it’s one thing. When they tell me their insights on what to do about that one thing, I can act on one thing at a time. I would say be courageous enough to ask, be humble enough to listen and be courageous enough to act. If you do that, feedback can be fearless and progress is possible.
You just made me think of a great idea I’ve never thought before, which is to do that to your team in your team meeting. Everyone go around so that everyone else sees the psychological safety of like, “I want you to say it and say it in front of me.” That’s a super interesting exercise.
I think the more natural we make these conversations, the more productive they become. It starts with leaders. Leaders have to normalize feedback. They have to normalize the frequency of feedback. They have to normalize the intent and purpose behind the feedback. Leaders get the feedback cultures they deserve. If you, as a leader, are courageous enough, fearless enough to have these conversations, to do them more frequently, they may not be perfect, but you’ll make progress. Ultimately, everyone then sees feedback is just another thing to do at work. It’s not high stakes, it’s high touch, and ultimately, you get high results.
How can people learn more about you and your work?
If you want to make feedback fearless, head over to JoeHirsch.me. All different kinds of ways we can stay connected there. If you want to make your next conversation your best one yet, I would love to help you do that. Hit me up.
All right, Joe, thanks for joining us. You’ve shared a ton of insights on courage, communication, and feedback. I know that a lot of people will be able to go put into work right away, so thank you.
It was a pleasure.
Alright, thank you for joining us. You can learn more about Joe and his work on the detailed episode page at RobertGlazer.com. As always, if you enjoyed ‘s episode or the show in general, we have a small favor to ask. Would you mind taking a minute to share this conversation with someone you think would appreciate it? Particularly, maybe someone on your team is struggling with feedback. We’ve grown entirely through word of mouth and that’s how I find new shows. Someone says, “You’ve got to read this episode.” If this episode with Joe make you made you think differently, just text or email a friend with that little share button. Thank you again for your support. Until next time, keep elevating.
Important Links
