Welcome to the #CriticalFewActions™ to Improve Your Business podcast. I’m John Downes and I’m here to help you cut through the overwhelm and prioritise what matters most to improve your business. Let’s get started and discover the #CriticalFewActions™ that have the biggest impact.

Welcome to the #CriticalFewActions™ to Improve Your Business podcast. Today I’d like to introduce you to Linda Murray, who’s been my coach for the last 15 years. Linda Murray helps develop leaders that people want to follow. Linda, welcome.

John. Thank you.

You know, leaders often struggle to get their people to do what they want. And then they go on holidays for a week or two and it all goes to shit. So what’s going on there?

Yeah. Haven’t we all heard this before and probably even experienced it before? Look, it could be many things is the quick answer, but firstly, I. I think leaders make the mistake of teaching their people what to do. So they’re, they’re very much in a telling mode, let me, show you what you need to do, and do that exactly the same, and then everything will be fine.

But of course, when that leader steps away, things don’t always end up being exactly the same. So I actually think leadership is less about telling people what to do, but more about, sharing with them how to think and asking more questions. And I had the perfect example of this. Working with A CEO, who we called it the revolving door, where he said, I spend my entire day just answering questions.

It’s like I’ve virtually got a queue outside my door and I answer someone’s question and they go off and I finally get to do what I wanna do. Someone else shows up. And I said, well, what do you do when these people keep showing up at your door? They ask you a question. What do you do? And he was like, well, I answer the questions. Like, okay, so humans are inherently lazy. It doesn’t take long for your people to realise, why would I use my own brain power when I can actually just go to his door and he’ll answer the question for me? And this, sorry, you go,is and he is a fan of all knowledge, of course. And of course they won’t get it wrong if he gives them the answer.

this is all true. But what it does is it builds dependence. So then he goes on holidays for two weeks, as you say, and it all falls over ’cause he is not there to answer those questions.

I’ve heard it so many times. I mean, the reality is, my perspective on leadership is that it’s actually all about coaching. It’s all about helping them actually learn to think, and it’s all about encouraging them and empowering them to do it without you. Hopefully at the end of the day, the leader is actually just sitting around.

having cups of tea and, and watching this wonderful orchestra before them performing flawlessly.

Yeah, that’s the plan. That’s what they put on the box before we all went into business, wasn’t it?

Yeah, yeah. It’s an ideal, but gee, it’s a long journey,

And so what happens when those leaders come back from holidays? I find that it actually has all gone, pear shaped, and it leads to some conversations about what went well and what didn’t go so well. And, and then we’ve got the dreaded performance conversations. And many leaders don’t want to have those.

They either avoid them or they handle them badly out of their own nerves. So why do you think that is?

I think it comes down to fear. I mean, we genuinely want to be. Nice people who are liked and respected. So I think when we’ve gotta say something that is constructive in nature, even if someone’s done the wrong thing, it brings up fear and insecurity in us. And I don’t know whether you are brought up the same way.

My mum very much taught me. If you don’t have anything nice to say.

Don’t say anything at all.

Don’t say anything at all. So if we have to give someone constructive feedback about their performance, that feels like a not nice thing to say at all. So I think we’ve got that in our DNA. We are also afraid of just saying the wrong thing and ending up in front of hr.

We’re currently in a very litigious society. we’ve all had experiences where feedback has been delivered really badly, so we certainly don’t want to be the person to create. A similar memory for other people. And at the end of the day, courageous conversations or feedback conversations, they’re tough.

It’s easier not to have them. And I think people fall into that trap of just avoiding them. They’re either, you know, non-existent or they’re unclear when they finally come out. Or what we see a lot is that leaders put off having these conversations and it builds and it builds in resentment, and then finally gets blurted out at an inappropriate time and probably in an inappropriate way.

Yeah,

I mean, I, the time when I see this happen the most. It really frustrates me is actually in the new hire process. So what I see is that. people go to all this trouble of actually coming up with a great job spec, and then they go through a hiring, hiring process and they have all these recruitment interviews and that’s all fantastic. And they’ve got a probationary period of three months or even six months, and then the person comes in and they get ’em settled in and they go off and do that.

And then 48 hours or 24 hours before probationary period ends, they decide to have their very first performance conversation about, well, how are you going and how are you not? And it’s a total stuff up. Typically because all of a sudden the poor new recruit is being given on a platter. All the things that they’re either not doing well or the things that they could be improving.

And there’s then starting to have a discussion around do they extend the probationary period? And it’s because they’ve actually had a, a supervisor who has spent the entire probationary period avoiding having those. Tough or helpful or amazing gifts as performance conversations.

Yeah, that would have to be nana’s ugliest platter, wouldn’t it? To have that, that information served on you at the 11th hour, both for the supervisor, but also for the person, the new recruit, because they’re then going to be thrown into a space of uncertainty, fight and flight, et cetera, of are they even gonna renew this contract in two days?

I thought things were going well.

Yeah, and they should have been having this conversation weekly for the first month, and then at least twice monthly from then onwards.

Yeah, absolutely. And I actually see this a lot. So I work with a number of engineering firms and they tend to be very, meticulous and very cerebral people. but when it comes to having those more, connected emotion-based conversations like performance, it’s amazing how often I see a focus or, prioritizing harmony.

And keeping the peace over, having that challenging conversation. And I was working with A CFO recently who, he would hold off and hold off and hold off ’cause he is trying to keep the peace and then he would end up delivering the classic feedback sandwich.

You mean the shit sandwich?

The shit sandwich, so compliment, critique, compliment.

And what was happening was his team didn’t really understand where they sat. You know, one of his direct reports said to me once, I couldn’t tell if I was doing a good job or if I was actually on a performance improvement plan. Every time he has these conversations, which isn’t often, we are left not knowing what to do.

And this is part of the challenge. People know they need to have the conversation. They put them off a long time and then when they do finally have the conversation, it often doesn’t go well or it’s unclear. And then we end up losing that person who’s just made it nearly through probation.

They’ve been a great performer. They’ve got great potential. In the firm, but then we risk losing them because they dunno where they stand.

Yeah. Yeah. So how’d you help this CFO?

Look, I think really it was about changing his perspective. ’cause like us, if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t try and say it at all, is this whole notion of he was really trying to soften the blow, right? And what happens is we dilute our message. It becomes unclear and hard for people to follow.

So one of our favorite people, yours and mine is Brene Brown. And as she famously says, clear is kind. Unclear is unkind. So obviously we wanna be clear in terms of the vision and the goals and the expectations of people and being transparent. But we also need to be clear in terms of people’s performance and what is working well and also what’s not working well.

And so we really had to work with this guy with his mindset around, he thought he was being kind. Actually, what he was doing was he was limiting his team’s performance. He was limiting their ability to learn and grow and improve because he wasn’t sharing those opportunities for development with them.

And so in my business, we very much think of feed forward. Rather than feedback, it’s less about what has happened and dredging up the past and here’s this platter of poor performance or, or subpar performance to more feed forward. What are the behaviors that we want to see going forward? And I recognise that you wanna learn and grow.

let me support you in that process. So it was a real mindset shift from. Him feeling like he was getting his people in trouble to actually me sharing this feedback with them is helping them actually grow and improve, which is what they’re here to do.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, and as you say that, Linda, you know, one of the things that comes to mind is that, part of the fear. I think also comes down to the fact that there isn’t clarity around what do I expect this person to do as when they’re doing a good job.

Mm-hmm.

So you know, the, the reason why I’m struggling to give performance feedback is because unless it’s an absolute Clinger,I actually don’t have any clear metrics or statements around what is doing a good job.

So, for example, I’ve got a friend at the moment who’s working with a team member and

Her idea of doing a good job is take on the task, get them done, show some initiative, think forward, hand it off. What’s actually happening is that her, her staff member is doing the task, but the task is actually not quite finished and it’s not anticipating what’s gonna happen.

So, you know, there’s nothing in the, job spec or the description, which says show initiative. Because if you’re a high performer, initiative is. Something that you do without even thinking about it. how do you sort of actually bring that factor in? I’m sure that’s actually part of that sort of fear is because they’re trying to figure out, well, surely it’s obvious, but it’s obviously not obvious if you haven’t actually helped them understand what is doing a good job in your eyes.

Yes, and I just think that is a classic example of what we were talking about before, of leaders telling people what to do, but not actually teaching them how to think. Because if that friend of yours was teaching her people how to think, she would be saying, okay, here’s where we need to get to. Here’s why.

You know, is it to be more efficient? Is to do things faster? Is it to serve the customer better? Like what’s the why of this? What’s our end point? And then allowing that flexibility for the person to actually get to that point, get to that expectation, and teach them how to think beyond the finish line. I.

It’s kind of like, it would be like running a hundred meter race, but expecting to stop right on the a hundred meters. We actually run like 110 meter race, but we’re judged on the a hundred meter mark.

Absolutely.

So yeah. Picking them how to think differently.

Yeah. So can we just go back a tad because I, I want to just dig in a bit further into this feedback sandwich and how it messes with people’s heads, you know, what do you mean by that?

Well, I mean, classic model. So it’s been around forever in terms of deliver the good news, deliver something nice, deliver something critical or constructive, and then finish it off with something nice. So the meat in the sandwiches is where the action’s at, in theory, 20 years ago or whenever that was created, that was probably a cute idea and a nice framework for leaders to follow.

What happens now is the feedback sandwich, which is so overused. That when we sit down for one of these feedback conversations, if we hear something good, like if I’m to give you a piece of good feedback in your mind, you’re sitting there going, uhoh, uhoh. What’s coming?

I wasn’t listening to it anyway. I’m, I’m just waiting for the eggs to fall.

Exactly. So then the ax falls and I give you the piece of crucial information of this is what we need to see done differently. And then I wrap it up in another positive piece of information, which you also don’t hear because your mind is down this rabbit Warren of, oh my goodness, how long have I been doing that?

Does everyone realise I do that? I didn’t even know that that was the wrong thing. I was even talking to someone yesterday about how I do that. Right? So we have not heard either of the good things,

Right. So yeah, it creates confusion and at the end of the day, when we are supporting people and creating, you know, high performing cultures, we wanna be teaching people what we want them to do or the behaviors we want them to display, rather than just the bits that we don’t wanna see.

Hmm.

So in handling that performance conversation rather than providing a feedback sandwich, what would you suggest instead?

Yeah, look, I think it’s, first of all, just having the conversation. So as we know what so many leaders get wrong in the world of feedback is just not having them. First and foremost. I think what underpins the opportunity to have feedback conversations is very much to make them part of the culture, part of the team vernacular, and that is really underpinned by psychological safety.

Mm.

And you know, you and I have had conversations about that. Is that something that you are hearing a lot about with your CEOs and founders?

Look, every time I speak to an HR professional, all I hear about is psychological safety at the moment. So what does that really mean, for an outstanding leader, especially in the relationship to the feedback and the feed forward as you call it? I mean, it seems it’s not as well understood as it’s as frequently Discussed.

Totally. So I’ve, I’ve just come up with an acronym to keep it easy. There’s heaps of research out there. If anyone wanted to Google psychological safety. There’s TED Talks and studies that Google have done, et cetera. But really, I think it just comes down to being fair. So we wanna connect as people.

We want people to feel seen and heard. And the acronym of fair, I think, is freedom to speak up. That we create a culture where people feel like they can share, they can bring ideas, even crazy ideas to the table. They can ask for help. They can disagree openly. So that’s that freedom to speak up. The A is for acceptance of mistakes.

We learn from mistakes. So often we shy away from doing the wrong thing, when really the more we can find the errors or find those boundaries and go, that was interesting. What are we gonna learn from that? How are we gonna bounce back? How, what systems do we need to make that better? And that almost like those errors get celebrated rather than hidden.

Is really important. The eye of fair is for inclusion and belonging. And I think one of the many gifts of Covid is us realizing the importance of belonging and feeling like we’re part of a team so that you know, everyone has an equal voice and that we can show up and it’s, it’s a tribe where we belong.

We don’t need to be the same, but everyone is accepted. In fact, better if we’re not the same. but our difference is accepted. And then lucky last, the R affair would be respect and trust. People feel valued, they feel welcomed. They feel like other people have their back no matter what. I think when we build these qualities in, then things like feed forward, can become just a way of communicating rather than people feeling roused on, like it should be exactly the opposite.

It shouldn’t be something that people almost have that visceral reaction to. It’s actually building a no surprises culture where we love talking about what we did. Right. What didn’t we do right, or what can we improve on? And it’s just part of the conversations that we have regularly.

So psychological safety. It’s great to have a, a new phrase and new addition to our, business. Bingo.

But you know, when you think about that acronym, fair, freedom to speak. acceptance, of mistakes, inclusion and belonging. respect and trust. Really it’s about just treating people like the way you’d like to be treated, right? I mean, it’s actually not that complex, but can, I I

It that though? Surprises? Yeah.

Yeah, so treating people how you’d like to be treated. I’m gonna build on that and say treating people how they would like to be treated.

Right. So a good example of that would be one of my clients is incredibly direct.

Yeah.

Like you’ve called me direct a couple of times as your coach. She is whole new levels of direct, so if she’s out there communicating to everyone and treating them the way she would like to be treated for most of her team, that feels like a punch in the face.

People go home, hurt. People leave the office feeling just a little bit broken when she’s like, I’m just treating them how I’d like to be treated. So I think it’s actually taking the time as a leader to understand how do different people tick? What gets the best out of different people? And even if we are looking at Fair as an acronym or any version of psych safety that you wanted to implement, ask your people.

I think we work too hard as leaders trying to guess what our people want to guess how they’re feeling to guess how we as a leader should be serving them and supporting them. Ask them. Say, if we were to, you know, I’m, I’m open to being vulnerable. What if we were to do a little quick quiz, an anonymous questionnaire just on these four categories, explain to them what they are and say, I would love to hear from each of you, score out a five, for example.

How fair do you think this team culture is, and what specifically do you personally need to see done differently to make it feel more. Inclusive or make mistakes more accepted, whatever it might be. I think we need to ask that in itself. Just that act makes it feel like a more psychologically safe environment.

Yeah,

And, and again, it continues to build on that. No surprises culture as well.

Mm-hmm. Yep. And no surprises goes for the person that’s finishing up on their probation to the half yearly or annual performance review. None of that should be surprises. I’m so irritated when I hear people call me and say, oh look, this has just happened. I’ve just got this news. and I’m on my second morning.

I’m like, well, that, were you surprised? That shouldn’t be a surprise. There should be regular conversations. People are having to give them the chance to perform differently. At the end of the day, no one wakes up in the morning and goes, oh, I’m gonna be a nightmare today. I’m gonna show up at work and just be utterly difficult to lead.

I’m gonna underperform. I’m gonna make my communication unclear. I’m just gonna be a nightmare. No one does that.

no. They just want to come to work and do a good job and then go home.

Correct. So if they’re not doing a good job, then either something’s happening in their personal life or there might be a clash of personalities, or they’re unclear on what the expectations are, or someone’s taught them what to do, not how to think. Could be a myriad of things, but we need to have the conversation.

Yeah. Yeah. And of course if they do get a surprise and we all. Don’t like surprises. That’s the reality. even at birthday parties, that’s just me. but you know, we’ve heard it too many times that, that when you end up with performance management. Then that surprise is going to typically result in a equal and a opposite reaction, whether it be a bullying claim or a harassment claim, or a discrim claim because you know, if, if you feel like you’ve been told and it’s unfair, then there’ll be some fight back.

There might be some, fight, flight, or freeze. but at the end of the day, it can often end up in one of those claims, and that tells me the feedback’s been handled badly. and that the staff member feels attacked, not coached.

Yeah.

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So what would be your number one tip for a leader who’s trying to create a psychologically safe culture?

Well, I would say to your point, it’s either been handled badly or not handled at

Yeah.

Right? And so then when it does come out, it’s not only a surprise, but it’s probably been delivered poorly. ’cause as we said earlier, resentments build up. and so therefore we end up in these uncomfortable, punchy conversations that are too direct, too brutal, not thought through, et cetera.

So. And then there’s resentment on both sides because the behavior’s been continuing unabated for a longer period of time than necessary because it wasn’t checked at the start.

Yes, so true. So I think if, you know, if a leader’s trying to create this psychologically safe environment, first of all, you know, as I said, just ask your people what would make it feel, feel more safe, how dedicate a team meeting to a conversation about psychological safety.What does that mean for us?

How well do we understand it? Run it through the fair, you know, acronym if you like. So I think having that conversation, but as a leader, I think just modeling vulnerability and really being curious. And this means admitting when you don’t know or owning your own mistakes or inviting input from the team.

it could even be admitting, you know, you might have made a decision yesterday and you could say, you know what? I’ve thought about that overnight. I made a call on that project and that was not good. I don’t think that was the right call. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how we do that differently or, you know, open up a sentence or a concept by saying, I might be missing something here, but what do you think?

’cause I don’t think this feels right. So really modeling those, what sometimes feels like courageous conversations if we as leaders are putting pressure on ourselves that we have to know everything always. So.

Mm-hmm. Okay.

So, how can leaders make these performance conversations lower risk, you know, more you know, more useful and and less stressful?

Yeah. I think that mindset shift that we spoke about earlier with that CFO of really, you know, performance conversations, they’re such a loaded phrase. And actually when you think about it, in most businesses, performance conversations are actually, lack of performance conversations, and they, so no wonder people don’t enjoy them when actually come back to what that phrase means.

It’s a performance conversation. It’s how are we talking about your performance and how you can perform even better. So I think really it’s about keeping them positive and really reinforcing, as well as noting the constructive, like, we don’t wanna. It ought to be Pollyanna and everything’s great if there are things that are not great, but we very much need to be highlighting the behaviors that we want to see more of.

It’s like, you know, when we talk to our kids, it’s not just don’t eat on the couch. What is more effective is eat at the table. Don’t just tell them what you don’t want them to do. Tell them what that desired behavior is that you want them to be taking or want them to be doing. So I think it really needs to become part of this culture of continuous improvement, which ultimately leads to high performance.

The more that we’re building, the more that we’re getting better at things, the better we as a team perform. So I just think the way to do that, keep it simple. Rather than, as we said earlier, once or twice a year, performance reviews, or even quarterly. I want them to be daily, weekly, end of a project, ad hoc, et cetera.

And so from my experience, the simpler way, simplest way of doing it is what our call three plus one, three things we did well. And one thing we should be doing different. But the difference here in terms of how I do it, is rather than telling people what to do, we are teaching them what to think. So we actually want, like let’s say you and I have just, what have we done?

We’ve done a pitch, right? We’ve just done a pitch to someone that we would really love to become their primary supplier. Right. So as we’re in the car leaving that with three plus one, but rather than me tell you what you did, I’ll say if you, let’s say you’re my direct report, I’ll say, John, that you know, that was great.

Obviously Chitty Chat, we’ll, we’ll do a high level debrief, but I’ll say, John, tell me what are the three things you think you did well? And you know this is coming because it’s part of our vernacular. We as a team, always three plus one, right? So you’ll say, I did A, B, and C. And I’ll say, great. Can I add something to that?

I think you did do all those things really well. I also really liked how when he, et cetera, et cetera. So I’m adding to your three plus one, but you are taking ownership for your development. And then I say, John, what’s the one thing that you should change next time? Or we should change next time you are thinking about it.

Yeah.

So you tell me what’s the thing that you think we could do differently, and then it’s my opportunity to either confirm that, add to it, et cetera. But we know that three plus one ratio is so important.

Hmm.

it almost takes those three deposits of positivity to offset the one constructive piece of information.

Yeah. I like exactly what you said about, you know, this, this frequency. it may be ad hoc, but it becoming part of the way we do things around here that we often and frequently have conversations, whether it be on a daily or weekly or,a project based or a milestone base or, or just noticing, you know, things are going well.

You know, that I think makes a, a massive difference. There’s been a lot of organisations, including I think Apple, who actually can, the six monthly and the annual reviews simply because it chewed up so much time, everybody dreaded it, and they actually got better results by actually having these, regular actionable con conversations throughout the year.

And it, it also reminds me of that phrase that you used before, the lack of performance conversation. It’s not a performance conversation, it’s a lack of performance conversation. And I dunno if you know it, but I had this amazing coach a few years ago and she sort of said, you know, when you point your finger at somebody else and tell them what they’re doing wrong.

There’s 1, 2, 3 fingers pointing back at you. And you know, I’ve sort of thought about that quite a bit. At the time. I thought she was just being a smart ass, but I realised, and I obviously respect her, that, that she had a lot going for it. And if we’re having a lack of performance conversation, there is a question for the reviewer to think about.

Okay. What’s been my lack of performance as well? Did I clearly state what my expectations were? Did I clearly empower this person? Did I clearly train them and prepare them for this thing? Did I clearly,get onto this when things were going astray quickly enough, you know, was my performance well as well as it should be as well?

And, and what can I, and what can we learn from that process?

Hmm.

And isn’t it easier to blame someone else than to have a good hard look at ourselves and, and. Okay, sure. It might be their lack of performance. They’re not meeting their KPIs, but as a leader, it is actually my responsibility that they meet their KPIs. So, what obstacles do I need to remove? Or what training do we need to do?

You know, where are the gaps and how can I support them? And look, we all know there will be times when you are leading a person who just simply isn’t gonna cut it. And that’s another conversation. But again, even if it ultimately ended up being a termination conversation, it shouldn’t be a surprise. It should be a, I think it’s time we freed up your future to do something more fitting as we’ve been discussing for some time.

so yeah, they’re just conversations. And I know when I’ve worked with clients before and we’ve, we’ve done workshops or embedded some systems or on courageous conversations, it’s not uncommon that they’ll come back and say, do you know what’s so funny? I’ve just remembered that we used to call these courageous conversations.

Now they’re just conversations.

Yeah, exactly.

We just have these conversations all the time, and it’s actually a much more harmonious team, not a combative team. That sounds like, oh, now we give one another feedback all the time. It’s like, yeah, because I care for you and I want to optimise your performance, and I’m owning my part in helping you to do that.

Absolutely. So you’ve worked with a lot of high performing

teams. What do you think it takes to maintain that high performance over time, especially when everybody’s actually doing well already?

don’t rest on your laurels. I mean, look at a premier sports team. Just because they won doesn’t mean that they. Stop training. If anything, they start training harder, because they’ve got something to defend. So I think high performing teams, make it part of their regular cadence to be having these performance conversations and performance being the operative word, not lack of performance.

I even worked with a client who had a very high performing team and they started underperforming and it was really because they took their foot off the performance. Pedal, you know, and over time this led to sort of disengagement and what have you. And, and I was speaking to the leader saying what changed, what happened?

And they said, well, previously we didn’t really need to give feedback because everything was going really well. And then now it’s dropped off and I’ve become frustrated. And so imagine being on that team, they already know they’re not performing as well as they were. But imagine the energy that would be coming out of that leader.

Who’s feeling frustrated at them now, but not necessarily telling them exactly what it was that they needed to be doing differently. ’cause they’ve never had those conversations. They had KPIs and as long as they were hitting them, everything was fine. And so we really worked together to like embed this feed forward type vernacular and make it part of the DNA at the team part of the language that they used all the time.

And a big part of that was just upping the frequency so that. That’s one happened a lot. It happened after meetings. It happened weekly, you know, as part of the weekly meeting, what were three things we did well and what are you gonna do differently next week? Friday they celebrated in their Friday catch up.

They celebrated what went wrong this week, and it literally was more of a Friday conversation than a Monday because it was a celebration. They made it overt that when things go wrong, that’s great. What are we learning? How are we building in new pieces? what else did we do? We did monthly check-ins. So what’s working, what’s not, and how can I be easier to work with?

I think that’s a really key question that leaders can be asking their people is, how can I be easier? To work with, work with, and that obviously you’ve got that psychologically safe culture where you can have those honest conversations. and then obviously the quarterly progress towards goals and how can I support, what do I need to move to make that easier for you?

And then six monthly reviews. But they were, they were really as much a,

career.

conversation by that stage as a performance conversation. How, you know, where are you headed? How can I help you evolve to that? Because they were talking about their performance all the time. So it wasn’t a performance review in the conventional, sense of that term.

Yeah. So when a leader is then looking at their team, you know, I’ve heard you talk a bit more a bit about the grandstand, concept. Can you share a little bit more about that in this context?

Yeah, so I, I say this to people coming on board if they’ve called me about coaching, and they’re like, what? What exactly is executive coaching for me? It’s hard to describe because every client is different and their needs are different, and my role is to be adaptable to meeting the needs of the individual, the overarching.

Metaphor that I would use is imagine you are there, you know, playing down on the field, whatever sport it is that you like to play. And we see this all the time where a player will kick the ball into the most ludicrous spot on the field, like straight into the hands of the opposition. You had a free spot with a key player over to the left, they didn’t take it right, and the crowd’s up in arms because we in the crowd are either up in the grandstand or watching on high def tv.

We have that higher perspective. Of seeing a different view to that player who at Eyeline, the view was to kick it over there. So I say to clients, join me on the grandstand. It’s about pressing pause on your game, bringing you up here. Let’s look down on the game. What’s the different perspective we see?

What are some tools that I can share with you, or different strategies or ways of thinking? How can you then use that? Great. Tap them on the back, press play, throw them back on the field. So we can all do that, you know, whether it’s with a coach, ideally, but even for ourselves to go, huh, what am I not seeing?

how, how do I need to lift my horizon basically, other than what is just in front of me?

Yeah, yeah. Interesting. So we’ve talked quite a bit about feedback, Linda. it begs the question, so what’s the hardest feedback that you’ve received?

It’s bound to come from you as my mentor. So many years you’ve, you’ve delivered lots of hard feedback over the

Um.Yeah, look, it’s a good question, and someone asked me this in a workshop last week when we were talking about feedback. They clearly wanted to put me on the spot in front of the room and, and he said, tell me what, what was the hardest feedback you’ve received?

And before I answered, and I am happy to answer, I’m not deflecting, but it did make me think about the difference between what’s the hardest feedback I’ve received versus what’s the worst feedback. I’ve received That sounds like the same question, but they’re actually vastly different. So for me, the hardest feedback I’ve received was, first of all, it was hard because it was true.

That’s what made it hard. well, I’ll share in full disclosure, it was that, and this was years ago. I am a recovering perfectionist. so back at that time, about 10 years ago, one of my team gave me the feedback that my perfectionism was making me hard to work with. They used the words high standards.

Hmm.

I pride myself on high standards, but my standards were so high they were probably verging on excessive. and so that was hard for people to live up to. Right? So that was hard feedback to receive. The worst feedback I’ve ever received is that feedback where you get where. No examples, no grounding comes as a surprise.

Delivered poorly feels like a punch in the face. That’s bad feedback because you are so thrown by it that you almost can’t take it on board. It’s not backed by anything. so that is unproductive. Or the even worse feedback is the feedback that I have never actually received. So the feedback of something that I’ve been doing that’s either irritating or or leading to lower performance, but no one’s told me,

Mm.

I call that the worst feedback.’cause if you don’t know it’s there, then you can’t even do anything about it.

Yeah. The blissfully ignorant is not blissful for long.

Exactly. So now I probably, that hard feedback conversation, I probably lean into that more. And hence the question of how can I be easier to work with? that’s exactly why I asked that question now. ’cause I, I wanna know about it early and I wanna be able to, to do something about it and just have the humility to go wow.

Sorry. That must have been hard. Thank you for letting me know. Gratitude is key, right? With receiving feedback.

Absolutely. And you know, there are so many, moments where you sort of swallow hard and think about, you know, do I or don’t, I, I remember in my second year at Deloitte, you know, I was a, a young whipper snapper who’d just come outta university and didn’t know.

Diddly Squat, frankly. And, uh, I had a manager, I’ll call him Fred, who was a fantastic technician. and he had a little office and because I was learning fast, I think, I spent quite a bit of time going in and out of his office,to get advice and, and get some direction and get some learnings and so on. and I. I

Realised that I was probably one of the only people who would be visiting him, to get advice.

And part of the reason for that was because of his body odor.

Mm. That’s a toughie.

And, you know, I, I thought about it for a couple of days as to whether or not I should say anything. And I, and I thought at the end of the day, I decided I’d want to know if it was me. And so I actually did go in and tell him, and it was some of the hardest feedback I’ve ever had to give.

I think actually I did a, remarkably good job of not,making it hurtful, but I’m sure he was probably still mortified ’cause I was mortified. But he knew and he resolved it and it was a relief. Yeah.

But, it had to be done. Totally. And if it’s not done, then everyone’s thinking the same thing.

Oh. The number of times, Linda, that I’ve. Been working with CEOs and they’ve made a judgment call on someone whose performance has been poor for six months, nine months, 18 months, 24 months, where they’ve finally gotten up, gotten to the point where they’ve realised that. Their aspirations for this person is far higher than that person’s aspirations for themselves.

And they’re not gonna make it. And they don’t have the initiative, they don’t have the drive, they’re not gonna make the standard. and they’ve had to have the final conversation to move them on. And within days. They’ll come back to me, the CEO, and say, I thought that, you know, the team would be really upset about it, but the overarching response was, what took you so long?

Yeah.

We’ve been carrying this person for months or years. What took you so long?

Totally. And the alternative to that, like same, same but different is the ultra high performer who is terrible for the culture,

Oh yes.

right? So KPIs, tick, tick, tick. They’re doing more sales than anyone’s ever done before, but they are destroying the, the DNA, the feel of the whole team. That is hard as a leader, especially if it’s your own business.

You’re like. But they’re making great sales. I can see what’s happening, but what’s the cost? Right? How many people do you have to lose or how many other people’s performance suffers? So that this one person can shine. So I think that is a super courageous move for a leader to actually do what has to be done.

And often we have to do the hard things, which is to move that person on. Well give them feedback and give them the opportunity to change, first of all, but sometimes. Especially if they are ignorant to the effect of their behavior. sometimes we do have to move them on despite their top performance, but what we often see is the tide then rises when they leave.

revenue doesn’t take, oh, it might take an initial dip, but then it, it’s amazing how quickly that recovers because everyone feels heard. They feel invested in, they realise that what we talk about in terms of our culture and our vision and what we stand for.

Is true. So people re-buy in and then their performance lifts.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I’m thinking immediately of, of five years ago working with, A CEO Samuel who had a sales guy. He was responsible for 25% of revenue. and he was toxic.

Mm-hmm.

it, you couldn’t describe it as anything else. He was toxic. He was arrogant. he treated the other staff, really disrespectfully and poorly.

and, and the reality is we anguished over it for, for a good six months. Interestingly, and I must admit, I, I never expected it to happen, but we did sit down with him and laid it all out for him carefully and constructively, and he actually was able to change. And it was, I’m astounded because most people, they’re pretty much the way they are.

but in this case, he really took it to, to heart. He actually was mortified that he, he didn’t see how much of an impact he was having on the team around him. And the, performance of the greater team lifted as a result because all of a sudden they weren’t feeling like they were being attacked or demeaned.

And this is the thing. So often we put these big conversations off for a really long time and what happens? We think they’re just gonna disappear. No. The longer we leave them, the bigger they become, right? So if we actually had the little conversation six months earlier of going, Hey, not sure if you’re aware.

but when you do this in meetings, like love your performance, know that you’re nailing sales, and let’s all celebrate that. Hey, you might just wanna be aware that when you say this in meetings, have you noticed. The impact of that on other people. And I’m just gonna flag it for you ’cause I would love for you to see it for yourself.

When you say this, notice what happens to people’s body language in the room. Notice the others seem to like it or not. ’cause again, we’re teaching them how to think

Yeah.

and just saying, it sucks when you do that is you want them going, oh, interesting. People don’t like that.

Yeah. And often, you know, starting a conversation about, actually, you know what, I find it really difficult to have this conversation with you, but because I care about your performance and your ongoing, development, I really want to have this conversation with you.

Yes,

and that is the intersection that we need to aim for is where we can really care for a person that is the intention behind our comments, and therefore we have to challenge them for their performance. I think we can tend to be skewed either one way or the other. We care so much we don’t wanna upset them. Anything at all, or we are so determined to challenge ’cause we’ve learned these new feedback skills, but we don’t have the care for that person anymore because we’ve left it too long and.

Too much resentment’s built.

Correct. And that’s where it shows up as just nasty really. And so we need to catch it at the gate where it’s those two together.

And I love, and feel free to correct me if I haven’t got this right, but Adam Grant another one of our fan club, he says, I’m going to, these comments are to challenge you because I have really high expectations, but I’m confident that you are going to meet them.

Yes, those 19 words.

Words to that effect. I can’t exact remember his exact quote, but yeah, it’s like this.

This comment’s hard and it’s gonna be hard for you to achieve, but I’m absolutely confident that you will achieve it.

Mm mm, absolutely.

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So, Linda, final question. So when you are speaking with a CEO or a business founder, what would be the #CriticalFewActions™ that they could start doing tomorrow if they did Nothing else that would help them deliver on their vision.

There would be so many that they would be working with you on, presumably. But I’d say as leaders, you know, we’ve all heard the saying, it’s not just about working on the business, it’s about working in the business. Both essential, but I think it’s also really important to work on yourself. So we’re working in the business, we’re working on the business, and we are working on ourselves as leaders.

And I think leadership is not a destination. I don’t think we ever achieve leadership excellence. I think it’s a pursuit. That we need to keep investing in ourselves. We need to keep evolving. It takes a lot of courage and self-confidence to do the things that we’ve talked about today, to be vulnerable, to have those hard conversations that it’s just easier not to have.

and so I would say obviously executive coaching and that grandstand time is a really great way for leaders to. Challenge their own performance and keep developing and growing and being aware of how their performance also affects their team. Because it would take a very brave employee to say to their, to their boss that their performance sucks.

But a coach can say that and always obviously coming from a place of great love as you have experienced firsthand, we’ve had to have some, some courageous conversations, but it’s always coming from that place of care. Right, and from that grandstand, and so we, you know, we do it through executive coaching.

We also run a lot of team workshops where we’re actually embedding these sorts of languages, but it’s less about training. Here’s the three steps to feed forward. It’s more about creating that safe space in the room for a team to have these real conversations of what are we doing well, but what’s getting in our way?

What are the conversations that we need to be having that we’re not? So I would say definitely working on yourself as a leader and then also looking at what’s the impact of that on the team and how can you be supporting the team, so that it’s not just a top down approach. It’s actually a new language that we all adopt a new way of being.

Hmm. Well, Linda, you’ve mentioned Adam Grant and a, and, um, brown and a few others. Really important thought leaders in this space. perhaps you could provide me, with some of your favorites videos or books to As, and we can actually include those in the show notes for people to have a look at

Love to

there’s, I know how much research you do on everything that you do, and I think it would be, a real treasure trove to be able to share.

Yeah, absolutely. That would be a pleasure.

Fantastic. Linda Murray, it

Always, it’s been an absolute delight to talk to you and our thoughts around leadership. thank you so much for time. Thank you, John Downes.

Thanks for listening to the #CriticalFewActions™ podcast. Don’t forget to subscribe and grab the downloadables from the show notes. And if you found this episode helpful, I’d really appreciate it if you share it with your peers and your team. Stay focused at take action.

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