BL 55: Negative Feedback

Bold Leadership podcast

Negative feedback may be the most important feedback you ever receive as a leader so long as there is a proposed solution. In this episode, we discuss This is Why Your Boss Deserves Your Negative Feedback by Jane Claire Hervey. The article is shared below.

This Is Why Your Boss Deserves Your Negative Feedback
Jane Claire Hervey, WOMEN@FORBES

I romanticize my work. I love to solve problems. I want to be the change I wish to see in the world. (I'm also a millennial—what can I say?)
So, when I started my first full-time job at a digital marketing firm, I had high expectations. I was ready to learn, maximize my role and help the company drive revenue. When I noticed a problem within our operations, I pointed it out. If I thought there were areas in which we could improve, I spoke up. If I had a good idea, I gave it. But, more often than not, this feedback was met with silence and inaction, and over time I began to contribute less and less. When I left the company after three years, the CEO was surprised. "I didn't see this coming," he said.

That stumped me. I had been vocal about my needs, pointed out gaps in our infrastructure and nothing had ever changed. Wouldn't my exit be expected?
It turns out I'm not the only one with this experience. According to Claire Lew, the CEO of Know Your Company, this phenomenon is common—and it's the reason she's got a job today.

Before Lew started Know Your Company, a software tool that helps business owners collect and utilize feedback, Lew also hated her job. She couldn’t give feedback to her boss, and the problem frustrated her so much that she quit to find a fix. She launched a consulting agency to help CEOs build better work cultures, and surprisingly one of her first clients, Basecamp, happened to be working on a software prototype for feedback. Together, they launched Know Your Company as a product in 2013, and Lew became the project's CEO in 2014. Since, Know Your Company has served more than 15,000 people in 25 countries.

A couple of weeks ago, I caught Lew's talk on building feedback loops at the Culturati Summit in Austin, Texas and I immediately had a million questions: How do we build work cultures within our economy that better prioritize women and healthy lifestyles? How can we empower employees to give negative feedback? What can we do better—as bosses, as leaders, as employees—to turn problems into solutions?

In this interview, Lew and I thankfully get to some potential answers.

Jane Claire Hervey: Who are you and what do you do?

Claire Lew: I’m the CEO of Know Your Company, a software tool that helps leaders create more open, honest environments by getting ongoing employee feedback. We also founded an online leadership community called The Watercooler, with 500+ managers and executives from all over the world.

Hervey: There’s a lot of pressure on women and people of color to advocate for themselves and negotiate harder to claim their seat at the table. The mindset behind Know Your Company implies that dismantling the power dynamic that may hold certain employees back is on the CEO/leadership team. What do you have to say to the former? What may be misleading about that way of thinking?
Lew: Asking women and minorities to advocate and negotiate for their seat at the table is like saying that people who get mugged on the street should take self-defense classes or carry a gun on them. It’s placing the burden of the problem on the victim, instead of addressing the underlying root cause of the problem. The problem is the work environment and culture—not the lack of action on the part of women and minorities. On top of that, the fact is that negotiating compensation is empirically disadvantageous to women and minorities. So negotiating for equal pay, let alone a seat at the table, has a ton of deeply entrenched hurdles around it.

Hervey: How can start-ups, small businesses and lean creativ