The Three Types of Feedback
In thousands of hours of coaching founders, I’ve discovered that there are only three kinds of feedback any founder ever needs to drive performance or correct behavior. Three types of communication that can help you achieve anything within your team, three scripts to memorize to help you do anything as a people manager. This is a magical insight. Three skills that will make you superhuman.
The three kinds of feedback every founder needs to learn (before headcount 20) are: Performance feedback, Relationship Feedback, and Culture Feedback. Each is briefly described below, and each will soon have its own in-depth guide so you can be a master manager in no time.
Performance Feedback
This is what most people think of when they think of ‘feedback.’ Performance feedback is contains two parts: your expectations and your objective, reality-based observations of your employee or cofounder’s performance (e.g. supporting data). It answers the question, “Is this person achieving the goals and functions of their role as I’ve defined them?” and seeks to eliminate any delta between their performance and your expecatation. It’s focused exclusively on the tasks as they’re being performed, not the person’s character, personality, or your hypothesis for why they are/aren’t being successful.
Performance feedback is one of the first skills every founder should learn, as soon as you’ve decided on cofounders and picked a direction. You should practice giving/receiving performance feedback on your cofounders so you’re always pushing one another to be better (the Founder Sync is a great venue for it), and you should master this skill by the time your headcount reaches 12. It’s an evergreen skill you’ll all re-use forever.
The goal of performance feedback is to 1/ use your objective observations of the other person’s performance to bring the other person into your reality, and 2/ to co-create a plan that will eliminate any delta between their performance and your expectation. The most basic formula for giving performance feedback is: name observations + name expectations + define a plan together.
Here’s what performance feedback can sound like:
“I noticed you’ve been late to ship your xfeature in the last 2 sprints. Going forward, we’ll need you to do everything possible to ship on time because velocity is how we’ll win the market. Let’s talk about what you might need to achieve that.”
“I’m noticing a level of detail has been missing from your output - I had to correct a number of misspelled words in your last sales deck and refine the overall design to bring it up to standard, and I’m also noticing that your comments in our sales sync are missing deep product knowledge. I’ll need you to make sure everything that passes through your review is error-free to reflect our brand, and that you understand the product as deeply as I do so you can own our sales motion. Talk to me about what’s going on such that you’re missing what you are, and let’s figure out how to get you running at full speed.”
Relationship Feedback
Relationship feedback is a discussion about your experience in relationship with someone, with a goal of ensuring an open, high-trust connection between you and your cofounder. Performance feedback improves the work. Relationship feedback improves the relationship. It’s a discussion of your subjective experience, the emotions you notice feeling in your end of the relationship, the amount of trust you feel (or don’t), your communication styles and preferences, the impact the other person is having on you and your work, and your needs. Relationship feedback is a pointed and focused type of Level 3 Conversation.
It’s important to edit relationship feedback, and I encourage giving relationship feedback only about the aspects of your experience that are relevant to your performance, otherwise you’ll run the risk of accidentally starting a founder therapy clinic when you meant to start a startup. Editing is important - relationship feedback is effective when your feelings and observations are framed as getting in the way of your execution or as blocking the trust you feel in your cofounder. Anchoring relationship feedback into these two things makes it relevant. It makes your cofounder care about how you’re feeling too. If it’s not, then your relationship feedback will likely be perceived as drama and a waste of time which means your cofounder will get frustrated at you and your problems will never be solved.
Relationship feedback is one of the first skills every founder should learn (along with performance feedback), but I recommend holding off on practicing it until you’ve chosen a strategy and started executing. If you try to build this skill before you start building your product, your startup will die of drama: It’s a failure mode when early-stage founders spend too much time airing grievances and talking about the relationship when the only thing that will save you is building a better product. Energy is an early-stage startup’s most valuable resource and we don’t want you to waste it. And remember, framing relationship feedback in terms of performance and trust are the keys to making it effective. You can’t say, ‘this thing going on in our relationship is making my job harder’ if you don’t know what your job is yet.
Relationship feedback is often given because someone’s performance is so bad that it’s started to affect your trust in them.
Here’s what relationship feedback can sound like:
“When you give me feedback that’s this prescriptive, it feels like you’re giving me authoritarian dictates. I find it frustrating and demotivating to the max - it feels like you don’t trust me to do things my own way and it makes me not want to work with you at all. I want you to understand how you’re coming across because this is damaging my relationship with you. Going forward please be explicit when you’re giving me feedback that you feel strongly about, and please tell me why so we can talk about it as equal partners. Otherwise I’m going to treat all of your feedback as a suggestion instead of an instruction.”
“I’ve had multiple conversations with you asking you to meet the expectations we’ve set for your role. Unfortunately I’m finding that you still haven’t met my expectations and unfortunately given the new goals we’ve set for the team this year, I no longer trust that you’ll be able to succeed in the timeline that we have.”
“We’ve never really resolved our conversation about moving our headquarters to SF. I’m noticing how much this makes me worried that you’re not actually fully committed to our startup, and I’m noticing that I’m not delegating big projects to you anymore because I’m scared you won’t be around to finish them. I need to fully trust you - let’s revisit this conversation and finally put it to bed so our working relationship feels more solid to me.”
“I’m noticing that when I don’t hear back from you about critical projects, that I don’t trust that you’re executing on them. I need to trust that you can be picking up the balls I’m throwing your way - until we’ve launched, I need you to reply to me within 24 hours max (within 12 hours is better) so I know we’re still on track. I’m running PM and responsible for making sure every team’s timelines are in lockstep - please help me make my job easier.”
Relationship feedback is ignored at a founding teams’ peril. Remember, the purpose of it is to create and ensure an open working relationship between you and your cofounder - a relationship free of relationship debt. So if you don’t have the skills to talk about what you’re experiencing and needing to make your relationship better, you can’t ever improve your relationship, minimize conflict, fill in communication gaps, negotiate, or build trust when it (naturally) gets depleted. If another founding team in your same vertical is mastering this skill and you’re not, their relationship will survive when yours withers - and so will their startup.
Relationship feedback is most often given between cofounders, and given less frequently to senior team members, execs, or other key hires in the startup.
Culture Feedback
When an employee’s performance is good but they’re problematic to work with, you’ll want to give them “culture feedback.” Culture feedback tells an employee what about their behavior or communication style is unwanted, and names a cultural value as the preferred way they operate instead. It makes your startup’s values actionable by using them as a management tool. Culture feedback aligns your team’s behavior and communication with your startup’s values, which minimizes friction and conflict among the team, tamps out undesired behavior, corrects decisionmaking, and protects morale.
Founders should learn how to give this type of feedback when their headcount is around ~12 because this is the size that “management problems” first start appearing. To be effective, you’ll need to define and launch v1 of your startup’s cultural values beforehand, so you have a common reference point going into these conversations. You can protect against needing to give culture feedback by making sure your hiring process explicitly assesses for culture fit.
Culture feedback communicates that performance isn’t the only thing required to be successful at your startup - employees need to be a good culture fit too, otherwise you’ll let them go. The most valuable thing culture feedback gives founders is relief because it makes undesired, stressful behavior and communication styles objectively unwanted, rather than subjective.
Here’s what culture feedback can sound like:
“David, one thing I’ve noticed in the way you work is that you often send me a list of reasons why you’re blocked and stuck in moving forward - this happened most recently in [example project.]. The impact of this is that me and other team members are having to set aside our priorities to answer your questions and help you troubleshoot which slows us down and isn’t efficient. One of our values is ‘relentless pursuit’ and this means that we expect everyone to think creatively, use [the resources available], and aggressively unblock themselves so we can all keep moving quickly toward [goal]. Going forward, I need for you to embody this value by unblocking yourself without needing to pull others in. Let’s figure out together what you need in order to do that, and we’ll check in again two weeks from now to make sure you’re on track.”
“Vera, your raw talent and what you’ve delivered for us is incredible. But I notice that I often experience you as defensive in our conversations, which shuts the conversation down. When I’m asking questions to try to understand what’s going on in your org so I can be the most helpful, it feels adversarial and I notice you shifting accountability. It comes across as if you’re blaming others for problems instead of remembering that we’re on the same team and all our problems are shared. I’ve gotten feedback from others on the team that they experience you in this same way and it’s gotten to the point that people are cutting you out of conversations and workflows because they imagine the work will get done faster and easier without you. I imagine this is really tough to hear, and I imagine this isn’t at all what you want, which is why I’m bringing it to your attention. One of our cultural values is ‘open’ and I need to see you embodying that more going forward. As strong as your performance is, in order to be really successful here you also need to have strong working relationships with everyone on the team. Being ‘open’ would look like [example a], [example b], example [c]. Let’s talk about what this will look like for you starting today, and I also want to make sure we check in about it in a few weeks to make sure your openness is coming across to the team and feeling good for you.”
“Sonny, one of the things I want to talk with you about today is our cultural value of “right-sized debate.” As you know, this value is all about challenging and debating one another when it’s productive and drives us all toward the best solution, and knowing when to drop the challenge when it’s no longer productive so we can keep moving. I’ve noticed in the last handful of shape-ups that you’ve kept the debate going beyond the meeting after we’ve all already agreed on the path forward, sometimes even extending into Slack hours after the meeting. ‘Attention’ is one of our team’s most valuable resources right now, and your tendency to do this isn’t in line with ‘right-sized debate.’ Going forward I need you to keep an eye on this because right now, you’re taking our collective energy away from the decision we’ve all already made and we can’t have this kind of inefficiency. Is that clear?”
