Making feedback a habit: What one company does well and where they're still working
When I joined Stripe as COO in 2014, there was a strong—sometimes too strong—culture of commenting on one another’s work, and a lot of transparency on every piece of work product to enable this. A lot of the feedback was quite direct and lived in written comments and Slack $WORK messages, which could feel abrupt and intimidating for new people. Over time, both the amount of work product a person can absorb and the amount of time others have to comment on it has waned.
Companies often invest in their formal review processes but forget to examine their culture of informal feedback: the one-off pieces of advice or observations that people offer to help their colleagues and reports in their day-to-day work. But I believe a culture of informal feedback is just as important as the formal review process. It gives people an opportunity to grow and improve at a day-to-day level and sets expectations ahead of any formal performance review.
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But one practice that Stripe has held onto is before anything is sent out to a large group, the whole company, or anyone externally, we test the content with a small group for feedback. And the people who do this the most are the CEO and the president: the co-founders. This sets the example for everyone, from leaders onward. It transmits the value of humility, collaboration, and respect for the time that the reader or viewer might take to absorb the content once you send it out into the world.
What Stripe does less well is bidirectional, informal feedback. We haven’t cultivated a fully open culture where people frequently speak up and say something constructive without necessarily being asked. I can attribute that to fewer examples set by leaders, to our rapid growth, and to the fact that new folks lack the confidence to share feedback, or perhaps to our emphasis on generosity and kindness to one another. (Again, I think feedback is a kindness, but not everyone does.) No matter the cause, it’s something for us to work on.
During my time managing teams at Google $GOOGL and Stripe, I developed a set of principles for building that culture of informal—but always constructive, empathetic, and growth-oriented—feedback. If your company hasn’t built the strong muscles needed for informal feedback, the formal review process can feel very destabilizing, and we miss the chance to improve the day-to-day, not just the year-to-year.
To build a healthy feedback culture, model the behavior you want to instill in both team meetings and 1:1s. “Praise publicly and criticize privately” is a good rule of thumb here. However, I make a distinction between team and individual feedback. Often, team feedback—that is, feedback about the performance of the team—is data-driven and can be presented as an honest assessment of how things are going.
Your team should come to expect that you’ll tell them honestly how you think they performed last quarter or whether a project was well executed. Talking about team performance publicly, focusing on what you all learned and what the team can do differently to improve, helps build an environment of learning and open feedback.
You should personally solicit and welcome feedback, especially when you’re still setting the tone of a working relationship, like when you’ve just started managing a new team or employee. For example, if you’ve just tried out a new meeting format, set the expectation up front that you want people to share feedback on how the meeting went. If your team already feels comfortable doing this, you could devote a portion of the meeting to going around the room and asking for feedback. If the team hasn’t built that norm yet, you can also follow up privately with individuals.
Since the best way to create a culture of feedback is to ask for feedback yourself, here are some pointers on how to do that openly and often:
Claire Hughes Johnson is one of Forbes’ ‘Self-Made Women’ of 2022, who is known for her work as VP at Google and COO at Stripe. Her new book Scaling People is a practical and empathetic guide for being an effective leader and manager in a high-growth environment. Including actionable strategies for interviewing, navigating crises, and running a truly successful meeting, it reveals exactly how to build a company that’s set for long-term success. She also includes valuable tips for expanding your own career.
