3 Reasons Why Your Team Has Stopped Giving Honest Feedback

An email arrived this summer with the subject line “Magic Key Holder, your Magic Key pass expires in one month.” It invited me to renew before my expiration date of Sept. 17.

I’ve been a pass holder since 2018, first through the Annual Passport program and then through Magic Key, which replaced it in 2021. This past year I held the Inspire Key, the top tier, at $1,749. I’ve stayed at Disney’s Grand Californian. I’ve booked guided tours at both Disneyland and Walt Disney World. I’ve eaten and shopped in the parks.

I decided more than six months ago that I wasn’t renewing my pass. My last visit was December 20. I still love Disneyland, and I plan to go once a year with my parents.

The part of the email that stayed with me was the timing. It was tied to a date on my contract. It had nothing to do with anything I did or stopped doing. If they had solicited my feedback earlier and not just assumed I would renew my pass, they might have changed my mind.

In my work coaching tech leaders, I watch the same thing happen with feedback. Leaders build a feedback process, put it on a schedule and receive information too late to actually act upon it. Here are three timing problems to fix if you want honest feedback from your team while you can still use it.

Ask hard questions while plans can still change

One of my clients found out days before his latest product launch that his team wasn’t going to hit their deadline. He came to our session frustrated with them for not telling him sooner. I asked what he had done to create a way for them to tell him the launch was falling behind schedule.

He had been checking in, but the problem was when. He asked for updates late in the cycle — after the plan was already set — because that was his habit, and he accepted what he heard at face value because it matched what he expected. He didn’t give his team any other way to raise a concern before it became a crisis.

We changed his check-in cadence. He started checking in earlier, well before the plan was locked in, and he stopped assuming projects would take the length of time he had in his head, asking his direct reports directly instead.

Most of his launches have gone out on time since. For the ones that fell behind, he knew far enough in advance to get ahead of disaster.

More importantly, he avoided having to tell his executive team and the customer that he was going to be late, which was the part that frustrated him most.

Don’t make feedback a once-a-year thing

Years ago, a boss of mine asked our department to complete a written feedback exercise on every colleague. I was on my way out the door at the time, so I declined to participate. Formal feedback about people I was leaving, delivered in my final week, wasn’t going to change anything for them. I also didn’t want their last impression of me to be a critique that was headed for their employee file.

The exercise was reasonable. My issue was the timing, since the results would land after I was gone.

Annual reviews and exit surveys work the same way. If you wait until your staff submits a form in June or December, you’ll just get a summary of decisions people have already made, and you’ll have no way to change course.

You have to ask yourself whether what you learn will still change the outcome. When the answer is no, you’re just keeping records.

Set expectations before problems arise

Another client was promoted multiple times, from senior engineer to vice president. His title kept changing, but the way people treated him stayed where he started. He noticed it most when former peers, now his direct reports, kept taking questions to his boss instead of to him.

We decided that it was best for him to set up a series of direct conversations with each person now reporting to him. He opened with language like this: “I recognize our working relationship has shifted. In this capacity, I need to give you feedback as your manager rather than as a peer. How would you like to receive that feedback?”