How I give high-quality feedback quickly
Giving feedback is an investment that scales your judgment across your organization. Here's how to give useful feedback in as little as 1-2 hours per week.
👋 Hey, it’s Wes. Welcome to my weekly newsletter on managing up, leading teams, and standing out as a higher performer. For more, check out my intensive course on Executive Communication & Influence.
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Most leaders know sharing feedback is extremely high ROI, but there’s one problem:
Time.
I often hear clients ask, “Is there a way to give feedback that's relatively fast? How do I start?”
Luckily, yes. You can give high-quality AND fast feedback in as little as 1-2 hours per week, and the results will compound.
When I say “feedback,” I say this broadly to include: evaluating assets, shaping decisions, explaining your thought process behind a strategy, being a thought partner, critiquing write-ups, improving positioning, editing content, tightening a proposal, improving product flows, etc.
When done thoughtfully, this investment scales your judgment across the organization. You teach your team to notice what you notice.
As a founder, I chose to invest heavily in feedback—about 15 hours per week, which comes out to 3 hours/day.
This meant my team needed less guidance over time, they felt energized from getting real feedback (vs an automatic “looks good to me”)—which allowed us to be a scrappy team that punched above our weight class.
But you don’t need to be extreme to see results. The principles below will work even if you only have 1 hour per week.
Here are four ways to make your feedback both high-quality AND fast.
⛑️ Welcome and thanks for being here. If you want to set an even higher bar for your team, I typically work with tech leaders on executive communication, managing up, and managing a team of ambitious ICs.
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1. Give feedback on one thing that will make the biggest difference.
Give feedback on the 20% of work output that will make the biggest impact.
Identify one highly-leveraged piece of feedback
Show them how to fix it in one place, in detail
Have them apply that logic to the rest of the document
This teaches your team the skill of pattern matching. You’re not spelling everything out for them—you’re giving them a chance to practice applying what you just shared.
Instead of fixing the whole document, you save yourself time AND teach them how to fish.
When they bring you a stronger updated version, then you can mention the next most highly-leveraged piece of feedback.
The part I love about this approach is I’m able to give detailed feedback—and still be highly leveraged—because I’m not editing at the same level of detail equally across the whole document.
FWIW I do the opposite too: I give edits on an entire document in one sitting—the “suggested edits” and comments in Google Docs looks like a war zone. In this post, though, I’m focusing on ways to be as highly leveraged as possible. This usually means prioritizing and triaging feedback.
2. Don’t jump straight into line edits.
If what you get is drastically different from what you expected, give structural feedback first.
Here’s why: if you start with line edits, you might trim entire paragraphs later—so your line edits are wasted. Take a step back to see if the underlying premise and strategy itself might be off-base.
Start with foundational questions like, Should we be doing this at all? Should we do it in this way? Of all the things we could do, why should we do this?
Once your direct report sends back a revised version with the right strategy, then you can give line edits.
Here are examples of structural feedback:
“This team-wide strategy doc doesn't have enough signposting, so as a reader, I can't tell where you're going. For example, [insert before and after that illustrates this concept]. This doc would be a lot clearer if you applied that throughout. If you want to take another stab, I can review your updated draft.”
Another example:
“This email is too much about logistics, not enough about sales. For example, you jump straight into logistics like X, Y, Z, but the prospect isn't sold yet on why to take action in the first place. We need to get them excited about this, then we can share details. Let's have you take another stab with this in mind, then I can review."
Notice how I didn't give line edits right away. I gave one round of high-level feedback first, which can take as little as 5-10 minutes.
This is better for me because it saves time. It’s better for my direct report because they get the right level of feedback at the right time.
If the work output is in line with my expectations, I will go straight into giving line edits. This is about an order of operations: if we’re aligned, then I can move to the next piece, which might include line editing to tighten the execution.
3. You don’t need to write out all your feedback.
Giving written feedback is giving feedback on hard mode. It might take 30 minutes to write coherently what you can say in 3 minutes out loud.
The benefit of written feedback is it's highly scalable. But the downside is it takes time to write well, and realistically, you might not have that bandwidth. Don’t let that stop you from giving feedback.
You have a variety of tools at your disposal: voice notes, Looms, phone calls, etc. Not everything needs to be written in order to be useful for your recipient.
Fun fact: many Maven employees are in the top 10-15% of Loom users. One employee is in the top 3% of Loom users. We have an intentionally asynchronous company culture, so tools like this are super helpful for sharing high-fidelity feedback while allowing recipients to review when it's convenient for them.
Loom is most useful for anything with a visual component. You're walking someone through what you see on your screen and adding voiceover. You can pull on more levers (tone of voice, visuals, pointing with your mouse) to help convey meaning.
To be clear, this does not mean you should give vague verbal feedback while sharing your screen. You should still aim to give feedback that's TACS—tactical, actionable, concrete, and specific—even if the feedback isn’t written.
4. Balance what’s easy for you (feedback giver) and easy for them (feedback receiver).
You want to make feedback easy for your recipient to take action on, but don’t burn yourself out.
Your direct reports would rather have you give feedback in the format you prefer than not get any at all. So above all, keep the process sustainable, so you can do it long enough to see your efforts come to fruition.
Which of these techniques are you most excited to try? Hit reply because I’d love to hear from you.
Thanks for being here, and I’ll see you next Wednesday at 8am ET.
Wes
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The structural feedback before line edits is something I’ve implemented since I first read about it in the Maven coach training. Line edits are the low hanging fruit so they’re easier to jump on, that was something I had to unlearn.
Next up will be quickly zeroing in on the 20% with the most impact in lieu of spending too much time covering everything in one go, which seems like an opportunity to apply the structural feedback approach to other mediums.
Thanks for sharing!