“Looks good to me” is a lazy default: Why managers should give feedback on work output
If you’re not regularly giving feedback on work product, you’re missing a valuable opportunity to invest in your team and set a higher bar.
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Read time: 5 minutes
One of my former direct reports came from a FAANG company.
After a few months of working together, they told me: “I learned more from you in three months than I did from my previous manager in five years. When I sent them anything to review, they almost always said ‘looks good.’ This is the first time I’ve ever gotten such detailed feedback.”
That conversation stuck with me because it revealed something kind of terrifying:
Every time you say “looks good” about work that isn’t actually good, your team’s standards drop a little.
It’s subtle, which is why it’s insidious.
A strategy doc that’s not a strategy doc, but a list of tactics with no throughline or point of view. Looks good, let’s ship it.
A customer email that’s not persuasive, but checks a box. Looks good, let’s ship it.
A project proposal with gaps in logic and weird assumptions. Looks good, let’s ship it.
The work you label “good enough” today becomes your team’s new standard tomorrow. Your bar for quality gradually lowers, one “looks good” at a time.
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Managers typically say “looks good” for one of two reasons:
1. You care about quality, but it’s faster to fix the work yourself.
“I'll just make these changes tonight.”
“It’s easier to do it myself than explain what needs work.”
“It will take too long to teach my direct report why this is mediocre.”
This approach means you get stuck owning IC work, even if you technically have direct reports.
By the time you finish redoing your team’s work, you have no energy left to zoom out, look ahead beyond this week, or think about strategic initiatives.
2. You don’t prioritize quality, so you think the work is fine as is.
“We’re prioritizing speed over quality.”
“Done is better than perfect.”
“It’s not worth the time to make this better.”
This approach normalizes mediocrity in the name of efficiency. Your team thinks they’re moving fast and ticking all the boxes…except they’re executing poorly at each step. Unsurprisingly, they don’t get the results they’re aiming for. (Also, if you don’t prioritize quality, you can’t complain that your team doesn’t prioritize quality.)
Every time you have an automatic response of “looks good,” you’re training your team to think less deeply about their work and depend on you to be their safety net.
This is where we managers need to be intellectually honest. Most of us avoid giving real feedback not because we’re too busy, but because it’s hard.
It takes effort to identify why the document/copy/analysis/design isn’t landing, figure out how to fix it, share what great looks like, and explain this to your direct report.
This not only takes work, but can feel fraught with downside risk—risk that your direct report takes the feedback poorly and gets upset, offended, or wants to argue.
But here’s the thing:
You either invest the time to train your team, or you take a few hours every day to correct their work forever.
Pick your poison.
In the short term, giving feedback takes a bit longer. In the long term, training your team eventually makes your life easier and energizes your high performers.
I love this quote from Frank Slootman, former CEO of ServiceNow and Snowflake:
There is performance upside everywhere. As a leader, your opportunity is to reset in each of these dimensions. You do it in every single conversation, meeting, and encounter. You look for and exploit every single opportunity to step up the pace, expect a higher quality outcome... Yes, it is confrontational. That is pretty much what CEOs do all the time: confront people, issues and situations.
In my experience, giving feedback on a regular basis is THE best way to “confront” your team positively and productively. I’ve written more on how to give specific, actionable feedback that drives behavior change.
To be clear, no one expects you to give detailed feedback on everything.
But you should be giving detailed feedback on SOME THINGS.
Start by sharing one piece of feedback that is most likely to make the biggest difference in improving the work product in front of you.
When you review a draft, vocalize what you notice—don’t just keep it in your head.
You can acknowledge your team’s effort without resorting to empty niceties, and while pushing them to do even better. Try saying, “This was a great start. To make it even stronger, [insert feedback].”
These tactics can take as fast as 5-10 minutes to do.
Another point to clarify: The takeaway is not “never say looks good.” If you genuinely believe the work output is strong, you should say so. I say ‘looks good’ to my team all the time—WHEN I MEAN IT.
My point is: Don’t say looks good (or anything, really) as a thoughtless default. Whatever you say, you should mean it.
What to do today
The next time your direct report sends you something to review, ask yourself:
Do I REALLY think this looks good?
What would make this excellent?
What did they do well, and what could they improve?
What’s one piece of feedback that will make the biggest impact in improving this?
What’s something I’m noticing, that I can point out so my direct report learns to see what I’m seeing?
You raise standards not by giving a big inspiring speech once a year.
You raise standards the same way most change happens: by deciding this is worth doing, showing up, and reinforcing the standard every day. There is no shortcut.
If you want your team to have higher standards, that starts with updating your default response when a piece of work comes across your desk.
Which question above jumps out for you? 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
My friend Anton Zaides wrote a post riffing on some of my most popular frameworks. I love the real-life stories he shares about when he did (or didn’t!) put these principles into practice, and what he learned. He wrote about these six topics—I’ve linked the original posts below:
For example, I talk about the importance of using accurate language. Check out his story about this:
Until a few years ago, I didn’t even know my overconfidence annoyed people.
Then one day we were waiting for a bus with a coworker. 2 buses arrived, numbers 40 and 240. He said “Let’s get number 40, that’s my usual one”, but I insisted: “240 will get us there faster”.
He listened to me. Turns out 240 was not even in the right direction...
I laughed about it, but he said seriously: “You know Anton, you do that A LOT. You are very sure about everything. Most of the time you are right, but in the 10% you are wrong, it’s very annoying. If you had given me even a little clue you are not 100% sure, I would have insisted on my opinion.”
Since then I have tried hard to re-evaluate my confidence in things before I speak, and put in proper caveats.
Full post is here:
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Feedback isn't just a pain in the ass, it's friction and friction is uncomfortable. It's even more uncomfortable working remotely. We need to push our teams and ourselves into the discomfort - saying hard things, giving real feedback - or as you said, our standards will continue to plummet. Thanks for sharing this!
One key point I would add: If, as a manager, I find myself genuinely saying "looks good" (i.e. the work meets or exceeds my high standards), I will encourage this team member to use their judgement and skip running it past me next time. The best thing is when I see good doc, launch announcement, etc FYI, it is great and took zero of my time on reviewing. If I am not the bottleneck, customer benefits faster.