Welcome to module five, how to give feedback to your boss? One of the most nerve wracking things you can do, as well as try to understand is, how do you give your boss feedback that helps him or her improve? So much of it is based upon how you do it, understanding your boss's personality, temperament, level of trust you to have to not only have frank conversations, but deliver what could otherwise be something negative to him or her. But it also rests on you, understanding what you need to do beforehand to get you there. So let's walk you through some of these steps to help you do that. First, you need to understand power dynamics, even within startups that are highly distributed, meaning there's various teams everyone's very collaborative, friendly, maybe even your peer, there's still power.

The CEO obviously has more power than say an operations man Measure and say this operations manager wants and has feedback that they want to give to the CEO, she'll have to understand this, that power comes from the top down, and where the rest on that ladder means and gives them an implicit bias as well as an implicit power and asymmetry that they need to consider. In order to correct this is something that is really tantamount to how you give feedback to your boss. Let's walk you through how to do that. The first step is doing a cost benefit analysis. It's really simple. It doesn't have to be really that big.

And it really just rests on who's your boss, and who are you. And relative to that you want to really understand is the personality. You want to understand. Do you have the ability to tell your boss some hard truths? And if so, how are you going to do that? You should ask yourself three questions and it starts with This one, is it worth it?

Not everything you want to bring up is worth it. And if you're gonna give, let's say the CEO some feedback and his or her time is very precious, you're gonna want to understand, is it worth it? Is this a battle worth fighting for? And if you can say yes, then proceed to the next question, which is, is there a business benefit to the feedback is the fact that the CEO is not giving you guys explanations, they may be useful information as to the status of a project, or maybe even resources, they may be useful for being able to do what you need to do. If those are some aspects of the feedback that you're trying to give. And you understand it there is a business benefit to wanting to have this feedback conversation, then yes, proceed and go to the third question is my boss open?

This one's going to be a hard one because not only is it personality wise, you also under want to understand context. Are there other things on his or her plate that may actually prevent you from giving feedback? I had a client, let's call her Rachel, who worked at a major startup in New York. And it was a highly toxic environment. And she had to tell her immediate boss that this environment wasn't stimulating for her and was causing her to have some doubts as to whether or not it was the correct place for her. Her boss.

Unfortunately, it was the person instituting these types of jokes in the workplace and was making it what she referred to as toxic. She after entering all three of these questions, she came to this one and ultimately said, No, the boss isn't open. And in this type of example, unfortunately, she ended up having to document a lot of these circumstances, take them to a lawyer and ended up actually leaving with them with a really good severance pay, because she realized that because her boss was making not open to the feedback and maybe even correcting it, that she was better off leaving. When you do this type of cost benefit analysis, you want to be truthful to yourself, as well as see, is this a risk worth taking. And if your boss is open, shoot your shot, see what could happen. Because if he is it could really change things.

But you also want to make sure how you have that conversation is just as important as how you prepare for it. So let's walk through those two. So the first thing is you want to prepare beforehand, simple. You also want to ask for permission, meaning if you're going to give feedback to a boss, respecting the power difference means you ask him or her when is it good time to have this conversation. And please don't do it over email or slack if it is something that's highly sensitive. And as I said, you want to do it face to face.

There's a lot of things that get lost in translation when you just do it via the word in word or a phone call. You want to make sure that you really sit down, make it intentional, and you bring yourself prepared and see what it is that you want him or her to do. But you always want to do these two things you want to balance not only performance, what it is that's actually going on the business benefit versus an effect. And if you haven't heard of effect before, effect is emotions, their intuition, they're things that you're feeling, or maybe even energy, if you want to call it that around the environment that are affecting, let's say, the performance and you want to be able to really put them side by side and not let one or the other speak but have both there because that would be very powerful and make it as I mentioned, process oriented.

Specifically, you want to be very specific, get to the data, get to what is actually going on and look at the business standpoint of what and how this is affecting things in your job, your role. The work environment. But most of all, you want to keep it classy. What I mean by that, don't yell, don't pout. And if you need to cry, maybe do that on your own. Because you want to make sure that you're showing your boss and not only are you really taking this seriously, but you want him or her to also understand that and know that you are not only vocalizing yourself and wanting to give this feedback, but you want to go forward together.

And best of all, is just ask questions, what type of questions, make them open ended, you know, see and understand his or her perspective, because there may be context that you're missing as to why the CEO isn't always on time, or why your manager is, you know, maybe a little flippant when it comes to meetings. There might be some external circumstances outside of his or her control and outside of your own purview that are maybe affecting your understanding of the situation. And when you're wrapping up the conversation, it's really important to follow these steps. One, you want to make it confidential. Don't go off talking to other co workers within the startup space and say, Look, I just had this conversation. This happened, you know, or whatever, keep it between you and your boss.

It respects not only the power dynamic, but also respects the trust that you too are building upon. You want to make sure you write it down, send a follow up email, have a log under Google Docs somewhere to track what it is you guys actually said and what agreement you might have reached. And lastly, you want to reflect personally on what you did. Was there something that you said that maybe triggered your boss and then you had to continue talking about it? Was it something that like you said, that did something really well and actually helped move things along? Whatever that is, jot it down because you want to make sure you either do that or you don't do that going forward.

Because feedback builds on itself, and the more feedback you go through with someone and they receive it and you end up with a good result, you build upon that. It's called social capital. And in the long run, you then use that social capital in high stress situations in order to either move forward with something or by have some buy in whatever that is, you want to make sure that you're doing that. And lastly, I'm just going to leave you with this which is a quote by Rich Welland which says, firing these bosses may be a drastic action. Instead, workers need to provide their bosses with feedback about what will make them better leaders. Poor people skills may cost may not cost the business, their job, the Boston job, but it is costing them the confidence of their teams.

Wow. Look, you have skills and your boss hired you and put you there for a reason. They're your boss is also a person they're going to have blind spots and The more you can understand that and see that and be able to vocalize with them according to what may actually be very helpful for them could actually help them not only become better leaders, but also better at their jobs in the long run. So remember that and know that feedback goes both ways. And you as an employee to your boss may actually have some powerful words to share and you shouldn't be afraid to share them.