Lead Well Part 2: Lead Your Team Well with Feedback

Last week, I mentioned the three concentric circles of my business: leading yourself, your team, and the work well. If leading yourself well is the foundation, then leading your team well is where that inner work becomes visible to the world around you.

And nothing reveals the quality of your leadership faster than how you give feedback.

When I started as an elementary teacher, I had a first-year principal. We were both figuring it out at the same time, which felt oddly comforting, until my first formal review. He had never once sat in on my classroom. Never observed a lesson, rarely even popped his head in the door. But he sat across from me and gave me a glowing evaluation anyway.

It should have felt good. It didn't. A positive review based on vibes alone is just noise. I left that meeting wanting what I hadn't gotten: real observation, honest reflection, something I could actually use. I genuinely wanted to be the best teacher I could be, and I knew I had areas where I could grow. But as a first-year teacher, all I knew was that blind spots existed.  

When I started hiring employees, I knew what I didn't want to replicate. But knowing what you don't want and actually building something better are two different things.

Here's what's true: my team and I still struggle with this. I’ve done a lot of work to create a sense of psychological safety in our team, but when it comes to taking work to the next level, I can struggle to be direct. In fact, we all tend to tiptoe. If you've been following my work with Iowa Kind, you know that "Iowa Nice" runs deep, and it shows up in the workplace too.

I’m learning that true psychological safety doesn’t mean shying away from difficult conversations or direct feedback on how to improve the quality of the work. And that when I work to foster a culture of kind, clear, mutual feedback, the work goes better, my team is happier, and we are better able to serve our clients.

Here are three tangible ways I’ve been working on giving better feedback:

Talk Well Behind Their Back

I try to be as generous as possible with positive feedback, even when my team isn't in the room. Amy Poehler talks about this on her podcast Good Hang, and it resonated with me immediately: finding intentional ways to talk about what you love about your people, even when they can't hear you.

For me, this looks like making sure positive client feedback actually reaches my team. When a client tells me they loved a deliverable, I don't just say thank you and move on. I bring my team into that moment. I thank the client for the compliment, let them know which team member led that deliverable, and then relay it back to my team directly. The work matters. The person behind it deserves to know.

In spaces where complaining and gossip are commonplace, speaking positively about others is counterculture. I think this is true in any close relationship, but when we make an intentional choice to speak well about someone to other people, it signals trust: to the person you're talking to, and quietly to the person you're talking about, even if it never gets back to them.

Go Verbal Whenever You Can

We're a remote team, which means most of our communication happens in writing. Writing is efficient, but tone disappears fast. A piece of feedback that would feel collaborative and caring in conversation can read as cold or critical in a comment on a Google Doc.

So whenever I have meaningful or more nuanced feedback on a deliverable, I reach for a voice memo or a Loom video instead. Verbal feedback lets me convey warmth, add context, and make it feel like a conversation rather than a verdict. Especially for remote teams, that shift makes a real difference.

Put on a Different Hat

As a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, I've spent a lot of time thinking about how different people are wired to contribute, and how that applies to the way we talk about our work, not just the work itself.

That's what led me to create the Illuminated Checklist for Feedback. It's a tool I built for my own team because we needed shared language, a way to give feedback that was honest, collaborative, and multifaceted. It adapts the six Working Genius types into six different lenses for reviewing a deliverable:

• Wonder — stepping back to ask the big picture questions. Does this connect to the larger story? Are we aiming at the right goal?

• Invention — bringing creative energy. What other approaches could make this stronger? What if we tried...?

• Discernment — trusting your gut. What's your instinctive reaction? What feels off, or feels exactly right?

• Galvanizing — leading with the positives. What's working? What do you love? What makes you want to champion this?

• Enablement — thinking through the end user. Is this human-centered and user-friendly? Does it actually serve the client or audience well?

• Tenacity — getting into the details. What small things could elevate this? What needs a second look?

We’ve started using this tool as we go in and give each other feedback in our internal editing rounds. I’ll leave a comment that might say “Red hat- I’m wondering if we should try x?” or “Yellow hat - let’s put this section into bullet points to make it more readable.”

This approach has been really helpful for our team. Not only does it contextualize the motive behind the feedback, but it also helps us think more deeply about how to take work to the next level. Most of us naturally give feedback from one or two of these modes, usually the ones that align with our own Working Genius. The checklist is a prompt to stretch beyond your default and provide more complete feedback.

Download the Illuminated Checklist for Feedback

At the heart of leading a team well is a simple but demanding commitment: to help the people around you grow, in service of the work you're all trying to do together. It may be the hardest, but most rewarding part of leadership. And it's not meant to be figured out alone. Sometimes it takes a fresh perspective, some shared language, and a little honest self-reflection to shift the dynamic. If that's where you are, I'd love to help. That's exactly the kind of work I do as a leadership coach.

If this resonates, let’s connect today.