Mario Harik

However, from my perspective, when I give constructive feedback to my team, I never make it subjective.

I always ground it on data.

I'll tell them, well, okay, look at this situation.

We could have gone into this outcome based on what the data is telling us, but we got over here.

We got to figure out how to do it in a better way.

Suddenly that person is thinking, yeah, I fell short in this area, but they're not thinking, they're not becoming defensive because I'm not telling them, hey, I think you dropped the ball on this.

I think you're not working hard enough.

I think you're, because then suddenly it's a very subjective set of feedback that causes people to retract from it as opposed to it being, let me tell you objectively where things didn't work well.

But then after you have that, so after you believe in that, it's also about creating an environment where it's safe for them to try things

And it's safe for them to sometimes fail at them because that's part of life.

For every five great things you're going to do, you're going to fail at one or two of them.

But also creating a safe environment where they can spread their wings, where they can figure out a way to get from, again, best outcome from point A to point B. How did you learn to give feedback like this?

That's a great question, Shane, because if I go back earlier in my career, that was a big shortcoming of mine.

But the way I led teams was based on, let's say I'm looking at a certain goal, certain solution we wanted to build.

I would analyze it and I would come up with a roadmap going back to the engineering design process.

I would say, well, okay, this is a goal we want to achieve or a problem we want to solve.

Then I would think through the requirements.

I would think through the highlights of the solution.

And then I would go to my team member and say, well, you know, listen, this is where we are here.

This is where we want to get to.