Every good leader should welcome feedback.
It’s a great way to make sure you fulfill your team’s needs and an even better way to ensure you don’t fall victim to any blind spots.
But there’s a problem with asking for feedback: Sometimes, you get it. A lot of it.
If you ask 25 people what they think, you’ll probably get 25 different opinions. Getting feedback is not the challenge. Sifting through it and choosing valuable advice to act on is.
We first did this at Crisp many years ago by setting up a suggestion box for ideas the team had. We got a range of answers from free lunches and better drink options to upgraded furniture and software.
In the beginning, I listened to it all. Especially when you’re a new entrepreneur, it’s natural and tempting to want to make your team happy by delivering on their wishes. After all, they’re the ones on the front lines, so surely they must know what they need.
As I learned quickly, that’s not always the case. The reality is that every piece of feedback comes through the lens of the person giving it. Considering their lens is the key to differentiating feedback that matters from feedback you can safely put on the back burner.
How do you do it? You start by understanding the difference between feedback from highly accountable people and feedback from low-accountability people.
The latter is a category of team members who consistently miss deadlines, show up to work late, and always find an excuse to negate accountability when things go wrong. So when someone who’s so disengaged from your firm gives you feedback on how to better it, should you take it to heart?
The answer isn’t always a clear “no,” of course. After all, maybe they’re disengaged because of something happening in the firm. But you should be cautious of the source. People who avoid accountability tend to view problems through the lens of comfort, convenience, and personal preference. Their feedback usually focuses on what would make their lives easier, not necessarily what would make the business stronger.
Now consider the opposite of that: people who consistently deliver, care deeply about the organization and their team, always take ownership of their mistakes, and think like owners, even if they aren’t ones.
They tend to be good at identifying opportunities for performance improvement and actual problems that hinder it, so when they offer feedback, it’s usually different. They think about efficiency, scalability, productivity, client experience, profitability, and long-term growth. They understand that every investment the business makes has consequences because resources aren’t unlimited and dozens of people need to be taken care of.
Their feedback ultimately carries more weight because they’ve earned credibility through their work.
Too many people treat every opinion equally (once myself included).
But great leadership isn’t about implementing every single suggestion. It’s about filtering advice through the right lens and identifying the ideas that would suit the organization as a whole best.
The best leaders listen carefully, but they never surrender their judgment. They remember that the loudest voices in the room aren’t always the wisest.
So keep the conversation with your team going. Encourage them to share their views. But to actually move your business forward, pay attention to who’s giving the opinions, not just what they are. Because the quality of the feedback often depends on the accountability of the person delivering it.
