The ‘X-Factor’ of creative leadership. 7 of 10. Give constructive and progressive feedback.

Feedback is a delicate balance of praise and criticism, and giving it is an essential part of leadership. It’s the barometer of progress for team members. Positive feedback is one of the most enjoyable parts of the job. Congratulating your team on a pitch win, an award, or simply a job well done is a definite chest-pumping highlight.

Conversely, negative feedback can be a tricky thing to deliver. But this is where well-established and nurtured personal relationships with all of your direct reports – and your bosses – come in handy. Praise can seem hollow and criticism can seem overly harsh if both are delivered without a foundation of good relationships. Strong relationships help you be direct and honest. Distant, impersonal leadership makes these necessary conversations feel infinitely more cold-hearted and brutal.

But whatever feedback you are delivering, it should help your team members move forward. Positive feedback is like armour. It breeds confidence and provides evidence to a team member that they are doing the right thing – that the decisions made were the right ones – giving them implicit permission to keep doing those good things.

Negative feedback can have the opposite effect if delivered without care. In a criticism-based scenario, highlight the issues you both face as a consequence and offer a clear, actionable path forward, rather than an unfeeling “that needs to be much better next time” type of approach.

Be prompt. Early actions allow for slight adjustments. Let things fester and the actions required will appear far more daunting. When your team members miss the mark in any part of what they do, they must be told as soon as possible. Don’t wait for a scheduled meeting – deliver the feedback as soon as you’ve formulated it.

Crucially, make sure to give praise or criticism to all who deserve it. Singling people out when there is a shared responsibility can damage those who didn’t get the feedback and leave those who did feeling ‘thrown under the bus’.

The late CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs, was known for inflammatory criticism:

“Your work is shit.”

He might say. The success of Apple under Jobs is plain for all to see in many forms – but how did he get away with it? Well, there’s a lot to unpack about Jobs’ leadership style beyond this one line.

Part of the reason he was able to get away with such perceived bluntness was that he gave senior people at Apple absolute permission to be brilliant on their own terms. As he also famously said:

“It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

But before anyone starts throwing incendiary barbs around in one-to-one meetings, remember one thing:

You are not Steve Jobs.