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Getting Great People on Board 93

ers, so you have to find your own voice. Try writing out what you want to
say or at least how you want to start. Role-play the dialogue with a trusted
colleague or human resource person. Be clear about what you want the
discussion to accomplish (an improvement plan, a better understanding of
what’s expected, a decision to change roles, etc.). Then assess afterward
how well you did and what you could have done better.
In addition to individual discussions, one of the most powerful ways to
deliver tough feedback so that an individual can hear it is with 360-degree
feedback, which provides comments from multiple sources—boss, peers,
subordinates, customers, and others. This assessment is particularly pow-
erful because if common themes from a number of others don’t align with
a person’s own view, those themes become more difficult to dismiss or ig-
nore. Richard Ober, CEO of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation,
described the effect: “One of our key people was a brilliant problem solver
and project manager, but did not have much experience leading people,
and the culture in her group was strained. We did a 360 assessment to
identify her core capabilities and weaknesses. She was stunned to hear re-
actions of people about working with her. I took advantage of her open-
ness to listen to start intensively coaching her to evolve from being great
at doing to being great at empowering. Now she’s one of the best perform-
ers on our senior team and consistently gets very high rankings on annual
employee surveys.”
There will be times when people don’t respond to individual feedback,
however, and don’t develop the way you need them to. When you’ve ex-
hausted ways of discussing with them what needs to change, you may have
to take action, letting them go from your team, as we described earlier in
this chapter.

Team feedback
Feedback is not just a tool for improving the performance of an individual;
you also should give feedback to your team about how they are performing
together, and you should encourage the team members to give feedback to
each other. For example, Jim Ziolkowski, the head of a nonprofit called
buildOn, brings his leadership team together at the end of every year for a