Co-founder and executive chairman of Netflix Reed Hastings gets an annual 360-review via written assessment to which any employee can contribute. He wrote about his 2019 review in his book No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention, observing, “I find the best comments for my growth are unfortunately the most painful.”
In a memo to employees, he thanked them for pointing out how he skipped or rushed over topics he felt weren’t worth the time. He recognized these observations were, “So true, so sad, so frustrating that I still do this. I will keep working on it.”
Leaders such as Hastings asking for feedback—and even further taking it to heart to implement change—requires vulnerability. Bob Weinhold, a Velocity partner who leads the firm’s executive coaching services and focuses on multigenerational family enterprises and corporate environments, has seen this firsthand. When we spoke, he was traveling to start an executive coaching engagement with someone who had not received feedback well. He had also just completed a call with another executive who was pushing back against feedback from her team.
“I think feedback can be incredibly valuable, and I’ve watched it be incredibly damning. When it’s done the wrong way, people feel threatened. They become very defensive, and it becomes a reason to exit a situation or a business or a relationship prior to making any changes,” he says. “When [feedback is] done right, people get to the very highest levels. When done poorly, it results in very negative consequences, and sometimes terminal consequences.”
In their study “Feedback: the Powerful Paradox,” Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman describe feedback as “any conversation designed to convey a message that one person believes to be important for another person to hear.” They acknowledge that “giving and receiving feedback in organizations is a complex and unpredictable process.”
To navigate this unpredictable environment, Weinhold prescribes a specific process to create a receptive environment, ask for feedback and implement the advice.
Establishing the environment for feedback
Executive coaches and consultancies can facilitate the feedback process. “When I was a CEO, I could go ask everyone in the organization, ‘What do you think of me?’ Would they tell me I’m a jerk? No, because they’re afraid they’re gonna get fired,” Weinhold says. Bringing in an external firm adds a layer of confidentiality to offset this power differential.
If leaders are operating without an intermediary, Weinhold recommends establishing context. It’s important to say that “you’re on a growth process. It’s going to be hard for them to give you direct feedback, but you will do everything in your power not to hold that against them.”
Asking for feedback
To solicit opinions, Weinhold recommends using both an informal and formal 360-degree review process. The traditional process involves inviting people to complete an anonymous online questionnaire. It’s valuable to request comments from people below, lateral to and above the leader on the organizational chart.
There are three vital questions to ask:
1. Where do I add value?
2. If you were to pick two or three areas that you think I should focus on that would allow me to deliver better value or performance, what would those areas be?
3. Is there anything else I should know when I’m considering my own performance?
Following this, informal, one-on-one conversations can expand upon the information offered in the formal review. “I encourage people to … a) ask for [conversations with] people that you agree with, b) ask for [conversations with] people that absolutely don’t agree with you, and then [c)] find the right mix in the middle,” Weinhold says. “Your job is to extrapolate from the absolute value of that data.”
Assessing the feedback
Before considering the feedback, it’s valuable to undergo a self-assessment and identify growth areas. Then, with feedback in hand, leaders can assess whether that information is congruent or incongruent with their self-identified growth paths. Next, the leader should consider whether the feedback is going to help their job or role, the company at large and the other people involved to prioritize what they will implement.
Finally, they should set tangible goals. For example, if someone receives feedback that they need to be more “likeable,” that’s vague. So, they could consider setting office hours, engaging in more social time with colleagues and/or attending more work functions to respond to this feedback. It’s important to vocally identify these goals to colleagues and employees. In this example, that could mean saying, “I’m working on my relationships with other people, so you’re going to see me being involved in a different way. Let me know if that feels good or if it feels intrusive or fake.”
Weinhold says that, if you implement feedback the right way, you can leverage relationships, business, performance, practice and growth faster than you ever could without it.
If the feedback is wholly negative, then the questions get tougher. Weinhold invites the leader to consider whether they can implement the requested changes or if the problem is an issue of fit with the company or the role.
Following up
Once a leader commits to accepting and implementing feedback, Weinhold recommends following up—much more frequently than an annual 360-review. Instead, he suggests touching base quarterly with a handful of people who gave the initial feedback. If the leader isn’t going through a coach, he suggests they approach selected individuals and share what they are working on before requesting a follow-up conversation to discuss results. Because this presents an additional encumbrance for the person providing feedback, it may help to sweeten the deal by offering to buy coffee or lunch.
Weinhold recognizes that most reviews don’t produce results because people stop at the anger and the frustration and the judgment. “I would say feedback is incredibly valuable, but it can be weaponized. Or it can be utilized as a vehicle for growth, and that’s the piece that most people miss,” he says.
After all, as Hastings writes in his book, “It’s when employees begin providing truthful feedback to their leaders that the big benefits of candor really take off.”
This article originally appeared in the May/June 2025 issue of SUCCESS+ Magazine. Photo courtesy of PeopleImages.com – Yuri A/Shutterstock.
