3 Types of Feedback · Performance Culture

¶One Person’s Opinion (OPO)

A subjective, anecdotal opinion that is coming from an experienced exec, but is being delivered with no special expertise or emphasis. As the input giver, we want the team to factor in the feedback in the same way they would if receiving it from anybody else: if they agree, they act upon it; if they don’t agree, they don’t act upon it, and they don’t freak out about having to explain in lots of detail why they didn’t follow our suggestion.

Jony Ive on Steve Jobs

Steve used to say to me (and he used to say this a lot),’Hey John, here’s a dopey idea.’ And sometimes they were really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room, and they left us completely silent. Bold, crazy, magnificent ideas

¶Strong Suggestion

This is stronger than OPO, but not yet at explicitly telling the team what to do. As the input giver, we believe our experience and expertise are relevant to the situation at hand, and we share our recommendation on the best course of action.

More so than with OPO, our expectation is the team will take this suggestion seriously, but they still may decide not to follow it. In this case, if they don’t follow the feedback, it’s a good idea for them to explain why, but it doesn’t need to become a big production, especially since we want to model decision-making made by the teams closest to the ground versus by execs farther removed.

¶Mandate

This is telling the team what to do; no more debate. As the input giver, we’ve decided the current proposal is going to damage our company in some way; and we’ve decided the damage will be greater than the damage caused by overruling and showing a lack of trust in the team’s judgment on this particular item.

Nobody likes having to overrule an individual or team, but whether we’re a Manager, Executive, or even CEO, that’s occasionally part of our job.

¶What we are Avoiding

We want to avoid having the majority of commentary (OPO) be interpreted and treated as an urgent, disruptive fire drill. This is particularly important for executives, who may not realize the extent to which their OPOs are being heavily weighed and acted upon by the team.

This can be measured by and especially important to 1-Way vs 2-Way Door decisions

Reversible ‘2-Way Door’ Decisions: we make a call, and it’s relatively easy to change it if we discover it’s not working out as we’d hoped.
Irreversible ‘1-Way Door ‘ Decisions: once we’re in, we’re not coming back out.
From Jeff B: “These decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don't like what you see on the other side, you can't get back to where you were before.”