What's up everyone? Welcome back to another episode of the crazy ones, the best startup show on planet earth.

This is Alex and I am back with a journal style episode where in 10 to 20 minutes I tackle the most important challenges or goals or skills that builders need to successfully build their businesses.

People have been loving these types of episodes if you've been listening to my show for a while you may remember Founders Journal which was kind of the predecessor to the crazy ones and this format is a lot like what Founders Journal was.

So before I happen to this episode, I would love to hear from you. Shoot me an email at the crazy ones at morningrew.com and share one specific topic that if myself or Jesse talked about it on a future crazy ones episode, it would make a world of difference for you and it would increase the probabilities of you being successful in your business or your career significantly.

So shoot us an email. Now without further ado, today's episode is about how to give feedback well because it is wildly important and most people are terrible at it. Let's do it.

What's up everyone? I'm Alex Lieberman. You know, this is Jesse Pooji and this is the crazy ones.

Most people suck at giving feedback. Yet it is a non-negotiable skill for leaders and managers. So what I want to share with you are six rules to not suck at giving feedback and to in fact be great at giving feedback because if you are a founder, your leader or a manager, it is your responsibility to be good at giving feedback to your employees, to your co-founders, to your senior leaders, to other founders.

And so this is your playbook for doing it. First rule to not suck at giving feedback is ask a lot of questions. You can't give feedback without immersing yourself in the right context.

I mentioned this last journal episode where I talked about how to handle people shitting on your business idea and if you haven't listened to that episode yet, you should go in the feed or if you're on YouTube, go check it out on YouTube.

But the only way for you to give feedback rather than uninformed criticism is to actually sit in the same context as the person that you're giving feedback to.

You need to understand their goals. You need to understand where they want or need help. You need to understand what's working versus not working for them. And you need to understand the specifics of their job or their business.

This is why whether it's with my operator for the plunge, with my co-founder of Morning Brew or when I'm talking to an early stage founder who's looking for business advice, I will spend an inordinate amount of time like half of our time talking just to asking questions to try and bring myself into their context.

Rule number two, follow every problem that you share with a solution or a strategy to find the solution. Think about it like this. What is the goal of giving feedback?

My view is it is to increase the probability of a founder succeeding with their business or it is to improve an employee's probability of succeeding in their job, which in turn increases the probability of your business succeeding.

So you should always come back to one very simple question. What can I say that's going to increase that probability and a generally good rule of thumb is that more direction is better than less direction.

So if you're going to point out an issue or a hurdle, don't you think that offering a way for the person you're talking to to get around that hurdle serves you and your goals for delivering feedback.

So here's a quick example. Let's just say someone sends me their Facebook ad spend metrics and I see the percentage of people that convert from landing on their website to putting in their email address is 10%.

And let's just say I believe that the ideal metric is more like 25% versus 10% based on their goals.

Here's an example of what bad feedback would be bad feedback would be me saying, hey, you need to improve your landing page and get your email conversion rate up or the economics of your business simply won't work.

And then I stop there. All that will do is get them worried and anxious and because of the lack of direction, lead them down this wild goose chase of their own to find the answer because I've been provided enough guidance.

Here's what good feedback would look like. It would be me saying, hey, your landing page conversion rate is too low right now. I think you have the opportunity to move it up meaningfully from 10% and here are three simple things you can do and test today to move the needle.

One, make a clear call to action on your email sign up right now. I don't think people know exactly what they're signing up for to a be test a different headline next to your hero image at the top of the page.

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