Welcome back to the Look and Sound of Leadership, an ongoing series of executive

coaching tips designed to help you be perceived in the workplace the way you want to be perceived.

I'm Tom Henschel, your executive coach, and today we're talking about upward feedback.

Sergei openly admired his boss Alicia, so he really grabbed my attention the day he asked how he could give her some overdue feedback.

He said,

A lot of the time, Alicia will use our staff meetings to think out loud.

She'll off-handedly mention, oh, we should do some research about that product, or we should

get that department involved in this initiative and

we're never sure if she's just talking or if she's actually assigning work.

Later on she might ask what happened with that project. If we didn't take action on it, she

wonders why we didn't. And that can get awkward. What do we say? We didn't know you were serious?

But other times, to avoid that, one of us will put in some hours on whatever it is you know just in case

Sometimes it never comes up again, but other times when she does ask about it

We find out that two or more of us have been working on

it, but we didn't know because it was also casual. Either way, it creates a lot of confusion

and wasted time. It sounded to me like there might be some feedback in there for Alicia, but I wasn't sure.

Maybe the group could manage the whole thing themselves.

After we talked a while, we decided there definitely were some things the group could do on its own.

For instance, they could check with each other, they could even ask Alicia for clarification,

and there might be a legitimate issue Sergei could raise with Alicia.

So I asked Sergei what feedback he wanted to give Alicia.

He said, I want her to be clear about whether she's just throwing ideas up into the sky or if she expects us to take action.

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