Deliver small feedback early
so hard feedback is rarely required.
A free playbook for founders. How to tell people the truth about their work, usefully, often, and without turning it into an annual ordeal.
// 32 PAGES · FIVE PARTS · THREE CHECKLISTS · FREE
Seven things to know about performance conversations.
Each is a mechanism you can plan around, and the guide is plain about the limit.
People need to know where they stand, and ambiguity is the cruelty
The kindest thing you can offer someone is an accurate picture of how their work is landing. Without it they are guessing, and people guess badly in both directions — some assume they are failing when they are valued, others assume they are doing well when there is a real problem, and both misconceptions produce worse decisions than the truth would have.
Feedback close to the event is cheap; delayed feedback is expensive
This is the mechanical heart of it. Something said the day it happens is a small observation about a specific thing — low stakes, easy to hear, easy to act on.
It is how standards become shared rather than implicit
In a small company, standards live in the founder's head until something makes them explicit. New people cannot infer them, and they will not ask.
It is what makes growth possible
People improve at things they know need improving. Someone with a weakness nobody has named will not fix it, not because they are unwilling but because they do not know it is there.
It surfaces a mis-fit early enough to be fixable
Most performance problems in a small company are not capability problems, they are alignment problems: the person misunderstood what mattered, they are optimising for the wrong outcome, or the role turned out to be different from what was described.
It protects your strongest people
This is the effect founders underestimate most. Strong performers notice what is tolerated.
And now the honest limit, and it is the one this guide most wants you to hold
Performance conversations are not goal-setting, and the two must stay separate. If your OKRs or team objectives feed performance assessment, everyone will set targets they are certain to hit and hide bad news until the end of the quarter — which destroys the goals as a focusing instrument and simultaneously builds your performance data on numbers everyone has quietly managed.
Five parts, and a last page.
Parts one to five are the thinking and the doing, worth your time even if you never touch a piece of software. The last pages show how to run it in one place.
What These Conversations Are For
Decide Before You Start
Hold the Conversation
Make It Produce Something
The checklists and the mistakes
Do it all in one place
Nine mistakes, all of them avoidable.
None is about talent. They are failures of method, which is good news, because method is something you can set up in advance.
Saying nothing until it is serious
Week three is thirty seconds; month five is a confrontation. The content is identical and the cost multiplied entirely because of the delay.
Fusing performance with goals
It destroys both at once — conservative target-setting forever, and performance data everyone has quietly managed.
Combining the four conversations
Feedback inside a pay discussion is heard as justification for the number, and development attached to criticism becomes a remediation plan.
Being general
"Your communication needs work" cannot be acted on or disagreed with. A specific moment, described, can be.
Delivering interpretation as observation
It converts feedback into an accusation and leaves you confidently wrong in a way that is difficult to walk back.
Only ever giving critical feedback
If a one-to-one always means something is wrong, the invitation itself becomes dread and people stop bringing you problems.
Never following up
Feedback raised once and never mentioned again teaches unmistakably that it did not matter, and the next piece is received accordingly.
Warning vaguely
People genuinely shocked to be let go were almost always warned in language they could not recognise as a warning.
Asking for feedback and being defensive
One defensive response closes the channel permanently and teaches everyone the question was rhetorical.
Thirty-two pages.
Yours in one click.
Five parts, three checklists and the nine mistakes. One email with the link, no drip sequence, and we do not sell the list.