Name: Learn how to give feedback that drives change | Google People Management Essentials
Uploaded: 2026-01-24T00:13:02.000Z
Duration: 6 min 2 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I lead Google's Education for Social impact organization within google.org day to day.

To-infinitive

I talk to customers, I talk to educators, I talk to students and parents, I talk to education leaders to really understand what is it that they're trying to solve for.

And then we look for ways to bring Google's best strengths.

That's our technology, our research, our people, our expertise.

When I think about my journey as a people manager, I go back to my roots of being a classroom teacher.

And a fundamental part of being a classroom teacher is providing feedback to make my students better.

And so now, today, as I lead a team inside of a large organization, I go back to those same roots.

Feedback is fundamentally important to make our teams and our colleagues better.

So my advice to new managers in having these types of conversations would include four elements to be ongoing, timely, specific, and

One of the things that I typically have done and still do even as an experienced manager, is I try to lay out the specific points that I want to discuss with my colleague as part of phase two.

And so in this conversation, I work hard to set the stage of trust with the employee.

I typically like to bring in and start with strengths, an asset for the conversation.

It's important to name it, be specific with the employee so that there's no confusion about what the feedback is.

And then I would close out that as part of the conversation, any specific steps, next steps, or action that you want the employee to take.

And then in that third phase, the final phase is the follow up.

After the conversation, I follow up in writing to the employee to capture what we discussed and to ensure that the employee has a place to reference after they have an opportunity to reflect.

So a strong outcome of a feedback conversation is that together we find the right solution.

The individual acknowledges and recognizes the performance and receives the feedback.

The flip side to that is I can think about a time when I've given feedback, we've had the feedback conversation, but

In those moments, my approach typically becomes much more prescribed.

I tend to have an additional conversation with the individual.

I also will ask additional questions of my colleague to find out what else do they need?

If the individual themselves are struggling to identify what they need to help them to make the necessary changes, then I come forward with additional recommendations.

Whether that's providing them with a mentor, providing very specific training courses that they may need to complete, a helpful strategy that you can use when dealing with a difficult feedback session is to lean in on your partners, take a step back, reach out to your human resource partner, speak to your own manager, speak to a mentor.

Use your network to help you have that conversation and to ensure that you can deliver that specific feedback and the timely feedback so that you can get the outcomes that we all desire.

We all receive feedback and a recent time where I received feedback was actually a few months ago.

We were in a meeting with a customer and the meeting was moving along and I posed a number of strategy questions to the customer.

You could see the customer was uncomfortable with the questions, but

we were there as a critical friend to help push them on their strategy.

And so I persisted with some of the hard questions even though the customer was uncomfortable.

My manager pulled me aside and gave direct feedback that my questions were causing the customer to instead of leaning in, they were pulling out and they were disengaging.

So I walked back in the meeting, I made that adjustment and we got to the right outcome.

Sometimes feedback sessions don't go well.

I can think of several examples where I had to work through a very difficult conversation.

And a specific scenario that comes to mind is in me delivering the feedback.

The individual began to cry and it prevented me from being able to continue the conversation because I recognized that the person's level, emotional level was very high and that they were not able to even hear the feedback.

I said to the individual, I understand that this is difficult and so what I'd recommend is that we pause the meeting and find a better time when they are ready.

In coming back to the second conversation, the individual reflected back with me what they heard, they acknowledged and then had even come back with a set of actions that they wanted to take so that we could find a path forward and that was the perfect outcome.

We want individuals to be able to be reflective and for they themselves to solution how we can make the necessary adjustments.

One of the things that we know when we look at a lot of the research is that as managers there are a lot of unspoken cues that can sometimes show up in the conversations.

And so that self regulation, the awareness of where my emotions are, I have to be really intentional and thoughtful about that.

And so it is important for managers to have that self awareness and to self regulate as we step into these critical conversations.

Being a people manager allows you to have greater influence in the organization.

It's a fantastic opportunity for you to help others reach new levels in their performance.

It's an opportunity for you to deliver more increased value on behalf of your company, and

it's an opportunity for you to pay it forward.