Latest / New Manager Conversations with Fexingo: First 90 Days, Managing Former Peers, and Leadership Basics / How New Managers Can Build a Feedback Culture From Day One
Transcript
- Lucas: If you become a manager and the first time your team hears you say the word 'feedback' is during a performance review, you've already lost the room. Luna: Oof. That's a strong opener. Say more. Lucas: I was thinking about a case I came across recently. A woman named Priya at a mid-size B2B SaaS company — she was promoted to lead a team of six, three of whom were former peers. She'd been a manager for about three weeks when she realized something: nobody ever gave her any pushback. No one questioned her ideas. No one said, 'Hey, I think we're going about this wrong.' At first she thought, great, everyone's aligned. Then she started looking at the numbers — the team had missed their last two quarterly targets, and turnover was creeping up. Luna: So the silence wasn't harmony. It was a symptom. Lucas: Exactly. What Priya had inherited was a team conditioned to avoid difficult conversations. The previous manager — a nice person, by all accounts — never gave negative feedback. And because of that, the team learned that the safest move was to keep your head down. Priya knew she had to flip that culture, but she couldn't just announce 'starting Monday, we're going to be more honest.' That never works. Luna: Right, because trust isn't built by decree. It's built behavior by behavior. Lucas: So she reached for a framework I'd heard about from organizational psychologist Dr. Tasha Eurich. It's called the feedback contract. The idea is simple but incredibly hard to execute: before you give any feedback, you and your team explicitly agree on how feedback is going to work. The norms, the who, the when, the how. Luna: I love that. And if you're a new manager — especially of former peers — this is doubly important, because you have a history. People are watching to see if you're going to act differently now that you have authority. Lucas: Priya started by dedicating an entire team meeting to this. She put up a slide that said: 'How should we talk about hard things?' And she just let them sit with that question for a few seconds. Then she shared her own fear — she said, 'I'm nervous about giving feedback because I don't want to damage the relationships we already have.' That act of vulnerability in itself was a signal. Luna: And likely the first time anyone on that team heard a manager admit they were nervous about anything. Lucas: Exactly. From there, they co-created a set of norms. Things like: feedback happens in real time, not saved for a review. It's always specific and behavioral. And everyone — including Priya — agrees to say 'thank you' after receiving feedback, even if it stings. That last one is the hardest. Luna: If we've helped you think through a career move or a management challenge this year, maybe you've considered how to build a culture of honest input on your own team. Shows like this stay ad-free because listeners chip in. If that's something you value, you can support the show at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure, just a low-key option for those who find the content useful. Lucas: Yeah, and we mean that. It's a simple way to keep this resource available to anyone who needs it. Back to Priya — she also established a two-question ritual for every one-on-one. Not just 'how's it going?' She asked: 'What's one thing I could do differently to support you better?' and 'What's one thing the team could do differently to improve our output?' She asked those two questions every single week for the first two months. Luna: And she had to be ready for answers that might be uncomfortable. Especially from former peers who might have felt they deserved her job. Lucas: One of her direct reports — a guy named Marcus — told her in week two that she was interrupting him in meetings. Priya's instinct was to defend herself. Instead, she said 'thank you' and then asked for an example. Marcus gave her one. And she realized he was right. She'd been finishing his sentences, probably because she was used to being his peer and jumping in. Luna: That's a perfect example of why the feedback contract matters. If they hadn't already agreed that feedback is a gift, that moment could have turned into a grudge. Instead, it became a data point for Priya to work on. Lucas: Another tool she used was the 'start, stop, continue' exercise. She did this as a team, not just one-on-one. Everyone wrote down one thing the team should start doing, one thing to stop, and one to continue. Then they shared them anonymously. The 'stop' list was the most revealing: things like 'stop solving every problem in the meeting' and 'stop sending Slack messages after 7pm.' Luna: Those are culture killers that nobody mentions until you create a structured way to surface them. And a new manager often misses these because they're focused on deliverables. Lucas: Priya's team didn't transform overnight. But by the 60-day mark, she was getting unsolicited feedback from her team. Marcus would Slack her after a meeting and say, 'Hey, you did it again — but I saw you catch yourself.' That's progress. That's a culture where feedback is normalized. Luna: What about the former peer dynamic specifically? Did she do anything different with those three people? Lucas: She scheduled separate one-on-ones with each of them in the first week and said, 'I know this is weird. Our relationship has changed. I want to be transparent about how I see my role now, and I want to hear how you feel about it.' She didn't pretend everything was the same. She acknowledged the elephant in the room. Luna: That's key. If you avoid it, the elephant just gets bigger. Lucas: One of those former peers admitted he had applied for the manager role himself and didn't get it. That's a brutal conversation. But because Priya had set the tone of honesty, they could work through it. He ended up becoming one of her strongest allies, because she asked him to be her sounding board on team morale. Luna: Giving him a role that honored his experience without undermining her authority. Lucas: So here's the concrete takeaway for any new manager listening. You don't need a formal feedback contract meeting on day one. But you do need to, within your first two weeks, have a conversation with your team — or even with one direct report — where you explicitly invite them to tell you something you're doing that's not working. And when they do, you say 'thank you' and you act on it. Luna: Even if what they say stings. Especially then. Lucas: Because that single exchange signals more about your leadership than any vision statement ever will. Priya's team started hitting their targets again by the end of the quarter. Not because she had all the answers, but because she created a system where the team could tell her when she was getting in their way. Luna: And that's the kind of culture that retains people. I'd rather work for a manager who asks me 'what can I do better?' than one who assumes they already know. Lucas: So here's a question to end on: if you're a new manager, what's one piece of feedback you're afraid to hear from your team? And how could you invite it this week? Luna: Great challenge. I'm going to try it myself.