👋 Hey, it’s Wes. Welcome to my weekly newsletter on managing up, leading teams, and standing out as a higher performer. For more, check out my intensive course on Executive Communication & Influence.

Read time: 5 minutes

Today's newsletter is sponsored by Uptempo. New year, new marketing plans. But even strong plans can fall apart due to competing priorities and shiny trends. The Blueprint for Marketing Planning helps you cut through the noise, focus on true growth drivers, and build a roadmap that delivers. Download the guide.

Most leaders know sharing feedback is extremely high ROI, but there’s one problem:

Time.

I often hear clients ask, “Is there a way to give feedback that's relatively fast? How do I start?”

Luckily, yes. You can give high-quality AND fast feedback in as little as 1-2 hours per week, and the results will compound.

When I say “feedback,” I say this broadly to include: evaluating assets, shaping decisions, explaining your thought process behind a strategy, being a thought partner, critiquing write-ups, improving positioning, editing content, tightening a proposal, improving product flows, etc.

When done thoughtfully, this investment scales your judgment across the organization. You teach your team to notice what you notice.

As a founder, I chose to invest heavily in feedback—about 15 hours per week, which comes out to 3 hours/day.

This meant my team needed less guidance over time, they felt energized from getting real feedback (vs an automatic “looks good to me”)—which allowed us to be a scrappy team that punched above our weight class.

But you don’t need to be extreme to see results. The principles below will work even if you only have 1 hour per week.

Here are four ways to make your feedback both high-quality AND fast.

⛑️ Welcome and thanks for being here. If you want to set an even higher bar for your team, I typically work with tech leaders on executive communication, managing up, and managing a team of ambitious ICs.

FWIW My approach is less about confidence and mindset (though I believe those are important), and more about practical techniques for getting more of what you want. My approach is quite goal-oriented, where we discuss your ideal outcome, stakeholders involved, specific levers at your disposal, and strategize how to get the result you want—assuming you work with intelligent colleagues who have reasonable perspectives of their own.

I mainly work with a pretty specific type of leader, and am more of an advisor-coach than purely a coach. If you’re interested, I’d love to meet you. Learn more

1. Give feedback on one thing that will make the biggest difference.

Give feedback on the 20% of work output that will make the biggest impact.

• Identify one highly-leveraged piece of feedback

• Show them how to fix it in one place, in detail

• Have them apply that logic to the rest of the document

This teaches your team the skill of pattern matching. You’re not spelling everything out for them—you’re giving them a chance to practice applying what you just shared.

Instead of fixing the whole document, you’re saving yourself time AND teaching them how to fish.

When they level up the document, they’ll bring you a stronger version. Then you can mention the next most highly-leveraged piece of feedback, or pivot into giving line edits.

2. Don’t jump straight into line edits.

If what you get is drastically different from what you expected, give structural feedback first.

Here’s why: if you start with line edits, you might trim entire paragraphs later—so your line edits are wasted. Take a step back to see if the underlying premise and strategy itself might be off-base.

Start with foundational questions like, Should we be doing this at all? Should we do it in this way? Of all the things we could do, why should we do this?

Once your direct report sends back a revised version with the right strategy, then you can give line edits.

Here are examples of structural feedback:

“This team-wide strategy doc doesn't have enough signposting, so as a reader, I can't tell where you're going. For example, [insert before and after that illustrates this concept]. This doc would be a lot clearer if you applied that throughout. If you want to take another stab, I can review your updated draft.”

Another example:

“This email is too much about logistics, not enough about sales. For example, you jump straight into logistics like X, Y, Z, but the prospect isn't sold yet on why to take action in the first place. We need to get them excited about this, then we can share details. Let's have you take another stab with this in mind, then I can review."

Notice how I didn't give line edits. I gave one round of high-level feedback first, which can take as little as 5 minutes.

This is better for me because it saves time. It’s better for my direct report because they get the right level of feedback at the right time.

3. You don’t need to write out all your feedback.

Giving written feedback is giving feedback on hard mode. It might take 30 minutes to write coherently what you can say in 3 minutes out loud.

The benefit of written feedback is it's highly scalable. But the downside is it takes time to write well, and realistically, you might not have that bandwidth. Don’t let that stop you from giving feedback.

You have a variety of tools at your disposal: voice notes, Looms, phone calls, etc. Not everything needs to be written in order to be useful for your recipient.

Fun fact: many Maven employees are in the top 10-15% of Loom users. One employee is in the top 3% of Loom users. We have an intentionally asynchronous company culture, so tools like this are super helpful for sharing high-fidelity feedback while allowing recipients to review when it's convenient for them.

Loom is most useful for anything with a visual component. You're walking someone through what you see on your screen and adding voiceover. You can pull on more levers (tone of voice, visuals, pointing with your mouse) that help to convey meaning.

To be clear, this does not mean you should give vague verbal feedback while sharing your screen.

While there's more leeway for feedback that’s less tight than written feedback, you should still aim to give feedback that's TACS—tactical, actionable, concrete, and specific—even if you're doing it verbally.

4. Balance what’s easy for you (feedback giver) and easy for them (feedback receiver).

You want to make feedback easy for your recipient to take action on, but you also need to do it in a way that doesn’t burn yourself out.

Your direct reports would rather have you give feedback in the format you prefer than not get any at all. So above all, keep the process sustainable, so you can do it long enough to see your effort come to fruition.

Which of these techniques are you most excited to try? Hit reply because I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for being here, and I’ll see you next Wednesday at 8am ET.

Wes

Course: Executive Communication & Influence for Senior Managers and ICs

The April 2025 cohort is open for enrollment. The course dates are April 10 & 11 from 12-3:30pm ET.

As of today, the course is 55% full. In the past week, operators from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OfferUp, First Round Capital, and more have enrolled. If you miss the April cohort, the next time I’m running the course will be summer 2025.

→ If you’d like to join us in April, here are the course details.

Connect with Wes

• Are you new to the newsletter? Subscribe for free

• Follow me on LinkedIn for more insights

• Check my availability to do a keynote for your team

• Learn more about 1:1 executive coaching

• Sell your ideas, manage up, gain buy-in, and increase your impact in my 2-day intensive course. Class starts in April 2025. Save your spot here: Executive Communication & Influence for Senior ICs and Managers