The “I Love You More” Principle: Give Great Feedback and Be A Better Boss

Today's Highlights:

• The Goal: make you comfortable giving feedback to your family, friends, and most importantly direct reports

• Feedback is truly a gift. It's scary to give hard feedback, but as long as you deliver it from a place of love and caring, then it's the right thing to do to help your people be the best versions of themselves.

• Think if someone came out of the bathroom with their fly down. You should tell them! Otherwise they'll walk all over the office like that and be more embarrassed later. Feedback is no different... tell people NOW so they don't keep making the same mistake over and over again.

Feedback is one of the greatest gifts you can receive.

It will make you better at your job, improve your relationships, and push you to fix flaws that may be holding you back from taking the next step in your career.

So why is it so hard to hear it?

And more importantly, why is it so hard to give it?

I just finished reading Radical Candor by Kim Scott.

The purpose of the book is to turn people into great bosses by teaching them how to do 2 things really well:

• Care personally about their people

• Challenge their people directly

When you are a boss who both cares personally and challenges directly, you are living in radical candor.

Living in radical candor allows you to give and receive feedback freely because there’s no fear of ruining your relationships. In other words, when people know you care deeply about them, they are more receptive to your feedback and less threatened by you challenging them. A huge game changer!

I loved the book and highly recommend it for anyone looking to be a better boss who is more effective at giving hard feedback.

So why am I telling you all this?

Because giving feedback is uber important, and last year, I came up with a technique that I believe enhances radical candor that I want to share with you today.

I call it the “I Love You More” Technique.

Here’s what it is and how to use it so you can be a great boss or friend, give great feedback, build stronger relationships, and enhance your team’s results:

I Love You More

The “I Love You More” Technique is a way to give great, hard feedback to your direct reports, family members, or friends. It helps show them that you are only giving them the feedback because you care deeply about them.

I’ve tried this myself many times and have had really positive results.

With that said, this does not mean I have never had a negative reaction when giving hard feedback. But it does mean that after a few days, the person who reacted negatively realized that the feedback came from a place of love and ended up being grateful for it.

If you really care about someone, then eventually they will realize it and appreciate your feedback.

For the “I Love You More” Technique to work, you have to push past this fear of an initial negative reaction.

How it works

When giving feedback, we all have the same fear:

“I really want to confront my direct report about this problem, but I don’t want her to think I hate her! So I just won’t say anything.”

This mindset doesn’t allow for growth. And that problem will fester into something bigger and bigger until one day it’s too big to manage. Then you can either still say nothing (and watch it destroy your team), or fire that person (and watch it destroy your relationship). Lose-lose.

So your job as a boss, or sister, or friend, is to be courageous enough and love people enough to give them hard, honest feedback.

The “I Love You More” Technique is a way of showing people that your love for them only increases when you can have these types of hard conversations.

Setting the scene

Let’s pretend you are talking to your brother about a bad habit you’ve noticed where he drinks too much alcohol when he gets stressed out.

You sense the drinking is effecting his personal relationships and have noticed it makes your parents uncomfortable.

Your parents are too scared to say anything because they don’t want to hurt him. And you’re scared too! But you know if you don’t tell him, then it will keep happening.

This is where the I Love You More Technique comes in.

Ask your brother to meet up in person— choose somewhere non-threatening. Then say:

“Michael, I want to talk to you about something hard. I have some feedback to give you and I don’t think you’re going to like it. You may even react negatively. But before I do, I need you to know something:

I loved you before I had this feedback for you. And I am going to love you after I give it to you. In fact, I am going to love you even more after giving it to you because being able to give each other feedback means nothing will ever stand in the way of us being as close as we can be.

So I know it may be scary to hear this, but please don’t forget I will love you more after saying it. Can I give you this feedback?”

Do you see how that works?

It’s all about creating a safe environment for giving the feedback and making the person receiving it feel comfortable.

Let’s look at a business example.

In the Office

In the office, the “I Love You More” Technique is equally effective, but there’s one significant challenge:

You need to mean it.

Obviously it’s easy to love your brother!

But if you’re a boss with a direct report?

Then you can’t use the “I Love You More” Technique unless you’ve spent enough time getting to know them that you actually do LOVE them. It’s possible for this to be the case, but it’s not the norm. Meanwhile, love can also be too intense of a word for some people. It may not be appropriate.

With this in mind, in the office, I usually modify the “I Love You More” Technique to the:

• “I Care About You More” Technique

• “I Appreciate You More” Technique

• “I Respect You More” Technique

The point is it doesn’t have to be the same love as you have for your brother. But it does have to be a connection that comes from knowing them deeply, caring about them as a person, and wanting them to be the best person and employee that they can be.

In the office, this may look more like this:

“Christine, I have always struggled to run a good OAC meeting, and watching you this morning, I respect the way you keep a tight agenda and make sure everyone has a voice. After sitting in on this morning’s meeting, I also have some hard feedback I want to give you.

Before saying it, I want you to know that I respect you a lot and this feedback doesn’t change that. In fact, I hope you know I have even more respect for you knowing I can give you hard feedback. That is really important to the future of our relationship and you being the best PM you can be.

Are you ready to hear it?”

Again, you don’t have to get all touchy feely, but you do need to establish that you really care! And show your direct report the impact that your feedback will have.

It’s 1 to 2 sentences to set the right environment.

Just make sure you mean it.

Create a safe environment

Humans come from a “tribe” mentality.

Our ancestors created tribes to increase their safety: the plains in Africa were much safer with a group watching your back.

Therefore it is in our DNA to fear being kicked out of the tribe. In our early days, that meant getting eaten by something big and scary.

So it makes sense that we don’t like getting hard feedback! We feel like we’re getting kicked out of the tribe. And we start worrying we’re going to get eaten — or worse, fired.

The “I Love You More Technique” is all about creating a safe environment.

It shows your brother/direct report/friend that they’re not being kicked out of the tribe before they can convince themselves otherwise.

They may still react negatively, but if they’re a great person or employee, they will come around to understanding that you wanted to help them be the best tribe-member they could be, rather than trying to push them out.

So give the “I Love You More” Technique a try and let me know how you do.

I’d love to hear your experience and feedback.