If you've been running quarterly planning and leaving the room feeling like nothing really shifted, this episode gets into why. Sarah and I talk through the peer feedback exercise we've built into StringCan's quarterly rhythm over the past six-plus years, what it took to get it working the way it was supposed to, and what changed when it finally did.
You'll come away with a concrete framework you can bring to your next planning session, a clearer picture of what surface-level feedback is actually telling you about your culture, and a better sense of why the trust problem in your leadership team is probably showing up in your revenue numbers, too.
This post is based on Episode 56 of Revenue Rewired | The One Thing Your Team Knows About You That No One's Saying Out Loud.
If you'd rather listen than read, find the full episode on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or Amazon. It's worth your time.
Why Being Too Nice Is a Leadership Problem
We've had a strong culture of care at StringCan for sixteen years. And for a long stretch of that time, our quarterly peer feedback process looked like it was working. People said kind things, offered something light in the growth opportunity column, and we moved on, feeling good about ourselves.
What I didn't see clearly until later was that we weren't being thoughtful. We were being safe. And safe feedback is just a slower way of avoiding the conversation.
When I traced it back, it came down to trust. Not loyalty, not whether people liked each other, but whether the environment felt secure enough for someone to say what they actually thought. Because if a team member is telling me privately that something isn't working with a colleague and then goes completely surface-level when they're in the same room together, that's not a communication style problem. It's a trust problem. And it almost always starts with how leadership receives information.
What the One Thing Exercise Actually Looks Like
The structure is simple. Before our quarterly planning session, everyone on the leadership team completes a reflection form. For each person attending the meeting, they write two things: one genuine appreciation and one growth opportunity. The filter we use for the growth piece is straightforward: will sharing this help the person, help the team they're part of, and help the clients we serve? If it doesn't pass that test, it stays off the form.
Then we get in a room together and go around. Each person shares what they wrote, directly to the person it's about. The recipient listens, asks questions if they need to, and responds. No written reports were passed around beforehand. No anonymous submissions. The reason for that is intentional: the tone, the context, and the care behind how something is delivered matter just as much as what's being said. You lose all of that the moment you put it in a document.
At the end of the round, each person chooses their own One Thing to focus on for the next quarter. Not assigned by the group. Chosen by the individual. That distinction matters more than it might seem. We follow up with a mid-quarter check-in to see how it's tracking, and we open the next quarterly session by looking honestly at what progress happened and what got in the way.
We've run this over 20 times. The last session was the first time Sarah told me it was the part of quarterly planning she actually looked forward to.
The Moment That Changes Everything
I've seen versions of this exercise go sideways at other organizations. And it almost always comes down to the same thing: the leader asks for feedback, gets some, and receives it like they're being personally challenged. Everyone in the room notices. And the next time the opportunity comes up, nobody says anything real.
Sarah described it well in the episode. An open-door policy is only as real as what happens when someone actually walks through it. If your team has learned, through experience, that giving honest feedback carries a cost, they're going to stop giving it. Not because they don't have anything to say. Because they've done the math.
Nothing terrifies someone more than working up the courage to give a leader feedback, only to watch that leader dismiss it entirely.
This is the part I want to push on: this isn't a feelings exercise. It's a revenue exercise. Leadership teams that can give and receive honest feedback move faster, waste less time, and build the internal alignment that shows up in the pipeline. The feedback loop within your company directly reflects what your go-to-market motion can produce.
What This Has to Do With Sales and Marketing
Two departments that have the most to gain from honest dialogue, and the most structural friction between them in many companies, are sales and marketing. I've watched organizations handle cross-department feedback by having each team write up a report about the other. Sales writes their thoughts on marketing. Marketing writes their thoughts on sales. Then they read the reports separately. All it does is harden the divide and give people something to quote back at each other in the next meeting.
What if instead, both teams got in a room once a quarter and ran something like this? One appreciation. One growth opportunity. Said directly, to each other's faces, from a place of genuine investment in a shared outcome. I think that single change would do more to break down cross-department friction than any alignment workshop or shared dashboard ever could.
The finger-pointing between sales and marketing usually isn't about strategy. It's about the fact that neither team has ever had a structured, safe reason to be honest with the other one.
FAQ
Q: How do you keep the One Thing exercise from turning into a performance review?
A: The framing does most of the work. The question isn't what's wrong with this person. It's what's the one thing that would help this person, this team, and the clients we serve. When the purpose is growth and support rather than evaluation, the conversation lands in a completely different place.
Q: What if someone uses the exercise to settle a score?
A: It happens, especially early on. When feedback is clearly coming from frustration rather than care, the room usually feels it. Over time the culture of the exercise self-corrects, because people can see the difference between honest input and passive aggression. But it takes a few rounds, and it takes a leader who models what good reception looks like.
Q: How do you introduce this to a team that's never done anything like it?
A: Start smaller than you think you need to. Practice the dynamic in weekly one-on-ones before bringing it into a group setting. The first time in a group is almost always awkward. That's not a sign something's wrong. It's a sign you're doing something that actually requires trust, and trust takes repetition before it feels natural.
Q: Does this work if the leader isn't willing to be in the hot seat too?
A: No. If the CEO or founder is exempt from the exercise, it signals that honesty only flows one direction in the organization. The whole thing unravels. The leader taking feedback in front of the team, and receiving it well, is what makes it safe for everyone else to do the same thing.
Q: How do you handle it when someone's One Thing misses the point of what the group was trying to say?
A: In over 20 rounds, we haven't had that happen. People almost always know what they need to hear. They just need the environment to make it safe enough to acknowledge it. If it did happen, that's a one-on-one conversation, not something to relitigate in the group setting.
Ready to Build a Leadership Team That Can Have These Conversations?
This is the kind of work we do at StringCan Interactive every day alongside our clients. Building the internal alignment and leadership clarity that makes a real revenue engine possible. The One Thing exercise is one piece of that, but it sits inside a much larger picture of how a leadership team needs to operate if they want their go-to-market motion to actually work.
If that gap feels familiar inside your organization, we'd want to talk.
