Morning team,
8 years ago, my team member (let’s call her Jane) found out from someone else.
We were in a client call, three of us, and the client casually said “yeah we did flag that a few weeks back, thought you two had already spoken about it.”
Jane went quiet. I felt my stomach drop before she even looked at me.
Because I hadn’t said anything, but I’d been meaning to. For weeks.
It wasn’t a big thing on its own. Some of her client updates had gotten thin, dates slipping without a heads up, that kind of thing. But it was something I needed to mention so she could adjust before it became a pattern someone else noticed.
I’d noticed it myself, actually, months previous. I even wrote notes on my phone once to jot down what I wanted to say to her.
But in every 1:1, something more urgent came up, or I told myself it wasn’t quite bad enough yet to raise, or I didn’t want to make a whole thing out of something small. So I sat on it. For weeks.
Which meant the first time she heard about it wasn’t from me, in private, with context and care. It was in front of a client, as a throwaway line, like it was old news everyone already knew about except her.
She wasn’t embarrassed about the feedback. She could handle feedback. She was frustrated that she’d lost months she could have used to fix it. Months where she just kept doing the same thing, thinking it was fine, because nobody had told her otherwise.
She told me she’d rather hear it small and early every time, because it meant she could actually get better at her job in real time instead of finding out months later that she’d been getting something wrong the whole way through.
She started asking for feedback more often after that, not less. Within the year she was the one giving it to newer starters on the team, the same way, quick and early, before it became a big deal.
When we ignore delivering the small, but often tough feedback, it doesn’t feel risky in the moment because nothing actually happens right away.
But the risk is that the other person keeps operating without the one piece of information that would have let them grow sooner. Every week you sit on it is a week of growth they don’t get back.
This is the exact gap we built Custard to close.
Not a once-a-year survey that tells you what everyone already knew months ago. A weekly pulse that surfaces the small stuff early, while it’s still a two-minute conversation and still early enough for someone to actually do something with it.
Take Jennie for example:
One of our pilot customers, a director running her own team, put it better than I could.
Seven questions, sixty seconds, and she’s already had conversations she wouldn’t otherwise have had, the small ones, before they turn into a Jane moment.
Her score’s sitting at 8.2, strong, but the real value is that asking for feedback stopped feeling scary and started feeling normal, on both sides.
So if you’ve ever sat on something small for too long, go see what it feels like to catch it while it’s still small.
Start your Custard free trial today.
I think about this every time I catch myself finding a “better time” to say something.
There is no better time. There’s just less time for the other person to grow from it.
Peace,
H