Asking for Feedback Upward

Asking for feedback upward means deliberately inviting the people who report to you to tell you how your leadership lands with them. On a small team, this is no

Level: Team lead
Setting: Small team
Core skill: Learning how you land
Common pitfall: Only waiting for reviews
Practice to try: A simple ask-your-team loop

What this looks like in real work

Asking for feedback upward means deliberately inviting the people who report to you to tell you how your leadership lands with them. On a small team, this is not a formal event. It is a habit of turning to the group and asking, in plain language, what is working and what is getting in the way. You might do it after a project wraps, after a tense week, or simply at the end of a one-to-one. The point is that you are the one initiating it, not waiting for a review cycle to force the conversation.

In practice, it can sound like a short question at the end of a team meeting: what could I do differently to make your work easier? Or it can be a standing item in a one-to-one where the other person knows they will be asked how you are showing up. On a small team, people often see your decisions up close, so their view is unusually detailed. They notice whether you explain the reasoning behind a change, whether you dominate discussion, whether you follow through on what you promise, and whether you seem approachable when something goes wrong.

When this works, feedback stops being a rare verdict and becomes ordinary information. You start to learn how you land before small frustrations harden into quiet disengagement. You also model something important: that receiving input is part of the job, not a sign of weakness. The skill is not collecting compliments. It is building a reliable picture of your impact from the people who experience it most directly.

Why it trips people up

The main reason leaders avoid asking upward is that it feels like handing over a weapon. If you invite criticism, you might hear something that stings, and you cannot unhear it. On a small team, there is nowhere to hide. The person giving you feedback may be someone you sit beside every day, someone whose work you assign, or someone who once disagreed with a decision you made. The closeness makes the risk feel personal rather than professional.

Another trap is the belief that people will simply tell you if something is wrong. In most workplaces, that is not how it works. Power changes what people say. Even a friendly team lead has formal influence over assignments, schedules, and how work is judged. Team members often calculate that honest criticism is not worth the possible awkwardness or risk. Silence then gets misread as agreement, and you keep repeating a behaviour that is quietly costing you trust.

There is also the discomfort of not knowing what to do with the answer. If someone says you interrupt too much, or that your updates create confusion, you cannot fix it with a single reply. You have to sit with the information, decide what is fair, and change something visible. That is slower and more humbling than waiting for a formal review, which is exactly why the habit is easy to postpone. The cost is that you spend months learning what you could have learned in a week.

The mistake that quietly hurts

The mistake is only waiting for reviews. Formal reviews arrive on a schedule, often months apart, and they are shaped by processes that reward tidy summaries. By the time feedback reaches you there, the moment has passed. You cannot ask a follow-up question about a meeting that happened last quarter. You cannot adjust a habit that has already annoyed people for half a year. And on a small team, where everyone's experience of your leadership is immediate, a delayed signal is nearly useless.

Waiting also teaches your team that feedback is an event, not a conversation. They learn to save observations for the official moment, if they share them at all. Meanwhile, the small frictions accumulate: a decision nobody understood, a check-in that felt like surveillance, a promise that slipped. None of these are dramatic on their own. Together they shape whether people trust you with the truth or manage you carefully instead.

There is a quieter version of this mistake: asking once and treating the answer as final. You run a single feedback session, hear that things are fine, and conclude that you have the skill covered. But how you land changes with the work, the pressure, and the people. A habit that felt supportive during a calm month can feel intrusive during a crunch. The only way to keep your picture current is to keep asking, lightly and regularly, rather than waiting for a formal moment to arrive.

A practice you can repeat

Try a simple ask-your-team loop that takes a few minutes and repeats on a predictable rhythm. Once a month, or at the end of each significant piece of work, ask every person on your team one open question about your leadership and one about the work itself. Keep it short, keep it verbal or written as they prefer, and keep it separate from performance conversations so it does not feel like an evaluation. The loop has three steps: ask, listen without defending, and close the loop by saying what you will try.

The ask should be specific enough to be answerable. Instead of asking whether you are a good leader, ask what you could do differently to make their week easier, or which of your habits gets in the way when deadlines tighten. The listen step is the hard one. Take notes, thank them, and resist the urge to explain why you did what you did. You are gathering data, not negotiating a verdict. If something is unclear, ask a clarifying question, but do not turn it into a debate.

The close-the-loop step is what makes the practice credible. Within a week or two, tell the team what you heard and what you intend to change, even if the change is small. If you decide not to act on something, say so and explain your reasoning briefly. This shows that their input has weight and that you are not collecting feedback as a performance. Repeating the loop builds a shared language for improvement, and it means you are never more than a few weeks away from knowing how you actually land.

What to say and do

The words matter less than the consistency, but a few simple phrases make the ask feel normal rather than alarming. At the end of a one-to-one, you might say: "Before we finish, what is one thing I could do differently to support you better?" After a project, you could ask the group: "Looking back at how I ran this, what worked and what should I change next time?" When you want something more concrete, try: "If you could change one thing about how I communicate decisions, what would it be?" These are short, direct, and easy to answer.

What you do after the answer matters just as much. Write it down so you do not forget. Thank the person for saying something useful, especially if it is uncomfortable. Avoid the reflex to justify yourself, and avoid the opposite reflex of over-apologising, which can make the other person feel they have hurt you. If you need time to think, say that you will come back to it, and then actually come back. A short follow-up note or a sentence at the next meeting is enough to show the loop is real.

You should also make it safe to say no. Some people will not have feedback at that moment, and that is fine. Do not push, and do not treat silence as a problem to solve. Over time, as they see you act on small things, they will bring bigger things. Your job is to keep the door open, keep the ask light, and keep your reactions steady. That combination, more than any clever question, is what teaches a team that upward feedback is welcome here.

When the stakes get higher

When pressure rises, the temptation is to stop asking. Deadlines tighten, decisions speed up, and feedback feels like one more thing to manage. But this is exactly when your impact is largest and your blind spots are most costly. Under stress, habits intensify. If you tend to take over in meetings, you will do it more. If you go quiet when worried, people will read it as distance. Asking upward during a hard stretch gives you a chance to correct course before small misunderstandings become serious ones.

The stakes also rise when the feedback touches something you cannot easily change, such as a decision made above you or a constraint the team dislikes. You do not have to fix everything to respond well. You can acknowledge the frustration, explain what you can and cannot influence, and ask what would make the situation more workable. That kind of honesty builds more trust than pretending you have full control. It also keeps the conversation about your leadership separate from complaints you cannot act on.

Finally, higher stakes may mean you hear something that challenges how you see yourself. Take it seriously without treating it as a verdict on your worth. Look for patterns across several people and several weeks. Ask a trusted peer or mentor how they see it, not to dismiss the feedback but to understand it. Then choose one visible change and follow through. The measure of a leader is not never being criticised. It is how quickly and calmly you learn from it when the work matters most.

Questions new leaders ask

One common question is whether asking for feedback upward undermines your authority. In practice, the opposite tends to happen. Teams usually read the ask as confidence, not weakness, because it signals that you care about your impact more than your image. Authority built on never being questioned is fragile. Authority built on listening and then deciding clearly is sturdier, especially on a small team where people see your choices up close.

Another question is what to do when the feedback is vague. "You are doing fine" is not useful, but it is often a starting point rather than a final answer. Try asking about a specific recent moment: what would have helped in that meeting, or what would make the next deadline easier. If the answer stays general, accept it and ask again another time. People often need a few rounds before they trust that honest input will be received well.

A third question is how to respond when you disagree. You can thank the person, take the point seriously, and still decide differently. Say what you heard, explain your reasoning briefly, and note what you will watch for. Disagreement is not a failure of the loop. It is part of leading. What matters is that the person feels heard and that you remain open to being wrong. Over time, that steadiness is what makes upward feedback a normal, useful part of how your team works.