My palms were sweating, and I was thinking, ‘No, no, no.’

Samantha Leal shares her toughest leadership moments and explains why embracing brutal feedback was the best decision she made.

Jun 26, 2024

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“I was very nervous. My palms were sweating, and I was thinking, ‘No, no, no.’ I felt like I was trying to detach myself by imagining I was a character in a movie.”

Then Sam Leal (Growth Advisor and former Head of Growth and Marketing) took a deep breath and stepped into the room for an in-person, no-holds-barred feedback session with her team.

Sam was in the messy middle of transitioning from being a successful IC to team leader, and the process was anything but smooth.

The company was growing fast and her marketing goals kept getting more and more aggressive. Sam’s default solution was to double down and work harder.

That’s what worked for her as an IC, but didn’t play out well with her team.

“My team had the highest turnover and the lowest morale,” Sam shared. “Some of my team members were even afraid of me. And I didn’t even see it coming.”

Sam first learned about her team’s feelings through an employee NPS survey. But the real turning point came after she heard the office gossip. “It was a very harsh wake-up call,” she says. “People were extremely burned out and thinking of quitting. It was clear I needed to do something.”

Sam called a team meeting to get specific feedback about her leadership style.

(She did this against the advice of her professional coach, who said it would likely be an unproductive and brutal feedback session.)

Sam wanted to give her team an opportunity to provide 100% unfiltered feedback – in person. “I needed to be vulnerable with my team,” she said. “I needed to show them I wanted to learn, and do better.”

The meeting was just as tough as her coach predicted.

“It hurt a ton, but I needed to hear their feedback” she shared. “It was super hard, but one of the best things I ever did.”

It took Sam about three-and-a-half months of hard work to turn things around with her team. She went into depth about this meeting during our conversation and also spilled the beans about a few of the other challenging moments in her journey, like:

The time her CEO bypassed her on a major project and gave her brutal feedback about her “lack of critical thinking skills”
The point at which she realized that failing is just part of the learning and growth cycle
How she came to understand the value of saying, “I don’t know,” instead of bluffing

Watch or listen below 👇