Jeff Weiner’s 3 Levels of Feedback

How do execs ensure teams act upon their feedback in the right way? Longtime LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner uses 3 Levels of Feedback

What are 3 Levels of Feedback?

After noticing team members tended to take his casual suggestions as marching orders, Jeff Weiner, Linkedin CEO from 2009 to 2020, now employs a simple system whenever providing feedback. As he outlines in “Avoiding the Unintended Consequences of Casual Feedback,” he categorizes input into 3 Levels of Feedback:

One Person’s Opinion (OPO): a subjective, anecdotal opinion that is coming from an experienced exec, but is being delivered with no special expertise or emphasis. As the input giver, we want the team to factor in the feedback in the same way they would if receiving it from anybody else: if they agree, they act upon it; if they don’t agree, they don’t act upon it, and they don’t freak out about having to explain in lots of detail why they didn’t follow our suggestion.
Strong Suggestion: this is stronger than OPO, but not yet at explicitly telling the team what to do. As the input giver, we believe our experience and expertise are relevant to the situation at hand, and we share our recommendation on the best course of action. More so than with OPO, our expectation is the team will take this suggestion seriously, but they still may decide not to follow it. In this case, if they don’t follow the feedback, it’s a good idea for them to explain why, but it doesn’t need to become a big production, especially since we want to model decision-making made by the teams closest to the ground versus by execs farther removed.
Mandate: this is telling the team what to do; no more debate. As the input giver, we’ve decided the current proposal is going to damage our company in some way; and we’ve decided the damage will be greater than the damage caused by overruling and showing a lack of trust in the team’s judgment on this particular item. Nobody likes having to overrule an individual or team, but whether we’re a Manager, Executive, or even CEO, that’s occasionally part of our job.

Since both of us are dads with pre-teen kiddos, here’s a fun visual:

When to Use 3 Levels of Feedback?

Anytime we’re in a position of influence where others acting on our feedback could lead to materially different outcomes if it’s misinterpreted. It’s most acute with a CEO, but the dynamics apply equally to anybody who manages people or sits in a formal leadership position. The key phrase to us is “materially different outcomes if it’s misinterpreted”: it usually doesn’t matter if the suggestion is easy to do and also easy to reverse, but if the suggestion may require meaningful work, especially work that may be hard to reverse, then it’s critical to be crystal clear upfront.

Therefore, 3 Levels of Feedback partially ties back to Jeff Bezos’s 1-Way vs 2-Way Doors and the idea of how easily reversible a decision is: what we want to avoid above all else is an exec making an off-hand remark that ends up involving much more material changes - especially hard-to-reverse ones - they didn’t anticipate upfront.

How do we use 3 Levels of Feedback?

John:

I like to take One Person’s Opinion (OPO) a step farther: often, I like to throw an idea out to spark debate. Which I’ve found more difficult to do as I’ve gotten more senior and the “shadow behind me” has grown in size. My goal is always to ensure my team can answer the “How do I tell John his idea is terrible?” question. I’ve found the key idea is to let people know the level of conviction you have in an idea - often not much - and then how you’d like for them to engage with it.

James:

“How do I tell John his idea is terrible?” reminds me of the opening of Jony Ive’s poignant eulogy for Steve Jobs: here’s the link to an amazing 7-minute video, and here’s the first paragraph:

“Steve used to say to me (and he used to say this a lot),’Hey John, here’s a dopey idea.’ And sometimes they were really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room, and they left us completely silent. Bold, crazy, magnificent ideas.”

I suspect many folks treated everything Steve Jobs said as a mandate, but perhaps “here’s a dopey idea” was his OPO equivalent?

Ever since I first read Jeff’s piece, I’ve tried to employ the same ideas whenever I’m among the most senior people in a meeting/decision process. I don’t always use the exact terminology, but I always strive to be clear between where “I don’t feel strongly” versus where “I’ve got a pretty strong feeling about this one.” I tend towards speaking with conviction, so a big focus for me is sharing when I have less confidence so others don’t misinterpret my naturally direct style.

John:

A big reason we’ve been able to work together successfully on Blueprints - this is #13, with plenty more to come! - is because we’ve used 3 Levels of Feedback. There’s nothing more subjective than art and writing. And James and I have a lot of ideas - sometimes competing - about what great looks like. I’d say 90% of James’ feedback to me falls in the OPO or Strong Suggestion category. I take much of the feedback and go a different direction on a few ideas. But I also respect his veto as a creative partner if something falls into the third bucket. Funnily enough, there was a visual on this specific Blueprint where he mandated a fairly minor change, but one that was important to him to capture the framework best. Easy edit, no problem.

I also like how 3 Levels of Feedback connects to 5 Step Reinforcement with Mike Derezin: sometimes, when we’re driving a mandate around a major change, it can come across as heavy-handed; 5-Step Reinforcement is a great framework to use when change is a must and we want to bring everybody else along with us.

James:

One of my favourite aspects of 3 Levels of Feedback is it’s equally powerful when we’re on the other side of the table. We’re in a meeting and an exec shares a piece of feedback, but, unlike with Jeff, it’s not clear how strongly she feels. It’s our responsibility to ask and clarify. If our company uses 3 Levels of Feedback, we can use the exact phrasing, but even if we don’t, we can say, “I have a clarifying question: when you suggest we do X, is that a light suggestion, a heavy suggestion, or a “Just Do it!”?” This can save a lot of time, especially when at least half the time we’ll hear back, “Just an idea to consider”, and we don’t need to fire-drill or change course.

The idea of getting clarity from execs is similar to a Blueprint coming soon around “What Answer Do you Want?” where we narrow down with execs following their asking for a piece of analysis: do they want the 2-minute answer (gut reaction), the 2-day-answer (quick follow-up), the 2-week answer (moderate follow-up), or the 2-month answer (extensive follow-up). I learned this at Bain, occasionally the hard way: sometimes, our client would ask a question in a meeting, and we’d do several days of rigorous analysis when it was just a flippant comment, and the 2-minute answer was all the client wanted. Bain Partners called it “Underpromise and Overdeliver”; the junior analysts who did the analysis called it “WTF” or “FML” ;)

Want to learn more?

WANT TO GO DEEPER ON LEARNING FROM JEFF WEINER?

We already Blueprinted This Meeting Will Be Successful If. In addition, here are 42 articles that Jeff has written on LinkedIn over the years. He and colleague Brian Rumao have also published a range of great content on their Next Play Ventures site here.

Also by far, our favourite course on LinkedIn Learning is Jeff’s “Leading like a CEO” [Note: LinkedIn Learning is a paid subscription product with free trial options; neither of us makes any money from LinkedIn anymore].