I Just Want to Help the Advisors, But All They Hear Is Criticism
“We put an enormous amount of energy into preparing these conversations, but the moment we give feedback, the advisors experience it as a performance review.”
A case from my practice, fully anonymized. Details such as role, industry and personal information have been changed.
What’s really going on
When well-meant support lands as control, the content of the message is rarely the issue. Almost always, it’s the relationship message underneath. Schulz von Thun’s four-sides model of communication describes this phenomenon precisely: every piece of feedback carries, alongside the facts, a statement about the relationship, a self-revelation and an appeal. While the sender means an improvement suggestion as plain factual information, the receiver may hear it, on the relationship level, as a judgment of their competence.
Wherever targets and metrics shape daily work, people slip quickly into a protective mode when they receive feedback. What decides the outcome then is less the quality of the suggestion than whether the conversation feels like support or like an exam. The pattern generalizes: intent and impact often diverge further than a team itself realizes. Quality cannot be criticized into existence. It grows in an atmosphere of psychological safety.
The starting point
A financial services provider runs its own advisory quality team. This team’s task is to support client advisors in hitting their targets and to sustainably raise client satisfaction.
The team lead brought me in because the team’s support was landing with the advisors noticeably differently than intended. The team put a lot of effort into its conversations, but wasn’t reaching the advisors the way it wanted to.
Getting to the real problem
To understand the situation, I started the process with a series of confidential interviews. I spoke with the team lead, two members of the advisory quality team, and two advisors coached by the team.
The picture was clear. The team worked with real commitment and a genuine intent to strengthen the advisors. The advisors, though, experienced these same conversations as a performance review and as criticism. Intent and impact had diverged, and that is exactly where the work began.
Together with the team lead, I agreed on two directions:
- Communication: team members phrase improvement suggestions so the message lands on the relationship level the way it is meant.
- Repositioning: the team develops a presence and a self-understanding that the advisors experience as support.
Back to the person behind the quote
The actual work happened across two workshops of about three hours each. Schulz von Thun’s four-sides model of communication served as the theoretical and practical foundation, but the focus was on the team’s stance. We worked on the following elements:
- The advisors’ perspective: feedback from the advisor interviews flowed into the workshop, anonymized. This had the team engage directly with its own impact.
- The four-sides model: the team analyzed which parts of a piece of feedback land on the factual, relationship, self-revelation and appeal levels, and aimed its communication deliberately at the recipients.
- Communication patterns: we developed concrete conversation patterns for feedback and coaching sessions that put support front and center.
- Role-plays: in intensive role-plays, the team rehearsed the new patterns on typical conversation situations from daily work.
- Stance: the focus was the team members’ stance. They understand themselves as support for the advisors, and show up that way.
What’s changed since
The change showed up on several levels. The team has reinterpreted its role. In the sense of sensemaking as described by Karl Weick, it now tells itself, and the outside world, a new story: that of a team that accompanies advisors in their development. Team members put techniques from the workshops to use immediately in their feedback conversations.
The impact is measurable too. An internal pulse survey showed a clear rise in satisfaction with the advisory quality team, and the advisors now experience the conversations as helpful. The team lead sums it up: “So far I’ve only heard positive feedback. My team is already trying out some of these techniques in its feedback conversations.”
Quotes translated from German.