Episode 146 49 min The quiet art of managing burnout
Psychologist Elena Marquez on spotting exhaustion before it spreads through a team, and what managers can do on Monday morning.
Season 4 · Episode 143 Leadership up close
How to give feedback people actually hear
Engineering leader Theo Grant shares the one-on-one format he uses with 60 engineers, and why most feedback fails before the first sentence.
GuestTheo Grant — VP of Engineering
Episode 143 How to give feedback people actually hear
0:00 58:44
Demo player — no audio file is connected to this episode yet. Add an audioUrl to the episode's frontmatter to enable playback, or listen on one of the platforms below.
Show notes
Theo Grant has given — and received — a lot of feedback. Over twelve years of managing engineering teams, he has developed a simple, repeatable format that he credits with changing the culture of his organisation.
Jordan and Theo walk through that format in detail, with real examples, and talk about the harder cases: feedback for senior people, for your own manager and for yourself.
What we cover
- Building trust before you need it
- The observation–impact–request structure
- The 48-hour rule
- How to make one-on-ones genuinely useful
Key takeaways
- Feedback lands when the relationship is already in credit.
- Theo separates observation, impact and request into three distinct sentences.
- Most feedback is too late — he aims for within 48 hours.
- Ask for feedback on your feedback.
Timestamps
About the guest
Theo Grant
VP of Engineering
Theo Grant leads a 60-person engineering organisation at a developer tools company. He has managed teams for twelve years and writes a popular internal handbook on feedback and one-on-ones that has been adopted by several other companies.
Episode 146 49 min 
Episode 138 52 min Leading remote teams across nine time zones
CTO Oliver Bennett on writing-first culture, async decisions and the meetings his team refuses to cancel.
Episode 148 63 min Why the best ideas start as side projects
Priya Nair on building a 40-person design studio from a weekend hobby — and why she still protects time for projects that might go nowhere.
Episode 147 55 min Saying no to funding, twice
Daniel Okafor explains why he bootstrapped his logistics software company to $8M in revenue instead of taking venture capital.
Episode 145 67 min Writing every day for ten years
Novelist Marcus Lee on routine, rejection and the 3,000-word mornings that produced four books and one very large drawer of drafts.
Episode 144 51 min Leaving a dream job at the top
Hannah Brooks on walking away from a VP role to start over at 41, and how she made the decision with incomplete information.
Have a story like this? Be our next guest
We read every pitch and reply within two weeks if it's a fit for an upcoming season.
