Eric Siu and Neil Patel challenge the old rule about criticizing privately. They walk through real scenarios—a CMO with bad data, someone late to a meeting—and argue public feedback, done respectfully, builds a stronger team and faster learning. The key: call out the behavior to improve the organization, not to humiliate the person.
Usually what they say is you want to criticize in private, praise publicly. The question is, should you criticize in public?
In business, I have a CMO. I'm not really the CMO of my own company. Salo, if he does a presentation to the company and the stats are off, like, dude, your stats are off. And I'll tell him like, come with— if you're going to present on something, the data better be accurate or you're wasting everyone else's time.
So that's private, not public?
No, I would tell him that in public.
Okay, yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
On the flip side, and I'm just making this up, if Salo sends an email that looks bad because he didn't take certain things into account, instead of replying back to the email and blasting him, I'll actually call him up and I'm like, dude, you messed up here. This is what you need to do in the future if you actually want to look good. And this is how people think. And you're just skewing the data to make yourself look good. That's not cool. If you want to get respect from people as a leader, Yep. you need to make sure that you're accurate and you just say, hey, we actually changed what the definition of this metric is. So automatically it improved my numbers by 50%. It's something that I actually gave him feedback on. And he won't care if it's public. He's a really good friend. And he's like, thank you for this. And I didn't tell him to do this. He responded to everyone and he said, by the way, this metric's looking better because of— we changed the definition. So we should optimize for this other metric here. And it's too early to tell if the numbers are going to be better or not, but directionally they're moving in the right direction. So like I would give him feedback like that in private because I want him to improve upon as a leader. And he thanked me for it and he's like, really appreciate this. Thank you very much. And it wasn't a big deal, but like if someone's doing something in public and it's wasting everyone's time within the organization, I will tell them right then and there, stop wasting everyone's time. But it's something that they're just doing particularly and that they could improve upon. I tell them those kind of things in private. So then that way, you know, it doesn't need to be public.
So the way I look at if you should criticize someone in public is, so you would hear common management wisdom. It's like, exactly, oh, you should criticize privately and praise in public. And you read a lot of these books, but then the thing with, with books is this, you learn over time what actually works for you. And there are certain philosophies. It doesn't mean that just 'cause it's in a book, it's right for you, right? You have to figure out what actually works for you. And so here, here's how I look at it. Sure, in some cases I do criticize privately. You know, I don't want to make it a public thing because it is just tied to that person. But in some cases, for example, if there's 8 of us sitting in a meeting and someone is late 4 minutes, that meeting isn't 4 minutes late, it's 32 minutes late. And so, if someone joins, I'll say— if Neil joins the meeting late, I'll be like, man, you know, the only thing I don't have, Neil, is time, right? So, I might criticize him publicly there.
Yeah.
Or in some cases, I used to hold back. I'm like, yeah, you know, management knowledge, management knowledge. And I know some people really hate this, right? But I feel comfortable criticizing in public because the thing is this, if someone's going to learn, if someone's going to make a mistake, that's okay. Okay. But we all should learn from that mistake. There shouldn't be— we should hide it because then what's happening, then those people might start to make the same mistake again. Right. And so to me, I think the vast majority of people probably hate that. But I've just— you learn over the years what works for you and what doesn't. You have to also look at, hey, like if it actually works in a company and the bad people are rotating out and the good people are getting better and it's attracting more good people, then it's It's working. So I think it's like you keep testing these things and you figure out what works for you. But I think the biggest signal, and we can move on from this, is if it feels right to you.
Yeah. And the way I like looking at it is not just fully feeling right, but by being direct with people in public for just most stuff, it'll help people A, build a thicker skin, and B, it'll teach the rest of the company that they should be direct. It doesn't matter if someone is above you or below you. If someone's doing something wrong, you should call them out. and tell them how to fix it or help them or tell them what to do. So then that way it could be improved upon. And this overall helps the whole organization grow versus you're seeing a lot of these big corporations, people hold stuff back and they're gigantic. But when they first started, they would have never got to the size they are today if they operated the same way.
Yep.
You got to make sure that people are doing what's in the best benefit of the company. It doesn't matter what their position is and people need to learn To just talk about hard things.
All right, so I wanted to take a second to tell you about my ad agency, Single Grain. We're a performance digital marketing agency, and we focus primarily on working with B2B companies and e-commerce. So performance marketing, that's SEO, that's paid media, that's CRO, that's ad creative. And there are a whole host of other things that we're doing with AI that's really cool. You can go to singlegrain.com to learn more. Again, that's singlegrain.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. Like, I like to always say withholding feedback is withholding progress. And the thing is, yeah, entropy kicks in. So as long as the founders can stay in the business, and they can keep the heat in there, they can keep injecting heat. That's all you can ask for at the end of the day. So I think if you're listening to this, if your founder gives you direct feedback, you might feel like it's a personal thing. It is almost never— I think 99.999% of the time, it's never personal. They just want you to do better so the company can do better. That's all it is.
Yeah, but the caveat with it is when you give feedback, you can be direct, But be kind about it.
Be respectful.
Yeah, exactly. Like, don't be like, F you. Look at you. No, don't call them names. Or anything like— you can't do that. That's just not cool.
Yep. All right. That's it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. Go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more about the Agency Owners Association to grow faster. And we'll see you tomorrow.
