Feedback is one of the most common workplace management tools, and also one of the easiest to misunderstand.
In this Skills Spotlight episode of The Leader Lab, Kathy Pearce, Facilitator at LifeLabs Learning, joins host Micaela Mathre to explore why vague praise and criticism often leave people unsure what to repeat, improve, or change.
Using LifeLabs’ Playing Cards Method™, Kathy breaks down how managers can make feedback more specific, actionable, and easier for teams to apply in real-world situations.
The method uses the four suits in a deck of cards to make feedback easier to recognize, remember, and improve.
Hearts are blurry praise. Clubs are blurry criticism. Diamonds are specific praise. Spades are specific criticisms. As Kathy explains, blurry feedback often leaves people emotional, confused, or guessing. Specific feedback, on the other hand, points directly to the behavior someone should continue or change.
One of the most compelling moments in the conversation comes when Kathy shares a real coaching example from a recent workshop. A manager wanted to tell an employee, “It’s obvious you’ve been using AI.” Kathy helped the manager realize that the statement was leading with interpretation instead of observable behavior.
By digging deeper, the feedback became:
That shift completely changed the takeaway. Instead of “stop using AI,” the employee now had actionable guidance on how to improve their own work and the prompts they give AI tools.
The episode also highlights something refreshingly honest: even experts struggle with feedback. Kathy shares that she recently used LifeLabs’ Lab Coach AI to help de-blur difficult feedback she needed to give while feeling emotional. Even after teaching the workshop many times, she explains, feedback still requires practice, self-awareness, and intentionality.
Kathy Pearce is a Facilitator at LifeLabs Learning with more than two decades of experience managing large-scale organizational change initiatives, cultivating strong teams, and building cultures of continuous learning. She specializes in helping leaders communicate with greater clarity, develop stronger feedback habits, and create environments where people can grow.
“If I said, ‘it’s obvious you’re using AI,’ the takeaway might be, okay, I need to stop using AI. And that’s not necessarily what we want people to do.” — Kathy Pearce, The Leader Lab
Workshops:
Resources:
Blogs:
Watch:
Transcript
Micaela Mathre 00:00
Let’s dive in. So the topic we’re talking about today is one of the behaviors that we teach in our workshops here at LifeLabs
Kathy Pearce 00:51
The rounded shapes. So the hearts and the clubs are blurry feedback. The pointed shapes, the spade and the diamond point
to a specific behavior that you want the person to keep doing or stop doing. And so when you have a name for something,
you can recognize it more. You can compare it. You can improve it. So as we’re giving a piece of feedback to be able to say,
“Oh, hang on. That’s a heart. Let me turn that into a diamond,” right? As soon as we have the language to recognize that,
then we’re much more likely to be able to say, this feedback is not going to be actionable. Let me, let me make it clearer.
Micaela Mathre 00:51
Kathy, welcome to the Leader Lab. So excited to have you on the podcast today.
Kathy Pearce 00:54
Thank you. Glad to be here.
Micaela Mathre 00:56
This is one of our many episodes where we are so thrilled to bring on one of our in-house LifeLabs Learning facilitators and
really get to learn and hear from their experience in real time. Kathy brings over two decades of experience in managing
large-scale organizational change initiatives, cultivating strong teams, and building cultures of continuous learning,
recognizing that employees often lack the necessary context and resources to excel, especially in the virtual world. Let’s
dive in.
Micaela Mathre 01:27
So the topic we’re talking about today is one of the behaviors that we teach in our workshops here at LifeLabs, the Playing
Cards Method. It kind of follows so much of our promises. It’s easy to remember. It’s really applicable and actionable. We’d
love to hear a little bit from you, Kathy, in terms of maybe the overview of the playing card method.
Kathy Pearce 01:48
So the playing cards method really is about giving a name to something. So we use the four suits that are in a deck of
playing cards. So hearts, clubs, spades, and diamonds to talk about feedback.
Kathy Pearce 01:59
Club is blurry critique. Now, when we say blurry is one of the words we use at life labs that we’ve kind of made up oftentimes
we say things that just aren’t clear as to what they need. So if I say, “Oh, Micaela, that podcast was a disaster,” right? You
feel like you’re getting clubbed over the head with bad feedback, right? That’s the club. It’s not helpful, right? It’s just, it’s
very vague and it’s a criticism. So that’s a club getting clubbed over the head.
Kathy Pearce 02:26
Then there’s the heart. “Oh my gosh, Micaela, that podcast was awesome.” Great. What did you like about it? Right? So
again, it’s still blurry, but this time it’s praise, right? And you think about like going on Instagram or any other social media,
you hit that heart, right? Oh, I like it. I like it. I like it. But if you don’t leave a comment, the person will have no idea what it
is that you like. So the hearts and clubs are very blurry. They don’t give you anything to go on.
Kathy Pearce 02:52
So then we go to the more specific ones, diamonds and spades, a spade. Think of a garden spade that helps you to like dig
down to the root of the problem. It is specific criticism. “So Micaela, the audio quality on that podcast episode was really
garbled,” right? Now, you know, next time, oh, I need to pay more attention to the audio quality, right? I’ve given you
something specific. So that’s a spade specific criticism.
Kathy Pearce 03:19
Then lastly, diamonds, the rare and precious gemstone specific phrase, right? “Micaela, the follow-up questions that you
asked the guests on the podcast were so on point and helped them to dig a little deeper into things that I think they were
moving too quickly through.” I could probably even get more specific than that, but you get the idea. Like now, you know,
okay, follow-up questions are really important. I need to dig deeper with people. And so you can keep doing that.
Kathy Pearce 03:45
Now here’s a way to remember this. The rounded shapes. So the hearts and the clubs are blurry feedback. The pointed
shapes, the spade and the diamond point to a specific behavior that you want the person to keep doing or stop doing. And so
when you have a name for something, you can recognize it more. You can compare it. You can improve it. So as we’re giving
a piece of feedback to be able to say, Oh, hang on. That’s a heart. Let me turn that into a diamond, right? As soon as we
have the language to recognize that, then we’re much more likely to be able to say, this feedback is not going to be
actionable. Let me, let me make it clearer.
Micaela Mathre 04:26
That’s so excellent. Thank you for that overview. This was a big aha for me, candidly, when I came aboard at LifeLabs. I
realized so often in my career, I had given both clubs and hearts. And I was like, neither of those are useful. And you think
you’re doing a good job? Because you’re like, well, I’m giving feedback. I’m telling them something. But I think the point that
you made earlier around something useful and actionable, you told me that was terrible. I don’t really know what to do with
that, except for feel bad and take it personally, right?
Micaela Mathre 05:00
You tell me the audio quality wasn’t great, then suddenly, okay, I know I can go and make sure that next time we’ve got this
set up, and we can do something differently. It was interesting.
Micaela Mathre 05:10
So we just came from our sales offsite. And at the end of the day, our sales manager, Jesse, actually had us go around and
do diamonds for each other. So we brought actually like a physical diamond that I somehow got through TSA, it was like a
fake, not real. It was like a fake. It was huge. And we took it and we passed it around. It was kind of amazing. Because like
the weight of it felt great. And you’re like holding it and we were giving diamonds to folks. And just to see the way that
people’s faces light up, when they hear a diamond because they feel and I can speak from my own experience, perhaps like
you feel seen when someone gets a diamond, you’re like, “Oh, I feel seen in this moment, like you were actually paying
attention to what happened there.”
Micaela Mathre 05:56
And I think the same is true for a spade as well. It’s always difficult, I think oftentimes to receive feedback, especially a
spade. And yet, when somebody is giving you a spade, they’re paying attention in a different way. Even though you’re like,
“Oh, there might be something I need to work on here or something I need to take away from this,” it feels personalized.
Micaela Mathre 06:15
Do you have any specific examples or workplace scenario of the playing cards method?
Kathy Pearce 06:21
Yes, so just a couple of weeks ago in the workshop, I was working with a manager who said the piece of feedback she
wanted to give to her employee was, “It’s obvious you’ve been using AI on a lot of your work.” And I said, okay. And that’s
obviously a club. Well, actually, no, it’s not obvious. It could have also been a heart, right? We needed to know, like, is it a
good thing that you’ve been using AI or not? In this case, it was not.
Kathy Pearce 06:45
And so I said to her, I said, “what are the things that this person has done? Or what is it that you see in their work that
makes you think they’re using AI?” Because when we use a heart or a club, we’re leading with our assumptions, we’re
leading with our interpretation.
Kathy Pearce 07:01
And let’s face it, we’re all being encouraged to use AI, right? So if we don’t want to demonize using AI, but what is it that is
indicating to you? What is it that’s making you believe that? And so she said, “well, the proposal that she put together lacked
the specificity about this client’s particular situation. And it lacks some specificity on how we could address those things.”
And I said, okay, much more specific there, right?
Kathy Pearce 07:28
So if I said, “it’s obvious you’re using AI,” the takeaway might be, okay, I need to stop using AI. And that’s not necessarily what we want people to do.
Kathy Pearce 07:38
So instead, if you go in with, I notice that your report lacks specificity in these two areas. And here’s why we need that
specificity. Now that person not only knows how to write a better report themselves, but they can tell AI, I need you to be
specific in these areas. And then when they look over the output from AI, they’re going to know to check for them.
Kathy Pearce 08:02
It’s not just I see this, and I think you’re using AI, it’s what is the thing? Because let’s make that thing better, right? And now
that person knows for their own skills, and they can teach the AI to do it, so that they’re producing much more specific and
useful reports in a much more effective and efficient way by implementing AI where it’s appropriate.
Micaela Mathre 08:21
That’s such a great example. And I think so many of us can relate to. And I also appreciate what you said around the
feedback. I can tell you used AI could be interpreted in two different ways, right? The company culture and expectation, I
mean, so many organizations these days do have an expectation that folks are using AI. And so that could be very blurry for
folks of, are we saying that’s a good thing that I used it? Or is that a negative thing? Like what is the side of it? So Kathy, I’d
love to hear just a summary. If you think about the playing cards method.
Kathy Pearce 09:01So just a reminder that the rounder shapes are the blurry feedback, right? So hearts and clubs. So a heart is a blurry praise.
So that was a fantastic presentation.
Kathy Pearce 09:13
And a club is blurry criticism. That was a terrible presentation, right? Neither of them give you the actionable feedback that
you need to make the next presentation better, right? Because we don’t know what was it that was wonderful or terrible
about it.
Kathy Pearce 09:28
So the pointed shapes, spades and diamonds point to a specific behavior. So a diamond is specific praise. The slide deck on
your presentation was loaded with images. There was hardly any text and the images that you included added information
to what you were saying and helped me to stay engaged. Right. That would be a diamond. Notice diamonds take a lot more
words. Right. When we get more specific, it’s a lot more words that come out.
Kathy Pearce 09:57
And then spades would be specific criticism. So your slide deck had over 20 words per slide and very few images. And it
made it hard for me to listen and read at the same time. The specific, the pointed feedback points to a specific thing. And
that is what is actionable. So we know what to keep doing or stop.
Micaela Mathre 10:18
I recently got wind of an idea that you were talking about with a client of ours, this idea around diamond days. So can you
tell us a little bit about what’s a Diamond Day? What’s the idea there?
Kathy Pearce 10:30
That was a company that I was working with in Boston, where I do most of my facilitation. I love when this happens. They
had the entire company, from the CEO down to the newest IC, all take the feedback skills workshop over the course of
several days. And what I love about that is it sends a clear message to everybody that this is important, right? That
everybody is gonna get in on this.
Kathy Pearce 10:52
And then everyone has that shared language so that you can talk about Diamonds and Spades because everyone knows
what it is. In working with the sponsor, I suggested, you know, now that you’ve done this, how can you get this traction
going, right? People are interested in this. They’ve had fun with this. And now let’s put it into use.
Kathy Pearce 11:09
And so we talked about them doing a Diamond Day, where everyone would find a way that day to give at least one diamond
to someone. They were talking about ways to celebrate it, different ways to make it fun. I wish I had known about your giant
diamond. I wanna know where you got that. That might be fun.
Kathy Pearce 11:25
But yeah, just a way to celebrate. We often, I think we’re much more likely to give hearts than clubs, right? I think most of us
know most of the time that a club is not great. We say all the time, “oh, great job. You’re a rock star.”
Kathy Pearce 11:41
And one of the things that happens is when you, you know, everyone knows praise in public, criticize in private, right? When
you give a heart in public, you know, “oh, Micaela, you’re the best, right? You’re awesome.”
Kathy Pearce 11:53
Everybody else sort of, “I’ll never be as good as Micaela, right? She’s so awesome.” But if instead I say, “Micaela, the way
you planned that activity at the offsite and you had something tangible that people could pass to each other, it just brought
so much more impact. And it gave people sort of a way to focus on each other after a long day of working together,” right?
What I’ve done right there, if I do that publicly, is I’ve given everyone the recipe to Micaela’s secret awesome zone.
Kathy Pearce 12:25
By giving a diamond publicly, I’m telling everyone, when you plan an offsite, you need to have activities where people move
around and, you know, do a thing and keep them focused. And so everyone leaves with a blueprint for how to be as
awesome as possible.
Micaela Mathre 12:42
That is so interesting. And I’m literally thinking of examples of when I have done that and been on the receiving end of both
kinds of that public praise. Something we have been talking a lot about with the sales and marketing teams that I’m
currently running at LifeLabs, celebrating the small wins because it builds momentum and it’s just energizing for folks. Like
we don’t just celebrate the big ones, we’re celebrating the small ones too.
Micaela Mathre 13:08
And I love this idea around diamond days. And when you’re celebrating those wins, be as specific as you can, because what
you just shared with us was you can actually have a ripple effect. If you celebrate the small wins and you share a specific
example of what that is and you give a really specific diamond, then you give other people access to what that was.
Micaela Mathre 13:30
And I love that the secret sauce, right? Instead of just that person’s a rock star, they’re so amazing. It’s like, what do you
mean when you say that? And how can other folks learn from that? I love that. I think that’s something our listeners could
really benefit from as well.
Micaela Mathre 13:44
I know we’ve got a lot of folks in the LifeLabs community that listen to the podcast and are always thinking about actionable
ways to reinforce the learning. And I think a diamond day will look very different for each organization depending on your
culture and your channels.
Micaela Mathre 14:00
Another idea that we recently had was a channel in Slack where you can share diamonds or feedback, and again, in a more
public forum. And I think there’s a lot of ways to go about doing that.
Micaela Mathre 14:13
So for folks that are listening that haven’t taken our feedback skills workshop, that is one of our workshops that’s very
resonant with clients. And I think one of these areas, I could speak to my own experience in this, we never become perfect at
giving feedback, right? It is something we always have to be learning and improving and iterating off of, and we just can’t
practice it enough. I don’t think it ever becomes easy going in both directions. I can even think about this week when I gave
hearts, and I work at LifeLabs and I talk and I’m like, oh yeah, I do that.
Kathy Pearce 14:50
Yeah, and I will say feedback skills is our most popular workshop. So I should go and see how many times have I taught that
workshop because I’m sure it’s a lot and even I like just last week, I had to give some difficult feedback to a friend and I
opened up our life labs learning platform and I went to Lab Coach AI and I, because I had, I was up in my feelings, right?
Kathy Pearce 15:11
So I wrote what I wanted to say to her and I put it in our Lab Coach AI function and it, it helped me to deep blur it because it
has been taught all of our life labs methods and so there was work to be done, right? That even though I teach this all the
time in the moment, when I’m feeling a certain way, it’s, it can be hard to, to deep blur. So yeah, it, we’re human, it takes
time. It takes practice.
Micaela Mathre 15:36
Was that helpful for you to kind of see it in that way?
Kathy Pearce 15:40
As soon as I saw it, I was like, yes, thank you. That’s exactly, you know, but I couldn’t in the moment cause I was upset and I
was like, no, this is good. This helped, yeah.
Micaela Mathre 15:49
What a great example. And I think I’ve actually done the same thing with Lab Coach AI where, right.
Micaela Mathre 15:55
If you were just to go into a more generic LLM, there could be a lot of different methods that you would get out of that. And I
think one of the benefits, especially for listeners who are clients of ours is that Lab Coach is trained on the playing cards
method and our feedback skills workshop. And so when you go in there, you’re going to, you know, have that framework
that you’ve learned, but then you’re going to get that specificity around for your specific example, how you might apply it. So
it’s a great example.
Kathy Pearce 16:26
And it’s going to use that language of diamonds and spades, which again then makes it easier to remember because it’s
language we’re already using. So yeah, it’s a great tool.
Micaela Mathre 16:35
Amazing. Well, Kathy, thank you so much for joining me today. It was so great to have you. I always like to ask folks who are
on the podcast, if people want to reach out to you and get in touch, they’ve got questions about what you shared today.
What’s the best way to do that?
Kathy Pearce 16:50
So you can reach me at Lifelabs, kathy@lifelabslearning.com. I am also on LinkedIn. It’s Kathy Pierce, NH. So Kathy Pierce, on LinkedIn.
Micaela Mathre 17:02
Wonderful. Thank you again for joining us. It was so great to see you today.