How to Give Feedback to Your Clinic Team Without Lowering the Standard

Recently, I caught up with a friend who moved to Hong Kong from Canada, and whose children are now navigating the same education system I grew up in.

She shared a story with me.

A teacher had corrected a child's handwriting exercise because the letter "J" wasn't formed quite properly. The curve at the bottom was slightly off.

Half ticks everywhere.

What followed, unsurprisingly, was internet debate.

Some parents were furious.

"It's a J."

"It's close enough."

"Why are we crushing children over tiny details?"

Others argued that correction, discipline, and high standards are exactly how resilience and technical skill are built.

I grew up in Hong Kong, so I understand this conversation intimately.

And honestly, I can't fully choose a side.

Because both perspectives hold truth.

Now what's that to do with running clinics?

Two things this does to you

The first thing it does is obvious. It can limit you. When everything has a right answer and a wrong answer, there's not much room for the creative middle. The grey area. The experiment. I won't pretend otherwise.

But the second thing it does is less talked about.

It makes you meticulous. It makes you check and recheck before you submit anything, because in that system, everything is treated as final. Everything matters. There's no casual, no near enough. You learn to care about precision because imprecision has consequences.

And somewhere along the way, that stops feeling like a rule you follow and starts feeling like just how things are done.

High standards stop being a choice. They become the baseline.

What that means when you lead a team

I've thought about this a lot. I wasn't just thinking about my girls, but also my team.

I've always found it easy to receive feedback. Someone tells me something I've done isn't good enough, and I want to understand why and fix it. I don't spiral. I don't take it personally. I just want to know what right looks like and get there.

For years I thought everyone felt that way.

They don't.

In most Western workplaces, correction is uncomfortable. Feedback is wrapped in softness and small talk to make it land without bruising. "You're doing great, and one small thing..." Compliment sandwiches. Encouragement first. The actual point buried somewhere in the middle.

I understand why. Psychologically, people are wired to protect themselves from criticism. And leaders learn quickly that if feedback makes people defensive, they'll get less of it.

But here's what I've watched happen when organisations optimise for comfort over truth:

The standard slips quietly. Nobody names it. The work gets good enough. The team stops growing. And the leader starts compensating, doing more themselves, lowering their expectations, or feeling quietly resentful that no one holds the bar they're holding.

False positivity doesn't protect people. It just delays the conversation and dilutes the standard.

The question I keep coming back to

What does it actually mean to be genuinely okay with giving and receiving feedback? Actually being okay with it, seeing it as just information, not attack. Giving it as investment, not criticism.

I think the answer lives somewhere in how you were taught to see the relationship between correction and care.

In Hong Kong, being corrected by your teacher meant they were paying attention. It meant your J mattered enough to fix. YOU mattered enough to be corrected.

It's the same in the competitive ballet school I grew up in, I was overjoyed if my teachers laid their eyes on me and made a correction.

Indifference looked like a tick you didn't earn. Attention looked like the half tick that made you go home and try again.

The correction was the investment.

What I've learned running teams

The leaders who build the strongest teams aren't the ones who are the most encouraging. They're the ones whose teams know exactly where the bar is, and believe the leader will help them get there.

That requires honesty. It requires the courage to name what isn't working before it becomes a pattern. It requires believing that the people around you are capable of more, and saying so clearly.

That's not harsh leadership. That's respectful leadership.

The half tick wasn't cruel. It was the truth. And the truth, delivered with the expectation that I could do better, built something in me that decades of false positivity never could.

Do you think the people who we believe in, and mentor, deserve the same too?

With love,
Winnie

If standards and how your team is led is the work you are in right now, that is what we build inside Set to Scale.

Winnie Wu is a physiotherapist, clinic founder and strategist. She runs Movement Laboratory and Papaya Clinic in Sydney, and The Clinic Project, a strategic education platform for women allied health clinic owners.