When you touch a hot surface, you get feedback when your hand hurts. When you hug someone you care about and who cares about you, those warm feelings are feedback. When you get a like on your post, that's a type of feedback. Feedback helps you to learn not to touch the burner, to connect you to other people who care about you too, and to decide who to write for. Feedback helps us all to grow, and that's why it should be built into our processes.
What is Feedback?
Ok, so this isn't a difficult question. But, I think many people think it's getting advice on how to change or just about the mistakes they've made. And although that can be part of it, feedback encompasses more than that.
Feedback is when you receive a response for something you've done or created. This can include positive feedback, ways to improve, and also negative responses.
What Teaching Taught me about Feedback
One of the biggest parts of teaching is giving feedback. In graduate school, I wrote ten to thirty-page research papers and often received one to three pages of feedback.
As a teacher, I would provide feedback on students' rough drafts throughout their papers and overall feedback at the end of their papers.
The point of giving writers thorough feedback was to help them to learn more about their strengths so they could continue to lean into them, discover where they can improve, and to understand the steps they could take to improve on their weaknesses.
At its core, feedback is given to help someone grow. And the problem with not getting feedback is that it becomes much harder to grow, gauge your progress, and improve. This is why it's so essential to build feedback into your projects. Not only is it helpful to get feedback, but it's also important to give feedback.
Giving Good Feedback
Learning how to give good feedback takes time, but here are some tips to get you started.
Give Honest Feedback
No one wins if you're not honest. Remember, the purpose of feedback is to help the other person to grow and improve. If you're not honest, you're not giving the person receiving the feedback the opportunity they deserve.
Give Feeback in a way it's Best Received
Not everyone accepts feedback in the same form. Find out the best way to provide feedback for each person you're giving feedback to. It might be written, oral, synchronous conversation, or a combination of methods. Timing is also important. The person should expect feedback is coming. If they're not expecting it, you're creating a scenario where they may be resistant or even unable to accept feedback.
Be Specific
Positive Feedback
Not This: This is great!
Do This: This is great because you've clearly outlined what we should expect to learn by the end of this talk.
The revision of feedback ensures the speaker realizes that a strength is that a clear purpose statement helps the audience to better follow and understand the talk.
Negative Feedback
Not This: "I don't understand."
Do This: I don't understand how this example demonstrates what you're asserting above. Can you explain you X relates to Y?
This improved example gives the writer a clearer idea of what you don't understand and where they need to clarify.
Provide an Opportunity for Discussion
Feedback shouldn't be a one-way street. For the full benefits of feedback, discussion is essention because it gives the other person the opportunity to ask clarifying questions, to be able to go deeper into the feedback, and even to get support for developing a plan for improvement.
How to Prime for Effective Feedback
If the situation and environment isn't right, even the best feedback can become ineffective. In order to create the best situation for everyone, do your best to:
- be empathetic;
- be honest;
- be trusted by the person;
- be consistent in your feedback and your expectations;
- be respectful;
- be private-public feedback can feel like a public shaming;
- give clear expectations at the onset of the project.
Giving feedback isn't easy. It's especially not easy if you're working in a space that's not psychologically safe, where there's not a built-in process, and where most of the experience with feedback has revolved around negative responses. Giving good feedback takes time, empathy, and care. But ultimately, when we do make it a deliberate part of the process, and we take a person-first approach; we all benefit and are better able to grow together from the experience.
Top comments (6)
I think your last paragraph is crucial, because unsollicited feedback does more harm than good in my experience. Even if said feedback is pertinent, it will not help much because the receiver is not ready to do something constructive with said feedback. But most of the time it will not be that helpful, because we miss some crucial piece of context and are merely projecting our experience onto the other.
Nowdays I try to delay my urge to give feedback and seek to understand first.
I also really appreciate when people ask if I want feedback or if I want to vent when I'm sharing an experience.
I love this - one of the most important things in giving feedback is making it safe for the recipient; giving private feedback in a public place can feel like public shaming, or it can also feel awkward if it's positive feedback.
One aspect of giving feedback that I think is often overlooked is WHEN to give feedback. The sooner the feedback is given, the more influential it is in making a change. When the feedback is negative, the provider needs to show empathy, but they need to provide the most critical feedback first.
I think of this in terms of learning a skill in sports. If you're learning to kick an Australian football for the first time and the coach gives you feedback on 30 things you're doing wrong repeatedly, are you going to continue to try? Instead, a good coach will give you 1-3 things to focus on - the most critical. Once you have mastered those skills, they will give you 1-3 more. Iterate this 10 times and you have a perfect kick. If you try the bombardment approach, you lose a player or get one that is just very frustrated and learns very, very slowly.
The other side of this, when learning, is that the feedback is given after each kick, so you can make adjustments in real-time. It's not helpful to practice it wrong for 30 minutes, get feedback that you're still making a minor mistake, and then practicing for another 30 minutes before making an adjustment.
Similarly, it's not helpful to get feedback on a development project once every two weeks when you've now coded the same mistake for 14 days, when the supervisor knew you had been making it on day 1, hoping you'd figure it out yourself. On the flip-side, if the supervisor sees you're doing it perfectly on day 1 and tells you, you're more confident.
You also pointed out something that supervisees often forget: they don't work in an autocracy - feedback is a two-way street. Supervisees often forget that their supervisor also needs feedback - let them know what kind of support you need, and what they have been doing that has been helpful. This builds their trust in you, shows you have empathy for them in their position, and turns the feedback into the discussion rather than what seems like a one-sided interrogation. :-)
Great topic! I can talk about this all day. :-)
For any other readers who are interested, two easy-to-find books on giving feedback in tough or really any situations are "Crucial Conversations" and "Crucial Confrontations" by Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, and Switzler. There are also hundreds of journal articles from behavioral science and organizational behavioral management on the topic.
Thanks, Justin! I appreciate the football analogy here. I can't wait to check out those books--maybe we can do one for Virtual Coffee book club.
Great clear communication examples with being specific with feedback.
Thanks, Klesta!