Feedback

You’re Already Making Progress

The good news is everything you have learned already in this course has set you up to give better feedback.

Whether it’s critical feedback or praise, all feedback conversations occur in the context of the relationship between the giver and the receiver. The success of that conversation is overwhelmingly defined by the trust in that relationship rather than what’s actually said. 

If you’ve found yourself approaching a feedback conversation and feeling uncomfortable about it, it’s probably because you know that your relationship won’t support the seriousness of the discussion.

People will be more receptive to your feedback if:

• They believe you care about them:  for both positive and constructive feedback (but particularly feedback that could be perceived as negative), your team member has to believe that you’re offering advice from a position of wanting them to improve. 

• They value your opinion: feedback is most impactful when it comes from someone whose opinion you respect on the matter. 

Conversely, think about feedback you’ve received in your career that didn’t sit well with you.  It probably came from someone who you didn’t believe cared about you or whose opinion you didn’t value (or both).

Even if it’s early in your relationship, the work you’ve done already in your 1:1s and career development conversations should contribute to a growing belief from your team members that you care about their interests and you have valuable perspective to offer.

Sharing Feedback You’ve Received

In your various conversations with your team, we’ve already spoken about the power of sharing your own experiences in the workplace.  Modelling this behaviour opens up the space for others to be candid about their challenges, and creates great opportunities for learning and development.

This is particularly true about feedback.  Research has shown that leaders sharing their own feedback had a positive effect on psychological safety and feedback culture and that doing so ‘does not jeopardize their reputations as effective and competent.’ 

‘Sharing feedback normalized and crystallized vulnerability as leaders made a public commitment to keep sharing and employees reciprocated, which opened the door for more actionable feedback, greater accountability, and ongoing practices that allowed psychological safety to endure.’  Organizational Science

You may have already shared some feedback you received as part of your conversations with your team, but if you haven’t, try to incorporate it into your discussions.

Giving Constructive Feedback

Most of the uneasiness for new managers around feedback involves constructive feedback, or what have become known as ‘tough conversations’.  The ones where you have to make a team member aware of a shortcoming with the aim of them improving it. 

Beyond the level of trust in your relationship, how you conduct the conversation is critical to how your feedback lands.

All these conversations are slightly different, and not all these tips will be applicable for every situation, but this advice should cover the majority of situations.  

• Don’t wait: feedback is most effective when it’s delivered soon after the relevant event.  It can be tempting to wait for the ‘right moment’, especially when you have a busy day, but the longer you leave it the less effective it will be.  Can you really claim to the individual that your feedback is important if you left it a few days? And never, ever, save it for performance reviews.

• Use the right forum/format: feedback is most effective when it’s delivered in person (although you may follow up in writing later).  It enables you to get any nuance across, for the recipient to respond, and a (hopefully) constructive discussion to follow. It also sends a positive message that you wanted to dedicate your valuable time to it.  Feedback delivered over e-mail/Slack can lead to awkward silences, fraught back and forths in writing, or both. 

• Ask for permission: although no-one likes to hear the question ‘can I give you some feedback?’ it opens up space for the discussion, rather than launching straight into it.  If you feel feedback is a loaded term, try ‘Could I give you some advice?’ or ‘I’ve noticed something I think you should know’. 

• Acknowledge your relationship: if you’re delivering serious feedback relatively soon in your relationship, you may want to acknowledge that in how you deliver it.  For example, ‘I know we’ve only been working with each other for 3 months and we’re still getting to know each other, but I’ve noticed a trend in your work I wanted to discuss with you.’ 

• Consider using coaching questions: rather than immediately offering your own ideas about the problem, ask the recipient some questions about the situation to see if they can make their own way to realising why their actions weren’t constructive.  For example, ‘Why did you think this was the best way to do x…’, ‘if you were doing x again in future, is there anything you would do differently?’. 

• Be direct, don’t ‘shit sandwich’: a common feedback tactic from inexperienced managers is to try and sugarcoat critical feedback with more positive news in the same discussion.  People will spot this a mile off (particularly if the good news isn’t that good) and it comes across as inauthentic.  If you’re genuinely trying to help someone improve, and handle the discussion well, directness tends to be more appreciated.  

• Be specific: people want feedback they can act on to improve - it’s infuriating to receive general feedback like ‘be more strategic’. Most effective feedback models include some variation on the Situation-Behaviour-Impact structure.  Explain the situation which you observed, the exact behaviour the individual showed, and how it had a negative impact.  For example, rather than ‘be more strategic’ - ‘I noticed in the presentation on the Q3 roadmap (Situation) that you didn’t tie the roadmap to the company’s financials (behaviour) which I know made some of the audience question your grasp of the material (impact).’

• Tie it to established team and personal goals: tie the immediate impact of the behaviour to aims that you know the individual is working towards - either team goals (‘this impacts our ability to achieve x this quarter’), or personal career aspirations (‘I know you’re trying to improve x and…’).  Tie your feedback to something you know they care about.

• Get feedback from others: to support the strength of your feedback, you can ask others the individual has worked with whether they’ve seen similar trends.  This can also be a valuable tactic where others may have a more trusted relationship with the individual.

• Discuss next steps: if it’s appropriate, talk about anything you think the person should do differently next time.  This could take the form of mentorship or coaching.  Take care to offer any help you can to show your commitment to supporting them. 

• Ask for criticism too: so it’s not a one way critical conversation, you can always say ‘while we’re here, do you have any feedback for me?’  Michael Lopp swears by this technique, and uses it every time he gives feedback, although he acknowledges it takes a few months for anyone to come back to him with any.

• Take notes: it’s often useful to keep a record of feedback to show progress (or lack of it).  Following a feedback discussion, you may wish to send the recipient an email summarising your chat (some managers use dedicated Slack channels for this).

Giving Praise

Ok, onto the nicer part of the job!  

The danger here is not so much getting it wrong, but not taking full advantage of the opportunity when someone has done something excellent.

The good news is, all the rules for giving great praise are the same as for giving constructive feedback, managers just forget to use them.  It’s often easy to congratulate someone with a ‘great work!’ when spending a bit more time digging into the detail will pay dividends.

When crediting someone for good work, take the time to speak to them in person about it.  Be specific about what was great.  They’ll appreciate your words even more, it will help them understand why their work was so valuable, and make it more likely they’ll build on it in future (which again, you can discuss). 

Although people vary in their preference to have their work praised in public (this is something you can establish in 1:1s) you can help build your team members’ reputations by telling relevant senior stakeholders about good performance (CC in the individual if you feel it’s appropriate).

Creating a Feedback Culture

‘Feedback’ can become a weighty word in the teams where it’s the exception rather than the norm.

If lots of things are left unsaid, when a critical point is raised it becomes an event rather than part of your team culture.  This is when people can feel surprised and singled out, feedback starts to dry up, and everyone loses those opportunities to learn and grow. 

Everyone benefits from more feedback, but it’s hard to build a culture of exchanging it.

It takes time for individuals to trust that everyone has each other’s best interests when offering feedback.  It takes time for individuals to feel safe accepting that feedback, knowing it’s part of their growth and won’t adversely affect their reputation or opportunities.

It’s your role as a manager to try and grow that culture.  Every time you ensure someone gets a bit of feedback, you help.  Every time you offer an example to others of where you’ve received advice after messing up, it helps.

Eventually the word ‘feedback’ will lose that weight, it’ll just be ‘how we help one another’. 

‘Your goal in life is to make feedback in all directions no big deal. You and your team never start in this state, they earn it. They start with small spoken observations that slowly turn into more useful feedback. They watch to see if each other are listening to the feedback and eventually acting on it. Once everyone has seen that feedback is both shared and acted on, they begin to feel more comfortable sharing large, more complex, and harder feedback. Why? Trust.’ Michael Lopp