Making Feedback Flow (Part 1)
Feedback is top-of-mind for me — it’s a core recurring theme in my business partner conversations and the design work I regularly engage in. Organizations want more of it to happen, managers want to give more of it, and employees want more of it. Yet, most people still hold back; this insight has me wondering what allows for feedback to flow effectively and what blocks the stream.
The concept of feedback is super easy to think about as a cerebral exercise, but ridiculously hard to actually put into practice. Even within my team, we had to be conscious in creating the space to discuss how we’re handling feedback with one another — it was only a few weeks ago that we held a conversation on how we each have wildly differences and needs when it comes to giving and receiving feedback.
As I continue to ponder more on the topic of feedback, I think there are three key things that really allow feedback to flow freely in an organization: delivering feedback, receiving feedback, asking for feedback. Delivering feedback speaks to how we actually go about telling someone the feedback we have. Receiving feedback dives into how we, as individuals, look at feedback and the personal triggers we have when feedback is actually delivered. Asking for feedback is the structural piece — what structures exist in an organization and/or team that lower the friction of feedback flow?
In this post, I’ll just be diving into delivering feedback.
How We Deliver Feedback
Delivery gets the most airtime whenever one talks about feedback. There’s so much that can apply to delivery of feedback out there. It’s important to note that delivering feedback and receiving feedback are quite connected topics — great feedback is dialogic, not merely a transactional activity.
Reframing feedback as a gift
One of the things that holds people back from delivering feedback is being nice. We think too much about how the person delivering it might feel or react to feedback. We don’t want to hurt the feelings of other people and so we decide to either tone down the importance of the feedback, or worse off not say anything at all. We end up thinking that feedback is a shitty thing, either because it’s been delivered in a crappy way to us in our past (Shit Sandwich, anyone?) or we overthink it. This is bullshit thinking — feedback doesn’t have to suck. We can absolutely give feedback in a way that is tough, valuable, and hugely motivating. A couple of reframes that I’ve found useful are to (1) think of feedback as a gift — you’re delivering feedback because you care about the person and you want to help them grow and (2) think of feedback as a data point — it’s a data point that you’re providing to someone so that they can make sense of what the world around them looks like.
I’ve found Radical Candor to touch on the above — it teaches us to help everyone get better by caring personally and challenging directly. In fact, we’re screwing other people and our company over when we fall into a place anywhere outside of radical candor. We can all get by in the other spaces (except manipulative insincerity — there’s special place in hell for people like that), and I bet you’ve been in a company where the cultural norm is to live in a space of ruinous empathy or obnoxious aggression; it doesn’t have to be that way if we all stepped up a little bit more and tried to live a life of radical candor.
Getting out of your own head
There’s the case where we worry too much about how another person might receive feedback, and there’s the case where we worry too much about ourselves. When I say worry about ourselves, I speak of personal limiting beliefs — people hold back on delivering feedback because they don’t think they have anything valuable to offer or because they feel their observations aren’t relevant or useful. I often fall into this trap — I have plenty of observations and data points about people through my interactions with them or their work and end up keeping them to myself because I’m not sure if they’re actually useful or valid for someone. I end up wondering if my observations are correct (which of course is silly thinking, because they’re my observations and interpretations so of course they’re completely subjective anyways) and doubt my own feedback.
This is selfish thinking (and rooted in self-doubt rather than self-compassion but that’s another topic for another day). This is thinking that focuses too much on yourself. When we again reframe feedback as a gift, it’s like worrying too much about whether your gift is good enough and ending up not gifting it at all because you think your gift sucks. You don’t get to be the judge of that — the receiver is the person that gets to judge that.
I think there are two things that get around this. The first is to develop a relationship of trust with people whom you want to give feedback to. When you get to know someone, you end up knowing what they’re trying to accomplish and what areas they’re working on improving. When you know a person’s direction and goals, you have a better idea of whether your gift of feedback is actually useful and no longer have to wonder. The other piece is actually working on those limiting beliefs and recognizing that we all have something to offer.
Increasing the quality of our feedback
It’s one thing to say we care and that we challenge directly, but how can we get better at actually structuring and delivering the feedback we have? I find feedback loses its usefulness when we end up delivering it in a convoluted way: describing our experiences as objective fact, mixing emotions with the feedback, providing it out of context, and more. We increase our quality of feedback when we get better at describing our experiences.
The Experience Cube
We use the Experience Cube a lot at Clio. It provides a great frame for us to deconstruct and describe our experience.
The idea here is to take the experience and describe it in the form of:
- Observations — What was actually captured? Imagine a video recorder or voice recorder . “I see…”, “I hear…”, and if you’re weird maybe “I taste…”
- Thoughts — Based on what you captured, what went through your mind? “I think…”
- Feelings — Thoughts can produce feelings (and of course vice-versa). The important distinction here is understanding that a feeling is actually an emotion; “I feel….angry, sad, excited, happy, etc”. Most of us use “I feel” to describe a thought rather than a feeling.
- Wants — Feedback generally includes a request or ask of some sort. “I need…”, “I would like…”.
One doesn’t have to apply this in a linear fashion — in fact, we generally move across and/or back-and-forth between these spaces when we make sense of our experience and the feedback we aim to deliver. I encourage you to try and describe your experience to someone (maybe even your experience of reading this) and see how hard it is to actually put this into practice!
Situation-Behaviour-Impact (SBI)
Another really useful framework is SBI — Situation, Behaviour, Impact. It’s similar to the Experience Cube, but is a little more well-known in the big corporate world.
With SBI, you break up your experience into three parts:
- Situation — What happened? What was the task? Who, what, where, when?
- Behaviour — What did you see from the individual? What actions did he/she take? What were the observable outcomes?
- Impact — What was the impact on you and others? What went through your head? How did it make you feel?
Using clear language
When we deliver feedback, we have an interesting tendency of abstracting away ourselves in the delivery. We end up saying “we think”, “we want”, “the organization”, “the team”, and etc. In reality, the experience and the request we’re building into our feedback is actually our own. Don’t abstract that away — use “I” language in your feedback and own what you’re delivering.
Increasing the relevance of feedback
The last thing that has been going through my mind when it comes to great feedback delivery is understanding that feedback is part art and part science. The nuance of feedback is recognizing that there are different types of feedback and that each type has a time and place for each person and in their given situation.
Three types of feedback
Feedback is actually a pretty loaded term. Feedback can mean really different things to different people, so it’s helpful for us to unpack what actually falls into the umbrella of feedback.
Everyone needs some of each type: coaching, appreciation, and evaluation. In Part 2 I’ll talk about individual differences for receivers. To increase the relevance of feedback we’re delivering, we need to identify what a person needs right now.
- Coaching — This focuses on learning and change. It’s a key type of feedback that allows for growth. You can coach for skill (like improving your tennis swing) or coach for development (where you’re focusing on helping someone find answers to their problems; like asking someone to reflect on their tennis game).
- Appreciation — This is motivational feedback. It’s showing gratitude and highlighting the things are great about someone. It shows that someone matters.
- Evaluation — This tells us where we stand. This is really important feedback that conveys where someone is in relation to what’s expected of them.
Zooming in, zooming out
The last thing I’ve found valuable in thinking about the relevance of feedback is the idea of zooming in and out. It’s understanding the size of feedback and how it plays in varying scopes of a person’s current path. It’s the dimension of time, and recognizing that feedback changes when you look backwards on the scale of immediacy (feedback in-relation to something you just did, in relation to the past little while, and in relation to the grand scheme of things).
I think of this in the form of progression loops — an idea introduced to me through game design.
The feedback you deliver may fall into different kinds of loops. We may deliver feedback that is for something we saw immediately to course correct based on something we just delivered on (e.g. feedback after a presentation). If we zoom out, we may then be discussing feedback in the context of a larger progression loop (e.g. themes around presentations and how that plays into their current level and responsibilities). Zooming out further, we may discuss feedback in the context of an even larger progression loop — perhaps one’s career path and how they’re trending along that. There can be many kinds of nested loops; the idea here is to consider which are most important for whoever is receiving the feedback and how you structure your feedback for which kind of conversation needs to be had at that given moment.
In closing…
There’s a lot more that goes into great delivery of feedback. If you have other tools and learnings that have been helpful here, I’d really appreciate it if you commented here!
In Part 2, I will be diving into receiving feedback and how we can make that side of the equation a little easier.
