Practical steps and tools for building your feedback culture

Article series: 1. “A feedback culture where psychological safety is the hero” 2. “Principles of a healthy feedback culture” 3. “Practical steps and tools for building your feedback culture”

If you need any of the resources below in English, mail me.

Trying to sell the concept “we need a systematic approach to this” to management or your team? Feel free to use a variant of these slides. At Ruter, I am using a workshop with these slides when introduce new management groups and teams to the program. In general, when trying to sell these ideas, make people reflect on their own experiences. The hardest truths to ignore are those we find from within.

Build gradually. We have had success with the following steps:

1. Present the program (go ahead and make it your own, this is just for inspiration. Or copy paste, up to you) to interested teams, and management, to ensure mandate and understanding.
2. Get management to partake with their own management group. But you can start with a few teams first to get a foothold.
3. Appoint a facilitator in each attending group. Either a leader, or get consent from the leader to enrol the team and outsource the administration to some other team member. Gather them regularly. Talk about how to push the teams forward, share experiences, teach each other and root each other onward.
4. Start the team(s) off with the “introduction to feedback” exercise to establish trust, inspire for future work and help the team choose a path that will work for them. Typically a person from within the team, the facilitator, can guide the team through. Most facilitators will need management backing and/or community to present and facilitate this exercise, and get the team through to commitment.
5. Hopefully, the above with lead them to decide a feedback and psychological safety roadmap for themselves, pick and plan the next exercise. Follow up and if they didn’t, problem solve with them. I usually have a facilitator re-group where they tell the others how it went and their team’s plan forward. Usually about half the teams manage to make a plan, and the rest have one after the facilitator has received moral support and helpful guidance from their facilitator peers.
6. Keep following up. Some teams will take off on their own. Some will need continuous troubleshooting, which you can provide through facilitator meet-ups.

For management/process owner

1. Someone needs to own/project manage your organisation’s/team’s systematic work with feedback and psychological safety. It doesn’t have to be HR or management. But making this happen is hard. Don’t expect it to go viral and not need a pusher.
2. Don’t pre-decide top down what exercises the the teams should go through — except always start the team off with the “introduction to feedback”.
3. Don’t pre-decide on frequency or how much time to spend. Different fases and constraints call for different approaches. Large, busy team on a tight deadline? Don’t force them to spend 2 hours to get through an extensive everyone-gives-feedback-to-everyone session.
4. DO require that teams do an activity in this area every X weeks. Either from a fixed set of activities such as the ones linked to here, or give them even more freedom. Let them decide which they need the most, and how to customise the exercises to fit their team size and situation.
5. Give your champions, facilitators and other interested parties lots of moral support, freedom to create something new and backing. The teams need to know they are allowed to — in fact supposed to — spend their precious time and effort on this on a regular basis. Without management’s clear go-ahead (and even better, expectation), don’t expect motivation, resources, expertise, community or wonderful words to have much effect.