Principles of a healthy 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”

Ensuring solid, concrete principles underlie the effort, allows you to rely on others’ initiative and creativity. These principles were developed based on theory and methodical, intense experimentation. More on the background here (link). Once they began to take their final form and our activities aligned to them, the positive effects on our teams’ performance and psychological safety became clearer, stronger and more consistent. Commit to the principles or tweak them to your culture together with your colleagues.

In order to promote psychological safety and productive feedback in your group, your feedback activities should:

… not weaken the psychological safety of groups or individuals. A strong and productive feedback culture that supports people’s growth and strengthens team results is dependent on high psychological safety. Which in turn is strengthened by honest, high quality feedback under the right circumstances. A culture that fuels useless, distancing or unsafe feedback and activities kills psychological safety. And thereby the productive parts of your feedback culture over time. This is so important, it has its own article (link). How do we ensure the activities don’t negatively affect psychological safety? This is partly covered in the principles below. It is also an important factor to keep in mind when designing your group’s concrete feedback activities, which will be covered later when describing the activities we had success with.

… be tailored to current levels of psychological safety. Interpersonal activities that people aren’t ready for, can ironically have a counterproductive effect. A feedback activity that produces important insights and strengthens psychological safety in one setting, may create fear in another. Ever tried to push a shy person to talk in an intense setting? It will often just make them feel uncomfortable and want to leave. In a different setting your encouragement may be just what they need, and may even be the seed to daring more next time. This is especially true for feedback. The activity itself makes us feel unsafe if we are not ready for it. When we feel unsafe, we increasingly expect feedback to be a weapon to silence, discredit, shame or push away, and meet it defensively. We close our ears, we misinterpret. Some of us react with attack, some with withdrawal, others too apologetically. The distress and distrust we feel when pushed to interact in ways that don’t feel safe provides a real chance of damage to team results. Pushing through resistance, instead of working out all the snags, may decrease psychological safety, breaking Rule 1. Create psychological safety through several paths, not just feedback activities. For feedback activities, build gradually, and most importantly, encourage everyone to pull the Andon Cord (stop everything and problem solve) when someone pulls away or raises an issue. As your group’s skills and courage rise and fall, tailor your approach accordingly.

… not be connected to pay or career opportunities. Don’t try to kill two birds with one bullet, mixing individual performance evaluation. Mixing personal evaluation and team development kills the latter. Best case, the feedback turns into a “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” pretend-authentic review, in truth addressed to the performance evaluator. Worst case? Absolute, toddler-level political shit show.

… prioritize quality over quantity. These feedback interactions need to be some of the most nuanced conversations in your organization. Assuming you now subscribe to the view of these interactions as being tools for improving psychological safety and performance. Not a source of data for promotion processes. Don’t let them degrade to rushed or one-way “feedback deliverables”. Or to written interactions that lose the critical non-verbal queues. Even with the best of intentions and skills, written feedback interactions often do more harm than good. Almost always for negative and neutral feedback, surprisingly often even for positive. If your only option is written, drop it! Do something else for your team’s dynamics. If your teammates want the feedback in written form, they can write it and send it after the discussion is complete. And don’t rush these interactions! A rushed conversation is almost as bad as a written one. Nuance is shoved to the side. There is no time to build up the courage to respond in a vulnerable, uncertain way. Or to ask for clarifications, check assumptions or express disagreement. Don’t have time for all of this? Yes you do. Just cut the number of interactions. For example, it’s surprisingly powerful for only two team members to give each other feedback in front of the rest. Everyone does not have to participate every time.

… provide useful insights. A small word with big meaning. We “soft value pushers” need to embrace that trying to create useful interactions between people is hard. Openly admit that these activities too often lead to waste of competent and busy people’s time. Red flags about wasted time must be taken seriously quickly, and not be seen as “resistance”. After 3 years of intense, methodical experimentation, we still found new ways to improve value per time in the activities we created and the way we implemented them across teams and time. What is useful for a new team is different from an old one. Some activities are amazing when introducing feedback, and a complete time waster later. Some tools are useless because the team is not ready for them. Keep tracking. Keep asking. Keep involving, and evolving.

Ready to start experimenting? Hang on to your hat, here are some solid activities to start with and how to implement them. Later perhaps I’ll do an article on how to get the ball rolling on an organizational level.