The Gift of Feedback

I love getting gifts.

Small gifts, expensive gifts, awkward gifts, whatever they might be I love them all. Recently my wife and I have been going through a 20 week marriage and parenting class. Early on in the class, we discussed and took a test to determine what each family member’s love language was. Alas, my primary love language is not gifts, but that’s ok. We’re pretty sure it is our daughter’s though.

For today’s discussion I want to talk about a gift you may receive in life if you are very fortunate. I want to talk about the Gift of Feedback. A lot of you are going to bring a diversity of presuppositions to the table when I use that word, and a lot of them are not positive. When I say the word feedback, you may think of getting scolded by an old boss in front of another customer about a perception of poor performance. Some of you may think back to a time when a coached yelled at you for missing the game winning shot. You may think back to a time when an older sibling made fun of your appearance or clothing and embarrassed you. While all of those examples are specific types of feedback, none of those are the ones that I want to focus on today. I will write this post in two parts to break up the reading into easier chunks.

Please come to the table today with a clear mind, a willing heart, and most of all an attitude of learning with the intent to one day help other people.

Why

First of all we must talk about and answer the question, “Why should we give other people feedback?” Let’s take the example that we have all been in a thousand times: you are at lunch with a friend. You and this friend are at a brand new gastro pub that has opened in town. It’s trendy, it’s amazing, and it’s filled with attractive people. You both order burgers and you have a great time. On the way out, you realize your friend has some “residue” left from the burger in his teeth. Now you are presented with the choice of doing several things.

Option A — Do nothing, say nothing and hope somebody else will tell them later on in the day.

Option B — Ask your friend if you have anything in your teeth hoping they will be vulnerable enough to ask you the same question.

Option C — Out loud in front of everybody, laugh at the top of your lungs and say how stupid your friend is for getting something in his teeth.

Option D — Politely pull your friend in close, and say, “Hey man, I care about you, and I notice you have something left in your teeth after lunch.”

Pick an option, any option, go ahead I’ll wait. Which one did you pick? I’m sure at some point in your life you could relate to all of these scenarios as examples of how you reacted in a moment when you were presented an opportunity for feedback. Maybe the conditions were different or more extreme, but we can all relate.

In this scenario we get to the heart of why we give feedback. We would give feedback in the example above because we cared enough about the person to realize it would have potentially damaged his reputation had we not given the feedback. Care is at the very core of why we give feedback. It is not about an emotional release of pent up anger towards a person. It is not about right and wrong; that’s a totally different type of discussion for another time. It is not about getting a person to buy into your beliefs, thoughts, or preferences on a certain issue. Feedback is a gift, and it is best when it is done with an attitude of care.

How

After we answer the question of why we give feedback to another person, we must examine more closely the nuts and bolts of how we deliver this gift.

Have you ever participated in an egg toss? You know the situation, they line you up with a “partner” across from you and give one of you a raw egg and you are supposed to “toss” it to the other person. I was in many of these scenarios growing up in our local church youth group. Sometimes I think this game is not designed at all to see how well a person can throw or catch, but rather a hilarious activity designed to bring joy in the heart of the youth leader when one of their teens gets plastered with egg. I digress. So you start off this colossal match of athletic ability really close to your “partner,” and then as you progress you take a step back away from the person. Eventually you are so far from the other person that the only way to get them the egg is to throw it at them. This also reminds me of a scene in the first Mighty Ducks movie where the coach is trying to teach the kids how to pass and catch the puck. He uses the phrase “soft hands” to describe the way to properly receive the puck from another teammate so that it won’t bounce off your stick onto another opponents.

Now using this metaphor think about feedback. There is a huge different in a nice slow lob that is received with soft hands, like our egg toss, versus getting feedback chunked at you and you are left with egg yoke in your face. I’m going to get painfully granular now and give you another scenario to think through on your own.

The situation is your significant other in life has bad body odor.

Scenario #1 — You walk into the room immediately smell this deathly odor, look at the person with disdain and say, “Hey, you got really bad BO, you know that?”

Scenario #2 — You walk into the room, and you notice something is not quite right, a smell you are not accustomed to is evident in the room around you. You realize this odor comes from the person who you love very much and has done so much to help you in your life. You approach them and say, “Hey, is now a good time to tell you something that might be a little hard to hear?” You wait for them to acknowledge yes or no that now is a good time. Then you say, “I noticed when I walked into the room, you don’t smell the way you normally do, is everything ok?” They respond by saying they had a rough morning, woke up super late, and rushed out of the house to get to where they were going on time, so much so that they forgot to finish getting ready. You respond by saying, “Is there anything I can do to help?” They say, “No thanks, I’ll finish getting ready in a little bit, but thanks for letting me know.”

Do you see the difference here? Scenario #1 is very hostile and confrontational, it lacks positive intent on the other person’s part, and most importantly doesn’t help them solve the issue. Scenario #2 is filled with care, assumes positive intent, and gives them an avenue to help them solve the problem. Scenario #1 is the egg being chunked in your face from 10 feet away. Scenario #2 is the slow lob received in a glove filled with silk and soft hands.

When

So you know you want to give a person feedback because you care about them. You have identified a specific behavior that needs to be addressed. You know how you are going to approach the situation. Now the only question that is left to answer is, when do you give the feedback? When it comes to feedback, timing is everything. I’ll share two Proverbs with you that are helpful on this topic of timing.

A man hath joy by the answer of his mouth: and a word spoken in due season, how good is it! — Proverbs 15:23

A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver. — Proverbs 25:11

If you give feedback too soon after something has happened, the person involved might be too emotionally charged to receive it. If you wait too long to give feedback, they might not even remember the details of the situation clearly enough because it was so long ago. There is a happy medium. The biggest thing I will challenge you with, however, is in getting their permission to give the feedback at that time. If they say it’s ok, then proceed; if not, wait.

Stay Tuned for Part 2 Next Week!