7 Ways To Create A Frictionless Feedback Environment
“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.”
- Winston Churchill
Feedback is like water for your professional growth: Without it, you grow dry, prickly, and stagnant. Yet most people receive it only rarely. Why?
The issue is how it’s administered. Most managers only perform infrequent performance reviews where employees, who have been wandering in the desert, are hit with an annual deluge. There are two big problems with this. First, it trains employees to see feedback as a natural disaster because it suddenly stands between them and a promotion. Second, these reviews are top-down, which means they don’t come from the people who know you best: your peers.
You see, it’s your peers who should be giving you feedback, not your manager. When you were growing up, wasn’t it your siblings who really knew what you were up to on Saturday night? It’s the same in the workplace, it’s those you spend 8+ hours bumping elbows with each day, that know exactly what kind of watering you need.
Most already know the solution, but not how to implement it. According to Forbes, 65 percent of employees actively want more frequent feedback. As a leader, you create a frictionless environment where your employees can get the water they need to grow. Here are seven ways to create a frictionless feedback environment:
1. Make the feedback concrete with SSC
“Maximize trial and error — by mastering the error part.”
- Nassim Taleb
First things first: Get everyone’s peers involved in giving them frequent feedback. The watering should be light, targeted, and constant, like drip-irrigation. And just like seeing yourself on camera, getting and giving feedback is awkward at first but gets easier with time. This is especially true if it’s a weekly phenomenon rather than quarterly as it becomes business as usual.
For delivering that peer-to-peer feedback, I’m a big fan of the stop-start-continue (SSC) method. Peers choose three things that someone should start doing, stop doing, and continue doing. Because they must come up with so many items and because each is tied to specific actions, the feedback is much easier for recipients to act upon.
2. Make public mistakes … often
Next, you need to create a culture where it’s okay to make mistakes. I once realized this was a problem for me when at a company event, I accidentally called someone by the wrong name and another coworker said, “Ha, you make mistakes!” I realized that I wasn’t showing it and made a bigger effort to publicize it the next time it happened.
This mistake-making initiative, unlike feedback, must come from the top-down. Nobody is willing to look foolish around the office if they don’t see leadership owning up to mistakes or if they see peers getting chewed out for being wrong. They’ll only learn good habits by watching those above them doing it. Office culture is acquired through osmosis.
Since I realized that mistakes are important to make, I’ve found that if I do have a superpower, it’s that I don’t care if I look stupid. When I play golf, learn languages, or try any manner of things with which I have no experience, I fail shamelessly forward until I get it right. I encourage my teams to do the same. Sometimes it even makes sense to reward incompetence. There’s a story from Facebook’s early days when an intern did something that accidentally took the entire site down. Mark Zuckerberg walked over to him. Everyone thought he was about to get fired, but instead, Mark said, “Good job. We have removed one way that we can take down the site and it’ll never happen again.” If it’s okay for everyone to fail, it’s okay for them to iterate and learn from their feedback.
3. Be hard on the process, not on the people
Whatever feedback process you settle on, stick to it. If you’ve committed to having monthly peer-to-peer feedback sessions, make sure they happen. If you’ve committed to giving SSC feedback with three examples per category, don’t settle for fewer. Keep your standards rigorous and high.
Now, process-driven feedback doesn’t have to be brutal but it should be real and actionable. People want this feedback even if it hurts. There’s an anecdote about a GE executive who had been at the company for 35 years but was fired under Jack Welch. Jack brought him in to tell him “you’re no good at your job,” to which the executive replied, “but nobody told me!” True or not, this highlights the very real mixture of surprise, hurt, and lack of responsibility that employees can feel about their development if left in a feedback desert. The kindest and most merciful offering you can make is to tell them what they can change while they still have time on their side.
4. Say thank you
Yes, saying thank you is a form of feedback too, and perhaps the easiest way to begin dipping your toes in the water. All of us are motivated by a deep desire to be appreciated — it’s more important any title or compensation and shockingly, it’s free. Dole it out liberally and acknowledge everyone for all that they do.
Kick off your thank you culture by thanking frequently and publicly — in-person, in front of others, or on public channels at work like email, Slack, or your intranet. Let people know that you see their contribution and show them that they matter. For any manager, this should be part of your daily routine.
5. Play the devil’s advocate game
When employees need feedback on their ideas, not just their work, the devil’s advocate game is a great way to deliver it. In meetings, we’ll assign one person to be devil’s advocate for just that meeting, and it’s their job to shoot down everyone else’s ideas. They’re given license to be as harsh as they can about the ideas, not the person, and I find that the fact that the role is temporary and rotates really frees people to be blunt and honest in a way that you just don’t see otherwise. It gets all those lingering doubts, concerns, and logical fallacies that all of us humans are occasionally guilty of onto the table where they can be dissected and analyzed by the group.
6. Begin feedback with a concrete observation
I have to credit Tim Burns with this one, but the idea is that when you give feedback, start with an observation such as, “Hey, during the meeting, I noticed that you interrupted several times.” Why is this important? Because most people instinctively give feedback the wrong way and begin by passing judgement or leaping straight to recommending alternative behaviour. They say, “It’s not good to interrupt people,” or “You shouldn’t do that,” which feels like a personal attack, makes people defensive, and guarantees that the feedback won’t be heard.
By starting with an objective statement of fact, you establish common ground. Once you both agree on that objective statement — perhaps they didn’t even notice they were doing it — you can then describe the effect it had on you and others and close the feedback loop. Here are five steps to follow:
- State observation
- Check for understanding
- Describe the effect it has on you
- Suggest alternative behaviour
- Open a dialog (optional)
With this approach, you give people a chance to accept and work with your feedback.
7. Do demos every Friday
On Fridays at our office, every engineer, marketer, salesperson, designer, and HR associate takes their “public opinion bath.” That’s what Abraham Lincoln used to call his office hours where he’d open his doors to private citizens who wanted to give him a piece of their mind. In our case, these baths take the form of demos, and each person must show the entire company what they’ve accomplished that week. Active participation is key to making it worthwhile and employees are encouraged to ask pointed questions and truly seek to understand. I find that these demos have a variety of benefits.
First, they give everyone a much better inter-departmental understanding of how the company works. If creating only four case studies per quarter sounds like absenteeism to a developer, this is the marketer’s opportunity to show them otherwise. Second, everyone is incentivized to work hard before each week ends so that they have something to show for themselves, and then get feedback on it. The peer pressure does far more than micromanagement ever could.
What do you get when you employ all of these strategies? A well-watered, friction-free environment where everyone gets the constant feedback needed to fuel their growth. I’m sure there are many other ways that I haven’t mentioned, but these are the ways that have worked for me.
What works for you? Share in the comments below.
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