What’s the use of feedback?

Feedback: a painful noise only relieved by putting your fingers in your ears.

It’s not just musicians who think that. I think most of the January 2012 On Purpose crew felt that way about peer-to-peer feedback at the start of the year.

“Feedback is a gift,” said one more enlightened Associate. Sure, we thought. Like a can of deodorant is a gift: you know you need it, and you’ll be better for it, but you’d still be pretty horrified to unwrap it on Christmas morning.

We felt we knew our own best sides and worst sides — and the less said about either the better. Formal 360 reviews at work were one thing, but the idea of 18 people frankly giving their opinions of you in turn sounded like a nightmare version of the X Factor.

But, of course, Simon Cowell was not invited. (If you’re reading this Simon, applications open again next year). The feedback we gave and received in our weekend away at Embercombe was not the brutal taxonomy of our personal flaws we’d imagined, but a reassuring and positive reminder of the good stuff we saw in each other, and the things we’d like to see more of.

The feedback had some immediate uses for each Associate. It also built trust amongst the group, allowing us to work together in other ways. One training session introduced us to action-learning sets, in which someone raises a problem that they are facing and a small group of peers asks open questions to help them resolve it. Another saw us critiquing each others’ documents more directly. Both would have been harder, and less productive, had the initial feedback session not broken the ice and let us be more open with each other.

So it turns out feedback is a present indeed, and the best type: something so thoughtful you don’t know you want it — until you get it.