Building “a culture of feedback” is something I often hear clients talk about. They typically have a vision for a workplace in which people offer their feedback generously, enabling the personal development of others and driving collective performance.
Yet more often than not, feedback remains stubbornly confined to structured processes. Individual perspectives are akin to submarines – surfacing a couple of times a year as scheduled, but remaining under the surface day-to-day.
Why feedback matters
Every individual is unique. We each bring a distinct blend of experience, skill, style and mindset to our work. If we wish to be the best version of ourselves, we require insight on how we operate today and how we might do things better in future. This can rarely be understood through objective KPIs and hard data alone. Instead, we must rely on human judgement – the internal perspective we have ourselves, bolstered by the external perspectives of others.
Organisationally, feedback can help teams work together more effectively. Individually, it can help us feel seen. The best colleagues we have are the ones who wish us to succeed.
Why feedback is hard
If feedback is great in theory, in practice it can feel like a minefield.
Giving someone feedback involves interpersonal risk (you don’t know how they’ll react, or what they’ll think of you afterwards) and requires confidence in your own perspective.
Receiving feedback isn’t easy either. As Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen write in their (excellent) book ‘Thanks for the Feedback’, the experience of hearing others’ views about us can be confronting in a few different ways:
- “Truth triggers”: when feedback feels inaccurate, unhelpful or unfair, creating a sense of injustice
- “Relationship triggers”: when the message itself may be valid, but our feelings about the individual giving it make it difficult to accept
- “Identity triggers”: when feedback makes us question our sense of selves, causing us to feel overwhelmed or threatened
If we want to make feedback an everyday reality, we should start by recognising the very real (and very human) reasons for shying away.
How teams can get better at feedback
Given the inherent discomfort, it’s little wonder that organisations often struggle to get effective feedback flowing at scale. But if you’re a leader who’s hoping to move the needle, there are things you can do:
Remember it’s not all about the negatives
We tend to use “feedback” as a synonym for “constructive feedback” or – more plainly – “negative feedback”. But it’s worth remembering that authentic praise is also a big part – perhaps the bigger part – of the picture. Whilst there’s a degree of debate about the ‘correct’ ratio of praise to criticism (and a risk of insincerity in making any number a target), there is a broad consensus that positive feedback should typically be more plentiful than negative.
It’s easy to fall into a trap of only ever offering praise alongside challenge. But an authentic – and specific – ‘well done’ goes a long way on its own. If you’re a leader, seize opportunities to offer genuine praise and recognition. If someone has impressed you with something, tell them. And encourage others to do the same.
Focus on asking
Being a seeker of feedback rather than a passive recipient puts the individual in the driving seat. And people typically find it easier to provide a perspective when they’ve been invited. If your team is struggling to share feedback, nurturing the behaviour of asking is a good place to start.
Be wary of becoming too reliant on established formal processes, which can often be too structured and infrequent to enable specificity, timeliness and actionability. Instead, focus on role-modelling the behaviour of seeking feedback after key events, and championing those who consistently seek day-to-day opportunities to learn.
Foster feedback in all directions
Often in organisations, feedback feels like a one-way street: people-managers provide it to their direct reports, typically in the context of a performance appraisal. Even when there are 360-degree processes involving peers and more junior colleagues, they’re often seen as merely an input to a top-down evaluation.
If you’re a leader, seek in-the-moment feedback from those who work for you and with you. Nudge your team to do the same. The intent isn’t to gather what you need to support your own performance appraisal, but rather to recognise that the perspectives of others are valid and valued, all-year round.
Elevate quality
Question: “How was that?”. Answer: “Yeah, good”
‘Good feedback’ isn’t people saying nice things, it’s people saying useful things. So often we receive feedback that feels vague, lacking in substance or hard-to-action. Providing concrete feedback is a skill that needs to be honed over time.
There are plenty of useful frameworks out there for structuring feedback (e.g. COIN, CEDAR, Stop-Start-Continue), but think about setting standards for seeking it too. Asking “what was one thing that I did well there?” and “what is one thing I should do to improve next time?” is likely to yield a much richer response than an off-hand “how do you think that went?”
Support people to process feedback, not just provide it
Organisations typically place much more focus on helping people give feedback than receiving it. But in reality, we don’t always have feedback delivered to us in perfectly-articulated ways. Placing the emphasis solely on the giver risks making the stakes feel too high, with individuals holding back from sharing a perspective at all for fear of not delivering it well.
Building the skills to enquire more deeply, separate feedback from the individual giving it or put feedback into perspective can help your team feel a greater sense of agency, confidence and resilience, and means the giving and receiving of feedback becomes a shared endeavour between all.
TLDR
Feedback is important but hard. Help your team get better at it in small everyday ways by remembering the positives, focusing on asking and receiving as well as giving, thinking upwards as well as downwards and providing tools to elevate quality.
