Giving Feedback: Context

Episode Transcript

The Giving Feedback Context card states, “Situate feedback in a specific time, place, and behavior so the receiver can locate themselves in it. The longer you wait, the harder that becomes.” And the card invites you to use the anchor, which you can do by starting with the when and where to paint the picture: “During the final part of rehearsal yesterday, it seemed to me that you were…”

Let’s get into why those details carry so much weight. So the time, the place, the behavior matter for what I describe as three reasons. First, the details show thoughtfulness. They convey to the receiver that you took this seriously enough to remember it precisely, and that seriousness sets the tone for everything that follows. Second, the details allow the receiver, usually, the chance to actually visualize what happened. They can place themselves back in that rehearsal, that meeting, that moment, and with enough specifics, they now have real material to think it through on their own. And then third, anchoring to specifics can help keep you honest. Vague feedback can drift around, and you can lose your own thread, and certainly you will have the receiver having a hard time keeping up as well. This is where even well-intended feedback can begin to slide into speculation, into character commentary, into things you never actually observed. The anchor holds you to what happened.

Now, about the second half of this card, the longer you wait, the harder it becomes. Many studies show that feedback givers avoid giving feedback because of the anxiety they feel around doing so. And so I think it’s fair to say that same anxiety drives delay as well, and delay can kind of compound. As time passes, the giving gets harder and harder, to the point where the giver may forget the feedback entirely or decide to drop it because it feels too removed from the present-day work.

Or something else happens, and maybe you’ve been on the receiving end of this. The giver holds the feedback, keeps holding it, and when they finally do share it, 10 other pieces they’ve been holding come out with it. What might have been a small, useful conversation becomes what can feel like a blindside, an avalanche.

I’ll share where I got this wrong myself. Many years ago, I delayed giving feedback to a direct report for far too long, and yes, it was due to anxiety, and by the time I gave it, they had completed a few genuinely great projects, so my critical feedback was much harder for them to receive, and I had to do all this extra work of explaining how, despite those recent wins, this improvement still mattered and why. I don’t think it went well. It certainly didn’t feel good to me, and I don’t believe it landed well for them either. The feedback itself was valid, but it was as though the timing had drained it of most of its usefulness, and it just kind of created a weird situation where they wondered why I delayed, and I did as well.

That’s card 03 of the Giving Feedback suit. If you’re holding feedback right now, and many of us are, consider that things may get harder as more time passes. Yes, there are perfectly acceptable times to delay, but make sure you’re delaying for the right reasons.