Giving Feedback: Impact

Episode Transcript

The Giving Feedback Impact card states, “Clearly connect the dots between the receiver’s action and the consequence you observed it having or the consequence it could have had.” And the card invites you to use the equation: “When you observed action, from my perspective, it led to observed result, and I felt emotion because value concern.”

Let’s look at what usually gets skipped. So a common practice in feedback goes like this: share your observation, then move directly to the action you believe the person should take. You did X, start doing Y. It’s efficient, and in my experience, it often bypasses some important parts of human communication.

The first thing it skips is the consequence. Sometimes the receiver truly can’t see the line between their action and its result. That line is obvious to you because of where you sit, and sometimes can be invisible to them because of where they sit. Drawing it explicitly is a gift. And here’s a piece I find givers skip even more often, the consequence that could have happened but didn’t this time. Maybe the missed double-check that didn’t reach the client because someone caught it downstream. That’s a lucky outcome, but there was a real risk there. If you only give feedback when the bad consequence fully lands, you can inadvertently be teaching people that near misses are fine. Describing what could have happened lets the lesson arrive without requiring the worst of what could have happened.

The second thing it skips is the emotion, and I want to spend a moment here, because this one runs deep. Too often, we don’t speak with our emotions, especially at work, where a kind of unwritten code says feelings stay outside the meeting room, and yet our emotions are there anyway. They’re running through our bodies, informing our thoughts, even impacting our heart rate, something we covered back in the receiving suit from the other side of the table. Pretending they’re absent doesn’t remove them from the conversation. It just removes our honesty about them. And again, I don’t think we need to be sharing what our emotional states are all the time. But there are times, depending on the context and the relationship you have with the receiver, where it can be one of the most powerful things you do for their growth.

So there are times when naming the emotion can humanize the conversation in a way that the mechanical feedback frameworks out there often avoid. “I felt worried,” or, “I felt caught off guard,” tells the receiver a human being was affected here. And notice the equation doesn’t stop at the emotion. It asks for the because, the value or concern underneath. “I felt worried because our client relationships depend on that level of care.” Now the receiver understands what’s actually at stake for you, and the feedback lands as something shared rather than something imposed.

That’s card 05 of the Giving Feedback suit. In a future challenging feedback conversation, try connecting all four dots: action, result, emotion, value. It will likely feel somewhat exposing the first time, especially the emotion part, but it might also help the receiver do less bracing and more listening.