Transcript Below
Hi there and welcome to Module 6, the final module in our course on Constructive Feedback.
The topic here, building a feedback culture, is a big one worthy of an entire book, but I’ll work to address as many points as I can without repeating too much from earlier in the course.
For those, who may have stumbled on this video rather than the course, I’ll pause here just to say that while I think you’ll find value in Module 6 here, if you are serious about improving your feedback culture at work, I’d highly recommend starting at the beginning of the course this module is part of as you’ll build some foundational knowledge that will make everything we’re about to cover here make sense on a much deeper level.
Okay, so we’re going to break this module down into five parts.
Part one will be to look at a Feedback Relationship Model so we have a visual way to understand how the many dimensions of feedback we’ve covered in this course relate to each other.
From there, we’ll move to an in-depth exploration of feedback literacy, a concept we’ve mentioned a few times throughout the course but haven’t unpacked.
If some part of your role involves building a feedback culture, and I’d argue that everyones is, then a large part of what you will be doing is working to improve the feedback literacy of yourself and others.
As such, it makes sense that we understand what feedback literacy is.
In part three, we’ll keep working with feedback literacy, this time exploring some practical ways we can develop in each of its three foundational areas.
In part four, we’ll dive into feedback culture – including an exploration of the ways in which we can categorize the various feedback types that exist within a culture.
This will take some of the information we covered throughout the course and give you a new way to look at it so you’re able to think about feedback at the organizational level.
And in part five, our last part and a fitting close to the course since we opened with a mention of how Slack made feedback the epicenter of its effort to grow into a $1 billion company, we will cast our gaze beyond the constructive feedback that occurs between individuals at work and towards organizational feedback systems – the ways in which organizations as a whole can be strategic in how they receive and process customer feedback and market feedback.
After all, for constructive feedback between employees to continue having the ability to even exist, the larger organization must be effective at leveraging feedback so it can stay alive and competitive as a business.
Okay, so let’s begin with exploring the feedback relationship model.
At the core, we begin with feedback literacy.
If you recall, this is your capacity to effectively give, receive, ask for, process, and use feedback – all of the things.
Think of it as the collection of all the pieces we’ve covered in this course, whether you are having a challenging conversation with a direct report whose performance is pulling your team down, or are learning from audience survey results that the presentation you spent months preparing didn’t land well, or are preparing to ask a colleague in your field if she might be open to serving as your mentor, or are working diligently to integrate the audience’s feedback you received into your next performance.
All of these are part of the feedback relationship and are actually opportunities, what you’ll hear me referring to as experiences, that can allow us to improve our feedback literacy by putting the reps in.
So before we move forward here, I want to call attention to the openings and the lines of this model, the dots that you see here.
This represents each element of the feedback relationship holding its own space, with the dotted lines representing fluidity as each element can influence and be influenced by the other.
Also notice that there are three levels to this porous nature.
In our initial view here, this would mean that what we are describing as the total set of our feedback literacy can leak out to impact other areas.
Likewise, those other areas can leak into our feedback literacy.
So here is how it works, starting from the inside out.
Feedback literacy is at the core because it contains everything and, although developing it takes being in relationship with others, it is an individual capacity we can develop.
Extending from this core individual capacity are the specific feedback skills we’ve covered in our time together.
So you’ll see in the next level here we have giving, receiving, processing, and generally experiencing feedback.
Let experiencing here be a reminder to get into the arena.
As we said earlier, we can intellectualize and read about feedback all day long and yet still not make much progress toward the development of our overall feedback literacy.
All of these parts then extend into the enclosed outer layer of the feedback culture.
While elements outside of the feedback culture can impact the culture, and while the feedback culture you are primarily part of can leak out to positively or negatively influence other cultures, we enclose it here so we can focus our thinking on it.
In my experience of feedback at work, while we are part of multiple feedback cultures, there’s usually one that we typically inhabit and influence most.
As we progress here, you might think about which culture that is for you.
Perhaps your direct team or the team you work closest with or, depending on your environment, the primary feedback culture may simply be the relationship you have with a colleague or two.
If you are leading some feedback training for your team or organization you may find, as I do, that this visualization makes it far easier to discuss feedback in general and each part in particular.
It also helps to break down some of the boundaries we have with feedback – where we put certain folks into certain camps.
This visual shows that we’re all working towards improving the same core even if as individuals we have differences in terms of how our time is spread across the different feedback parts.
One last point about culture here: it is both an expression of and a contributor to a group’s feedback literacy.
When managers receive advice to build a healthy feedback culture, they can now see this means recognizing existing elements of the culture that may not be as developed and modeling and otherwise helping their team develop the skills that feed into feedback literacy.
For example, a manager may find on their team that folks are excellent at receiving feedback, but upon thinking it through further it could just be that their team basically says yes to all feedback as soon as they get it.
This can often be the case on teams with very early in career colleagues.
If this is the case, you might highlight their openness to receiving feedback as a strength while also letting them know you also want their thoughts about it before they move to adopt it.
You might also find other areas where they can develop it.
For example, perhaps they can be more proactive by asking for feedback rather than only waiting for it, or perhaps they can begin to flex their muscle to give feedback to you or in peer-to-peer relationships where they can share feedback with others in areas most closely aligned to their greatest skill.
For example, you might have an early in career but incredible copywriter on your team provide feedback to others who aren’t as strong in writing.
These types of lighter touch feedback relationships can help early in career colleagues begin to build feedback confidence.
Okay, let’s now move to part two, developing a deeper understanding of feedback literacy.
Let’s say in the morning you saw the smiles of your colleagues and many heart emojis on your screen as you virtually presented quarterly results to your global team.
In the afternoon you receive a note from a regional manager who felt their territory wasn’t given the time it deserved in your presentation.
That evening, to power through getting some extra work done, you have a cup of matcha – I’m a big matcha fan here – but let’s say you have it a bit later than usual and you struggle to sleep at night because of it.
I have definitely done that on many occasions.
In her book, Feedback Fundamentals and Evidence-Based Practices, industrial psychologist Dr.
Brodie Riordan refers to these types of moments as feedback events, and she leads the reader through an inventory of 25 she captured just on a typical day in her life.
Dr Riordan’s point was to challenge our idea of feedback as primarily what happens during the quarterly performance review by showing us that feedback is literally all around us.
Once we bring awareness to the ubiquitous nature of feedback, we can begin to see its stunning dimensionality and modes of expression – how it includes not only the traditional manager to employee direct feedback relationship but also the subtle non-verbal gesture of your colleague, the self-reflective feedback that arises from observational learning as you compare your performance next to the performance of someone you admire, and even the wisdom of your body as your nervous system kicks in to try to protect you when you’re stressed.
Feedback literacy encompasses all of these elements.
The concept of feedback literacy has roots in the world of education where it primarily focuses on students receiving and adopting feedback.
As I’ve brought the term into organizations by expanding the concept to include the capacity of all people to effectively give, receive, ask for, process and use feedback, something magical has happened – the dismantling of the invisible walls that too often separate groups of givers and receivers.
When this happens, managers at all levels are able to take a more holistic approach to developing their feedback capabilities.
They see themselves not as purely feedback givers but as on the endless path to becoming more feedback literate – with giving as only one dimension.
Individual contributors who once felt disempowered and merely passive recipients in the feedback process now understand the challenges their managers may have in giving them feedback and feel more confident in exhibiting feedback seeking behavior.
And, perhaps most importantly, introducing feedback literacy creates a common language and a common ground for all employees to recognize that feedback is multi-dimensional and an ongoing developmental path that everybody is on.
Through conversation, leaders can create an individualized approach to help employees begin building their feedback literacy.
Getting it into a development plan is important for integrating learning into each employees workflow.
Beyond introducing the concept of feedback literacy, I found it helpful to visualize what I see as its three primary developmental areas.
I’ve also found it helpful to provide a brief glimpse into what each area means and then allow the individual to take it to the next level regarding how it might apply to their development.
So here’s how we can think about each part of feedback literacy.
We start with feedback literacy at the core as it develops at the intersection of each part.
In one part we have the intrapersonal – this refers to the skills within our own mind, including those involving self-awareness, open-mindedness and emotional intelligence.
How we’re able to bring awareness to and work with our ever-changing emotional states.
In this sense, it can be said that the intrapersonal serves as the foundation for how we enter into feedback relationships.
In my experience, if things are chaotic in our inner worlds that will likely manifest in our outer worlds – often in ways we don’t expect.
From there, we move to the other side of our venn diagram, with interpersonal.
If intra is our inner and individual state, inter can be seen as the outer and relational state.
Interpersonal refers to the relational skills – including those comprising verbal and non-verbal communication.
These enable practices like active listening that are critical for developing feedback literacy.
At this point, you may be wondering – it seems there’s a connection between intrapersonal and interpersonal and that a relatively stable inner state would be needed to engage in authentic active listening… you are correct!
These qualities not only feed into feedback literacy, they feed into each other.
From there, we move to the top of the diagram with experiential.
This is about the feedback experiences we have across our personal and professional lives.
As we’ve said, we must pursue meaningful feedback experiences in order to improve not only in our craft but in our feedback capabilities.
The primary way we’ve covered to be proactive about this aspect of our development is to ask for feedback wherever and whenever you think you need it.
Let’s now move to how we can develop each of these parts.
Let’s start with a cleaner view of our diagram and then break it apart.
Okay, we can begin with intrapersonal.
Self-awareness is a vital dimension of intrapersonal skills and self-reflection can effectively build this capacity.
Through practice, we can develop a heightened awareness of our emotional states, improving our ability to recognize and be with rather than respond to our emotions will help keep us receptive and grounded during challenging feedback conversations.
More often than we know, our inner emotional states can lead to our behaviors, and for many of us, we often exhibit those behaviors without having any real awareness of the underlying emotional state.
Through awareness-building practices we can ultimately get a better handle on what we’re feeling, what that feeling feels like, and even what behavior we want to engage in as a result of that feeling.
For me personally, when I am lacking awareness I tend to rather intensely pick and bite my nails when I have a feeling of uncertainty about something.
Also, without awareness, when I’m scared about the health of a loved one, I find my default behavior is to get something to eat.
This distracts me from feeling the underlying feelings of fear and listening to what they may have to teach me.
As I recently wrote in a blog post, feelings are trailheads that lead to insight.
That is, if we bring awareness to them and gently investigate them they often lead to insights we wouldn’t otherwise have had access access to.
We can also bring awareness to our inner chatter and in doing so begin to build an inner system of talking to ourselves that better serves us.
Dr Rick Hanson, a psychologist who offers a unique blend of neuroscience and mindfulness, speaks often about the ways in which we can work with our negativity bias to incline our minds towards more skillful chatter.
I’ll provide a link to his work in the description.
And last but not least, we can bring awareness to our reactive tendencies.
So what I mean here is that even if we can’t access the feelings that cause us to react in certain ways, we can develop awareness of what our habitual reactions are and then work backwards from there to understand where they came from and work forwards to think through what a more skillful response would be.
This is what I did in discovering my tendency to eat when I’m scared about the health and well-being of loved ones.
I first noticed my behavior to eat and then worked backwards.
This is still a work in progress and I still tend to eat in some of these circumstances, but through awareness I now reach for healthier foods and am in more control of how much I eat.
So how can we go about building these intrapersonal qualities?
The ways are limitless but can include a few of the following.
Mindfulness practice.
To put some structure around this, I’d recommend trying out an 8-week mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) course.
This is an evidence-based mindfulness development program and at the very least you’ll add many new self-awareness tools to your toolkit.
If you need some guidance on where to start on this, reach out to me.
I had the privilege of having an incredible teacher and experience.
You can also take up journaling.
There are hundreds of fun prompts, routines and even journaling communities you can join.
You can also work with a licensed therapist.
Speaking from personal experience, I can’t imagine where I’d be in my self-awareness development if I hadn’t spent many hours over several years working with therapists trained in different styles.
Last on our list, and there are certainly many other powerful alternatives that I’ve leveraged, is working with a certified coach.
Again, if you aren’t sure where to start here, feel free to reach out.
Okay, so let’s wipe the slate clean and begin again, this time with ways to develop interpersonally.
Our relational skills can be built through various means including, by setting intentions and goals.
You can think of setting an intention as what you do prior to entering into an immediate relationship.
For example, prior to a regularly scheduled 30-minute call with a colleague, you might set an intention to listen to them fully – without thinking about a response as you do.
By setting intentions in practicing you can build and refine new skillsets through direct experience.
Goals, on the other hand, are longer term.
A goal here might be over the next 6 months to break your habit of trying to multitask while on a video call with others.
Many small intentions may go into each call, but if you’re often trying to work on other things or looking at other screens while on calls with colleagues, it may take months to dismantle that habit and build a new one.
This is where a longer term goal comes into play.
One way that can help you progress towards your goal is to find someone who embodies some element of the future state you want to achieve, and then consciously observe them.
If you always leave a meeting with a particular colleague feeling heard and valued, you might practice observing how they create an environment to make you feel that way.
Next, you can improve interpersonally by directly asking others for feedback.
Let’s say you are typically more shy and reserved in meetings, and you’ve received feedback about how others would like to hear from you more often.
You can set participating more in meetings as a goal.
Let a trusted colleague know this is your goal, and then regularly ask them for feedback about how you’re progressing.
Another way to develop interpersonally is to record yourself and then study those recordings.
I’m reminded of an assignment when I was an Executive MBA student that involved studying films of ourselves and others based on presentations and facilitated conversations.
Having a mirror into my performance coupled with studying – not just watching – the verbal and non-verbal cues of myself and others allowed me to address several interpersonal weaknesses.
I even noticed small adjustments I could make that made a big difference, such as how when presenting I’d often subtly hold my breath, which caused me to work harder, or how when facilitating I had the habit of more often calling on folks who were to my right even if more folks on my left were raising their hands.
Lastly, be a lifelong communication student.
For several years now, I’ve worked with Master’s level communication students at the University of San Francisco, and one thing that has become clear to me is that the more I know the more I realize I can grow.
You might begin by getting a copy of a book called Nonviolent Communications or you can look up the work of Oren Jay Sofer who specializes in mindful communication practices.
Next, let’s see how we can more intentionally step into experiential.
As mentioned here, one way to gain experience especially in a feedback-averse culture is by proactively asking for it.
This will allow you to see and learn from different feedback delivery styles and practice how you receive and process each.
You could also combine this with journaling, perhaps carving out time after you’ve received feedback to reflect through journaling on everything from how you felt to what you learned in the process.
It’s only through these kinds of intentional practices that you can see, for examplem that your default reaction has always been to get overly defensive about receiving even relatively minor negative feedback.
With this new awareness, you can develop more skillful means such as perhaps taking a few deep breaths to calm yourself when you notice the defensiveness arising.
And reflecting after feedback can work for feedback givers as well.
After giving particularly negative feedback to a colleague, which was hard for me to deliver for several reasons, I found it helpful to reflect through writing on how it went and on how I felt before, during, and after.
Another way to develop experientially is to do a 24-hour feedback inventory as Dr.
Riordan did in the Feedback Fundamentals book.
You can jot down all the moments throughout your day at work and generally in your life where some type of feedback event happened.
This is a great exercise in part because it helps you see that feedback is all around you – it just takes bringing awareness to it and once you have that you can begin to wring insight from it.
Additionally, especially if you are part of a large organization with a robust talent and development department, you may find that you can get some opportunities to practice feedback through leadership training opportunities.
If nothing exists, you might request a 60-minute feedback training session for your colleagues, organized and led by someone internally or externally.
Even these practice experiences are the experiences we need to improve.
Lastly, you might consider taking on a stretch assignment at your organization.
Remember the quote from Angela Duckworth earlier in the course?
She said she’s never seen an organization get feedback right.
So this could be your opportunity to take something on, perhaps creating a constructive feedback training session or working with a group in your organization to help collect, organize, and use customer feedback – again it’s all part of centering feedback and gaining the experience we need to develop our overall feedback literacy.
Okay, moving on to part four: Feedback Culture Exploration.
When I first began providing feedback training, I sat across from Kai, who was about to become a first-time people manager on a newly formed team.
Kai courageously admitted feeling scared to give feedback to their new teammates, then rattled off a range of great questions including, “Before giving feedback should I spend a few months getting to know my team so that we first have a strong rapport?” and “Should I only give feedback on areas within my subject matter expertise?” For Kai, moving into a people manager role meant they had to rapidly understand what it was like on the other side of the feedback line.
I learned that Kai’s apprehensions were born out of a challenging workplace culture they were leaving behind.
In their previous job, they hadn’t had a healthy feedback culture modeled for them – one in which everybody on the team, regardless of title, felt psychologically safe and had the skills to give and receive feedback effectively.
In essence, rather than tap the wisdom of individuals to form a continuously learning collective genius, Kai’s team was assembled into one large group of passive feedback receivers, those who were perceived as knowing little and needing feedback all the time, and one very small group of feedback givers, those who were perceived as all-knowing givers – neither of which had received any feedback training.
After many conversations with leaders from global companies, I’ve come to realize both how common and how unhelpful this grouping can be for developing a learning culture.
The “good enough” assumption with feedback has a cascading effect whereby passionate and promising future leaders like Kai grow into the kind of managers in the various studies we’ve highlighted who struggle with nearly all aspects of feedback.
So we have managers struggling to give it, employees wanting it, organizations not investing much in it, and educational psychologists like Dr.
James McKenna highlighting that in increasingly volatile and competitive industries it’s a key to building a learning culture that can help organizational resiliency.
Where to from here?
Let’s dive in.
Whether you’ve consciously built it or not, you have a feedback culture.
And this culture is significantly impacted by the feedback literacy of individuals within it.
For example, if teammates are afraid to provide feedback to each other – because they don’t quite know how or lack psychological safety or both – vital knowledge will remain trapped within individuals rather than unleashed for the benefit of the team.
In such cultures, I’ve also seen shadow learning whereby individuals secretly pursue all types of learning opportunities but feel the need to hide that they did it – which again keeps insights locked within the individual.
If we take the classic metaphor of a team as an organism, you can imagine individual parts of the organism becoming stronger but the overall organism itself remaining no more resilient.
Fortunately, threading feedback literacy into your culture is in all of our hands.
While I still recommend all employees receive formal feedback training, leaders can dramatically improve their learning culture by having feedback literacy-centered conversations with their teams and encouraging all people managers to do the same.
Below is a simple but effective three-step process for facilitating these much-needed conversations.
I recommend breaking these into multiple meetings.
Step one: pull your team together to discuss feedback, not to give it and receive it, but to discuss what it is.
The goal of this meeting should be to allow everybody’s insights to surface to co-create a feedback definition.
You might use the feedback definition from this course as a guide, tweaking as needed.
The important part here is that the members of your team feel a sense of ownership, feel like they’ve contributed to this definition.
Step two then is introducing feedback literacy, perhaps leveraging the many frameworks and graphics we’ve used throughout this course to do so.
Lastly, working with each individual teammate, you can co-create with them a feedback literacy development plan.
You might find it helpful to include this as part of an ongoing professional development plan you have with each of your direct reports.
For leaders ready to step beyond their team, here are a few key questions worth asking as you work to improve the larger feedback culture.
Number one: Are employees receiving the feedback they want and need?
As we covered, employees who don’t get such feedback are far more likely to leave the company.
As a follow-up to this, ask: How do we know?
Second, you can ask: Are we training our employees across our organization how to seek feedback from those outside of our organization so that they are staying at the top of their field?
Too often we think of talent development as skills development that must happen internally, but the world is vast and talent is everywhere – often the best opportunities to grow your internal talent is to encourage folks to gain insights from outside of the organization.
And third, you can ask: What feedback training are we providing new people managers?
These new managers are your future.
They are often fired up and hungry to learn, but just as often in my experience we wrongly assume they have seen feedback excellence modeled for them.
As a follow-up, we can ask this question directly: Are we assuming these new people managers have the feedback literacy skills required to grow their own career and empower their direct reports?
So one way to think about a culture at work, and in our focus here a feedback culture, is as the soil upon which effective feedback is either neglected or cultivated.
Like the soil of our Earth, the culture exists whether or not we intentionally try to shape it, so a neglected feedback culture then is one that is not intentionally cultivated.
To continue with the soil metaphor, in such a culture, weeds and other invasive qualities may sprout.
This can include toxic cultural elements such as managers belittling colleagues rather than providing helpful feedback.
In many cases, neglected feedback cultures are actually feedback-averse cultures.
By this I mean cultures where feedback is generally avoided, which means employees aren’t receiving comprehensive feedback training and new employees aren’t seeing healthy feedback relationships modeled for them.
And if this culture is neglected at the people level, there’s a good chance there’s neglect at the organizational level – where the organization itself is not effective at seeking and receiving feedback.
A healthy and effective feedback culture, however is built with intention; it’s a garden that is pruned and nurtured and generally cared for – with the result being colleagues at all levels who are, number one, working to build their own feedback literacy, and number two, feel psychologically safe enough to give and receive feedback regardless of where they sit in the organization’s hierarchy.
One helpful way to frame everything is to look at our workplace feedback categories alongside a feedback growth pyramid.
There’s a lot here but let’s begin at the top left.
Internal refers to both the feedback happening internally in our minds and the feedback kept internally in our organization.
So if we work on the left side, this covers the self-feedback in our minds, the individual feedback we’ve received from our colleagues at work, the customer feedback we receive directly from our customers, and market feedback.
Market feedback in the internal sense is about the effects on our business that we experience based on what’s happening in the market.
For example, even before it’s a major topic of public discussion, we may begin seeing signals of labor market strength as employees seem to be asking for raises at a higher rate than usual.
If we move to external at the top right, we can begin with sought.
This is feedback outside of your organization that we intentionally seek.
So at the individual level this could be feedback you seek by asking an industry leader if they are open to serving as a mentor for you, at the customer level this could be feedback about some part of your organization that you see posted on public sites like LinkedIn, G2, Yelp, Reddit forums, or elsewhere.
Similarly, external market signals could be a result of publicly known market shifts that maybe haven’t impacted your business yet – such as the Federal Reserve changing interest rates or a tense geopolitical situation that may have an impact on your supply chain strategy.
As you see, there can be barriers at every level here.
For example, a company may be one of those rare few who offer their employees training in feedback communications but they may be missing the boat when it comes to having a strategy for listening to the external market signals that could seriously disrupt their business model.
Based on my experience and review of the decades of feedback literature, one way to move from feedback category awareness to real action is to pair our category diagram with a feedback growth pyramid as we have here.
From here, you can begin to map each category to corresponding growth initiatives.
Such as when it comes to collecting external market feedback, what’s our culture?
Do we provide training on this?
What accounts for an event here?
And are these events regular and planned or are they forced on us when the market changes and we’re often in catch-up mode?
Another example could be when it comes to organizing internally received customer feedback, have we mapped out the many ways, events, this can happen?
Do we provide customer feedback training to our colleagues, or is a wild west of customer feedback coming in from everywhere and not being routed or sorted in any way?
And, lastly, what’s our feedback culture as it relates to the customer feedback we receive?
Does everybody feel they have a role to play?
Does everyone feel incentivized to play this role?
How do we know?
This mention of feedback collection leads us to part five: Feedback Systems at the Organizational Level where we’ll cover what I call the three C’s of organizational feedback systems.
Step one here is about collecting feedback from various sources. one metaphor that may be helpful here is to think about all the tributaries that feed into a river.
The goal here is to map out all the most important feedback tributaries and to create a process for how they are being monitored.
For example, if we think about collecting customer feedback, those tributaries would include the internal feedback our customers send us privately (and ensuring they have easy ways to do so) and it would include monitoring the most important areas where they are providing public feedback.
From there, we can move to step two which is to ensure all that feedback flows into a central place where it can be seen in aggregate.
This could be a Slack channel, for example.
Once there, it’s helpful to classify it.
For example, is this external feedback about a particular product or service?
Is it positive or negative feedback?
You can get as detailed as is helpful here.
For example, it may be helpful to note if it’s coming from a Fortune 100 customer who you have a significant deal with as opposed to a customer from a small business who is simply on a free trial.
We then move to step three, communicating.
Some organizations end at step two thinking that the feedback river is enough, but the river contains everything and can be an overwhelming source of information to the point where it’s irrelevant for many people who are receiving it.
The river metaphor continues here as step three is about creating feedback lakes from the river.
That is, ensuring that the classified feedback is routed to the most appropriate people or teams.
As in our example, a batch of feedback from Fortune 100 customers on a particular product could be routed to the product team responsible for that product, to the enterprise technical sales team who can follow up directly with their customer points of contact, and perhaps to the marketing team who can determine if and how to respond to the public feedback.
So on the whole we’ve taken what can be a complex but always-on organizational feedback initiative – again, one in which Dr.
Angela Duckworth has never seen an organization get right – and we’ve turned it into a rather simple three-step approach we can keep top of mind as we work to improve our efforts and build a truly elite feedback culture across the organization.
Again, like everything we’ve covered in this course, this is much easier said than done, but putting a process in place is vital.
Well team, you just completed what is perhaps the most in-depth course available on constructive feedback.
Congratulations on not only prioritizing this important topic but focusing on your growth!
Now what?
Here are some recommended next steps.
First, this was an epic achievement.
By sharing it with others on social media or elsewhere you will create a ripple that will help others see and prioritize the importance of taking feedback seriously.
The world needs it.
Second, share the course with your teammates.
Building feedback literacy takes all of us acting as a collective.
As your teammates level up their skills, you’ll level up yours.
If you’re bold enough, you might even incorporate this course into your organization’s professional development plan so that all employees level up together.
Third, use what you learned at work, at home, wherever.
Keeping everything trapped in your mind won’t be all that helpful for you or humanity.
Fourth, keep learning about feedback.
I’ve been at this for a while and I still feel like I’m barely scratching the surface.
There are many ways to keep learning, including by reading many of the books I’ve recommended, but an additional way is to sign up for my newsletter on CameronConaway.com.
This will ensure you are the first to know about my Feedback Facilitator Certificate Program, an in-depth course that will build on what you learned here and prepare you to be a confident feedback trainer at your organization and beyond – a leader capable of delivering comprehensive feedback training to all employee.
We’ll get to work together directly, and I’ll be keeping the cohorts very small to ensure you leave the program feeling fully prepared.
Spots in the program will be offered based on the order you sign up, so if you have any interest at all I’d go ahead and get on the list.
Congratulations again on your achievement here!
May you and those you love be well.