Giving Feedback: Check-In

Episode Transcript

The Giving Feedback Check-In card states, “Don’t stop at the giving. Thoughtfully following up can deepen the relationship and give your feedback a better chance of sticking.” And the card invites you to use the closer: “I’m curious, was the feedback I gave last week helpful?” If they’ve adopted it: “How has practicing X been going?”

This is the final card in the deck, so let’s talk about why it ends here, with a follow-up. So there’s a version of giving feedback where the conversation ends and the giver considers the job done. Feedback delivered, box checked, everyone moves on. And I understand the pull of that version. The conversation may have been hard, and finishing it feels like a relief. But when it comes to challenging feedback, something important can get lost there, because for the receiver, the conversation ending is usually where the actual work begins. The processing, the deciding, the atomizing, the practicing, maybe the getting worse before getting better. Everything the middle suits of this deck are about happens after you’ve left the room.

When you never circle back, the receiver does all of that alone, and they will likely notice that they’re doing it alone. Follow-up questions like, “Was that helpful? How has practicing it been going?” communicate that you were and still are interested in their growth. In my experience, that’s often the moment trust actually forms. Feedback plus silence can, whether it’s true or not, be perceived as you judging them. Feedback plus a check-in, if done right such that it doesn’t feel like micromanaging, is far more likely to be perceived as you caring about them.

The check-in also gives your feedback a far better chance of sticking, for reasons this whole deck has been building toward. Maybe they tried the change and overcorrected. Now you’re the dartboard they can calibrate against. Or maybe they got worse before getting better and were close to abandoning it. Maybe they misunderstood a piece of it entirely, and two minutes of clarity from you saves months of practicing the wrong thing. None of that support is possible if the giving was the end.

And notice the closer’s first question takes some courage. Was the feedback I gave helpful? You are seeking feedback on your feedback. There’s humility there, which means this last card of the last suit, in a way, hands you back to the first card of the first suit. The giver becomes the seeker, and the loop closes. That’s the real shape of everything in this deck. Feedback was never meant to be a one-way transaction, one person launching observations over to another. At its best, it’s a loop between people who are invested in each other’s growth, seeking, receiving, processing, using, giving, and then checking in, which starts the loop again.

That’s card 10 of the Giving Feedback suit and the final card of the Feedback Deck. If you’ve been working through these cards, you now have 50 practices that reinforce one another. But if I could leave you with one thing, it’s this: None of them are really about technique. They’re about becoming the kind of person others can grow around and who keeps growing themselves. The check-in is often where all of that becomes visible. Don’t stop at the giving.