Transcript
Hi there and welcome to Module 4 in our Constructive Feedback course.
In this module, we’ll look at how we can give feedback more effectively.
If you’ve made it this far in the course, you’ve already improved your ability to give feedback.
As mentioned throughout our time together, there’s significant overlap across the various feedback dimensions.
For example, by understanding what feedback is, why it’s important, where we get challenged by it, how to receive it, how to process it, and how to use it – all areas we’ve covered so far – you’ll be in a far better position to give great feedback to others.
If you recall, we kicked off our modules with receiving feedback for precisely this reason.
In many ways, learning how to receive serves as the foundation for how we can give.
We will now build on that foundation, occasionally circling back to a few topics we’ve covered to ensure we understand them.
Let’s remind ourselves of the feedback definition now: “Feedback is a response to a person’s activity with the purpose of helping them adjust to become more effective.
Feedback comes in various forms, including evaluative (how you did and where you are), appreciative (how you are valued and recognized), and coaching (how you can improve).
And let’s recall just how challenging giving feedback can be.
The Harvard Business Review article highlights that 44% of managers say feedback was stressful or difficult, 21% avoid giving constructive feedback altogether, and a whopping 37% even avoid giving positive feedback – which research has proven is often more effective than negative feedback.
And let’s also recall the two-year study published in Fortune which found three insights.
Number one: employees who don’t get clear feedback quit.
Let me repeat this one: Employees who do not get clear feedback quit.
So keep in mind here that despite what you may think, studies point to employees actually wanting your feedback so long as it is clear, comes from a good place, and they respect where you are coming from with it.
For example, I am in no position to give feedback to Steph Curry on how to shoot a basketball.
So it’s critical here to check your ego at the door.
You don’t need to give feedback to someone just because you think it’s your role to do so.
You should only give it when you think you have a gift to offer.
Number two: not all feedback is equally effective.
For example, as a giver to a far more junior direct report, you may be providing task-specific feedback but not feedback that may be helpful for helping them navigate their career.
Similarly, you may be providing plenty of negative feedback but the primary challenge holding your direct report back is that they don’t have a sense of their strengths – which you can help change by delivering highly specific positive feedback.
Lastly, I’d argue here that the most effective feedback comes from a giver who both cares a great deal about the receiver’s development and has had enough deep one-to-one conversations with the receiver to have a sense of what they want.
And number three: high-quality feedback isn’t distributed equally.
We covered this in earlier modules, but it’s important to keep positionality in mind here.
The research shows that women tend to get far less helpful constructive feedback than men, and black women in particular get even less.
This impacts their professional development, their ability to receive promotions, and generally their overall career, so as a feedback giver you have a responsibility to understand both systemic biases and your individual biases.
We don’t have time to cover this massive topic here, but a good start is to begin learning about both social identities and biases that humans in general contain, and doing the inner work of excavating your own biases.
Lastly, let’s also remind ourselves of when feedback is effective – it’s effective when the setting it takes place in feels psychologically safe, and we know that psychological safety takes time to build.
This is is about ensuring each party feels heard, feels valued, and feels safe enough to share their thoughts, their ideas, and even their disagreements and mistakes without fear of negative consequences.
So perhaps your number one job as a feedback giver, if possible, is to put the work in to build this kind of relationship – or at the least to try to objectively see if this description of psychological safety applies to your team.
In my experience, this type of culture doesn’t just arise; it’s built intentionally by mindful leaders.
If you haven’t started yet, begin now.
If you don’t know where to begin, get Amy Edmondson’s book immediately.
The link is in the description.
We know that the feedback relationship can also be effective when the mindsets of the giver and the receiver are positive and aligned – which means the foundation here is built on trust and a shared goal of improvement.
Lastly, we know that feedback can be effective when it goes beyond calling out a past behavior.
In fact, based on our definition, that actually isn’t even feedback.
So the kind of feedback we’re talking about is by its nature constructive.
That is, it’s pointing to a past behavior but also lighting a torch to help point towards future improvement.
As we highlighted earlier, telling people they are missing the mark is not the same as helping them hit the mark.
And, lastly, we know feedback has a chance to be effective when the feedback giver grants the receiver time to process it – and even helps them integrate it into their workflow.
If you are a giver who has just delivered what may be very challenging feedback for the receiver to hear – and it takes empathy to recognize this – a great next move will be to ensure you and the receiver are on the same page about what it means.
And then grant them some space to make sense of it.
Additionally, while the actual feedback conversation is important, perhaps just as important is how the feedback giver checks in or otherwise follows up to see if they can do anything to help the receiver make progress on it.
And, as we covered, we know feedback is most effective when it falls within the Learning Zone of our matrix here.
Remember to consider the axis.
If the feedback is delivered with true empathy for the receiver and with a high degree of helpfulness, there’s a far better chance it will land well for the receiver and therefore have a chance to positively impact their professional development.
One way to build or at least center this sense of empathy and recognize the important role you play as a feedback giver is to think about an Employee Hierarchy of Needs.
There are many variations out there, but here’s how I often think of it.
At the bottom, the base for most of us, is the need for survival, for a paycheck.
After that it may be a sense of security, security that the paycheck will be there next week, but also a sense of security by way of the culture – of how the employee feels and is treated within it.
Next is a sense of belonging – again belonging to that workplace culture, a culture that in many ways can be shaped by the way feedback is given.
Next is a sense of growth and importance.
Again, two elements that can be impacted by the feedback relationship.
And lastly at the top of the pyramid we have growth and a sense of fulfillment, yet another area that can be impacted by feedback experiences.
Feedback givers can certainly have an impact on the top four parts of this employee hierarchy of needs pyramid, which makes sense considering that Fortune article which highlighted the role feedback plays in whether employees stay or leave their organization.
Okay do you have a grasp of all that?
If so, here’s a big picture way to think about giving constructive feedback that has impact.
This tip is about giving feedback that has an ongoing impact on someone ‘s life or professional development.
Giving feedback is a gift.
Yes, I know that is a phrase often about receiving feedback, but think about it.
As a feedback giver you have the immense honor of shaping the direction of a person’s improvement, even their entire career.
As that last part should have suggested, giving feedback is also an immense responsibility.
As such, it can be helpful, especially when preparing to give feedback in a planned feedback session, to think into the future about not only how you hope this feedback will land but also what the feedback receiver may be able to do with it.
I’ll repeat: feedback receiver.
So I think about this as Impact After Receipt (IAR).
It’s a concept I came up with that is inspired by the National Football League metric of Yards After Catch, or (YAC).
As it sounds, this metric is about how many yards a football receiver gets after they’ve caught the pass.
While it can be easy to think about this as purely the receiver’s speed or skill in outmaneuvering those trying to make a tackle, many other elements are at work here.
One element involves the quarterback who had to throw a pass in such a way that the receiver has a chance to do something with it.
Often, this means the pass was thrown not to where the receiver is but to some combination of where they are going and where they might be able to go.
Think about it.
Which receiver is likely to get more yards after the catch?
This receiver that needs to dive towards the ground just to make the catch or this one who is able to make the catch in stride and with an open field ahead of them?
So think about that the next time you step into an important feedback conversation.
Ask yourself: What might the Impact After Receipt be of this one?
Depending on context and many other factors, not all feedback you give needs to have a high IAR, but as a feedback giver you should try to bring awareness to those moments when you have the chance for IAR.
You might think to yourself: If, years from now, the feedback receiver were to take some kind of Likert Scale based on what I’m about to share, how might they respond to the following question?
The feedback I received today positively shaped my professional development.
Ultimately, thinking about Impact After Receipt is an act of care – it helps us bring greater thoughtfulness to how we give.
After all, for feedback to be a great gift for the receiver it should be a gift that provides ongoing value.
Next, let’s talk about the profound role of positive feedback.
As mentioned earlier, a whopping 37% of managers studied in one survey do not give positive feedback despite the the rather overwhelming amount of research on how doing so not only improves employee morale and performance but helps point out their strengths so they can double down on them.
In my video on taking an evidence-based approach to debunking five feedback myths, I opened by debunking the myth that positive feedback is not helpful.
To reiterate what I said over there: Positive feedback positively impacts so many lives and entire work cultures could immediately and dramatically improve if leaders started giving more of it.
Okay, so this myth has kind of a single root with several branches coming off it.
The root is some ignorance around positive feedback’s ability to highlight a gap.
One branch, as mentioned in that Harvard Business Review article, is that many managers believe positive feedback is optional.
As the authors put it: “We can only conclude that managers feel that it’s their job to tell their direct reports bad news and correct them when they make a mistake, but that taking time to provide positive feedback is optional.” They continue on to say: “We think this is a mistake.
Our research suggests that colleagues place a great deal of emphasis on receiving positive feedback, and that it colors their relationship with one another even more than does negative feedback.” In my own article at HBR, I wrote about how I’d spent years as an undergraduate writing student getting my papers filled with negative feedback in red pen.
The feedback taught me plenty about my weaknesses – it highlighted those gaps – but I rarely received specific feedback that showed me my strengths.
And, if you think about it, not knowing your strengths is also a vital gap to address.
In many cases, it’s actually far more important than shoring up your weaknesses.
So when one professor gave me specific positive feedback by showing me an example of something I did exceptionally well – and then he actually compared it to what authors that I admire had done – it not only highlighted a gap, it also improved my confidence to the point that I pursued writing as a career.
The academic research on positive feedback is vast.
This 2020 piece here in Frontiers in Psychology opens with a description about how “Positive feedback has been found not only to enhance performance” and here they cite the classic 1996 work from Kluger and Denisi, “but also to be an efficient intervention to manipulate self-efficacy.” So, team, what that last part essentially means is that when someone receives positive feedback it has longer term downstream impact – such as protecting that person from stress and also improving their self-confidence.
The paper then goes on to highlight its own study with a sample of 102 participants in which the results suggest something I find completely fascinating.
Positive impact may even increase flow state – the ability of people to be fully focused on a single activity.
This could be because, as positive feedback can both improve confidence and alleviate stress, it allows the receiver of it to generally feel good about their work and to less frequently be pulled out of flow state due to their inner critic or other self-doubting mechanisms.
Put all that together and the case to give feedback, particularly specific positive feedback, becomes quite strong.
It really can do everything from helping improve employee satisfaction and development to promoting a culture of appreciation, which many employees, arguably most, are looking for.
Speaking of showing appreciation, I’d like to pause here for a moment because this is kind of another branch off the root.
So you may have seen this: a person puts their tough card on the table.
And by that I mean they’ve equated positive feedback, even appreciation, with weakness – and they want you to know that they can take whatever harsh feedback you can serve up.
So coupled with this, that person often also usually holds kind of an erroneous notion that positive feedback is nothing but empty fluff.
You may have even heard someone say that.
Again our root here is the ignorance around just how impactful positive feedback can be, and maybe even what it is.
Yes, it can be meaningless and insincere fluff if it’s simply a comment like “good job” right?
But truly effective positive feedback is specific; it’s something like: “Hey I appreciated the way you steered our team discussion out of the weeds and back to gaining a better understanding of our customer’s primary pain point.
Without that we may have come up with a solution to a problem that wasn’t even the problem.
So, you know, when you said Hey team, can we pause here for a moment and come back to our purpose – that allowed everybody time to regroup and get back to our primary intention.
So well done and thank you so much.” Let’s now talk to the role of time as it relates to giving feedback.
By that I mean it’s important, particularly if you are a people manager, to provide a mix of planned feedback and unplanned feedback.
Why?
Because sometimes having a planned feedback session – whether you give a few days notice or it comes during a quarterly performance review – provides a sense of structure and long-term commitment.
While unplanned feedback can provide the ongoing in-the-moment feedback we all need to stay on the growth path.
Keep in mind that feedback delivered during a quarterly performance review should never shock the receiver.
There should be feedback touchpoints between you with enough frequency that the quarterly review can be seen as a chance to go deep rather than surface something new.
Lastly, and although these are generalities, I found these DOs and DONT’s about giving feedback helpful as a manager, as have many of the people leaders I’ve worked with.
First up: do give feedback as close to the observed behavior as feels reasonable.
Use your discretion here.
Obviously you wouldn’t want to give negative feedback immediately after an incredible performance, nor would you want to wait too long – delivering it so far into the future that the receiver missed many opportunities where they could have used it.
And our don’t here, of course, is don’t hold the feedback until an arbitrary date like a quarterly review.
As I tell here in this feedback failure story, I’ve made the mistake of delaying feedback to the point where it seriously impacted the career of my colleague.
Don’t make that same mistake.
Next up: as a feedback giver, do encourage feedback from your direct reports.
As a giver, particularly if you’re a manager, you have a great opportunity to model what asking for and receiving feedback looks like.
In doing so, you’ll also let your colleagues, who may be more accustomed to receiving feedback, have a chance to practice how they give it.
However, as you encourage your direct reports to give you feedback, don’t pressure them to give it in the moment.
Again, this comes down to your empathy.
If we continue with the people manager role, recognize that there might be differences in power between you and the receiver.
It may be exceptionally scary for them to provide feedback to you, as they may think whatever they say could jeopardize their relationship with you or even cost them their job.
So provide them space to think about it and work to create the safest possible relationship.
At the time of the conversation, you might open by saying something like: “I am so grateful for your time here.
I’m always looking to improve and I’m excited to hear any thoughts you may have about how I can.” Another do: do create a safe, empowering environment where your direct reports can ask for feedback.
Again, in my experience, two great ways to set the stage here.
First, to ensure you have real and heartfelt one-to-ones with your direct reports.
Get to know them.
Share a glimpse into your life outside of work, and try to make some space to talk about things other than work.
Second, you can model this behavior where it makes sense – asking them for their feedback.
On the don’t side: if your direct report does ask you for feedback, don’t feel the need to talk just to talk.
If you don’t have any feedback in that moment, ask for more time.
Similarly, if they are asking for feedback on something that is wildly outside of your domain, state that and try to refer them to an expert you know on that topic.
Another do: and this one should be obvious by now but, wherever possible in the feedback relationship, lead with empathy, helpfulness, and kindness.
If you feel agitation or even anger leading the way, it may not be a great time for you to deliver constructive feedback.
That said, the don’t here is don’t use kindness to mask direct feedback.
Feedback that dances around the topic is not likely to be helpful and is not likely to be clear.
As Brené Brown puts it: Clear is kind.
Unclear is unkind.
And, often when it comes to giving constructive feedback, direct is often the best path to being clear.
Next up: an obvious one if you’ve watched the previous modules, is do create time for your direct reports to process the challenging feedback.
On the other side, don’t expect their immediate acceptance and smiles.
Many of us in the privileged position of being able to frequently give feedback have been conditioned by countless articles and even academic papers that receivers should be immensely grateful and immediately accept everything we just said.
Hold those expectations lightly.
In fact, it’s often best to leave your expectations behind entirely and show up to the feedback conversation with an open heart and the courage to work with whatever unfolds.
Next up: and this is one we often forget – do promote self-feedback for your direct reports.
Encouraging and again modeling what it means to be a self-reflective manager can help them lean into doing the same.
On the don’t side, don’t, in your attempt to encourage them to be self-reflective, don’t force them into demoralizing comparisons.
If there’s a colleague or person in the world who you think they could learn from, rather than framing it harshly like “You really need to learn from Everett.
He’s your same pay grade and he never messes it up like this.” You can shift it to something like “I see your audience engaged when you shift attention from what’s on your slides to more extemporaneous sharing your story.
It makes me think you and Everett could partner up to improve each other’s presentations as I know he could use some help on the slides and I think he may have some great tips for you on how he goes off script.” Our final do here is do continue being a student of communications.
That’s the game we’re in as feedback givers.
You are doing this by taking this course, you can do this by continuing to put your feedback reps in at work, and you can do it by reading many of the great books out there – including Nonviolent Communications, Dare to Lead, Thanks for the Feedback, and The Fearless Organization.
All of which I’ll link to in the description.
And our final don’t – don’t think you’re all good and that you’re the feedback guru just because you read a few good books.
I learn something new every day about feedback and I invite you to stay on the same journey.
One final tip about giving feedback: it’s important to consider feelings.
Yes, by that I mean: how do you want the feedback receiver to feel after you’ve delivered the feedback?
Check out this wheel to be reminded of our complexity of human emotions.
Do you think constructive feedback is more likely to be adopted and set the recipient on a growth path if after they receive it they feel, say, inspired and respected or if they feel exposed and frustrated?
Not all, not nearly all, of what they may feel in a feedback session is under your control, but you do play a role here and it’s important to keep that in mind.
For more information about the fascinating and complex landscape of our emotions, check out the Atlas of Emotions (atlasofemotions.org), a collaboration between the Dalai Lama and emotion scientist Dr. Paul Ekman.
Well team, that’s a wrap on Module Number Four: Giving Feedback.
I’ll see you over in the next module.