The Art and Challenge of Feedback

In the last two weeks, I have been prompted to reflect on the value of good feedback and the challenge of creating an environment for a strong feedback culture to thrive.

The impact of good feedback

Going through 360-degree feedback and preparing for happiness and success meetings for my team at SHERPANY (this is what we call performance and development conversations), I have appreciated how much of an art feedback-giving is. Specific, both for criticism and for praise, giving the right context and providing an open door to discuss or advice.

I am incredibly thankful for everyone who puts in the time and reflection to provide it. This kind of feedback makes my job as a leader better because I can be more helpful with it for my team and because it lands with people. There is always this "aha" moment that triggers a reflection for people when they receive good feedback, and they act on it because they understand the situation when it happens and what people observe, and they have pointers on what they can do to change.

An incredibly beautiful moment throughout this process is seeing when the loop is closed. In the next iteration of the 360-degree feedback to read how a person is appreciated and improved in an area they worked on, also coming from people who were unaware of the development goal set.

The challenge of creating an environment with a strong feedback culture

At the same time as an organization, in the product team-wide retrospective, we received criticism, and discomfort was voiced around giving and receiving feedback from the 360-degree process.

Strengthening our feedback culture is something that I have been working to address. And it is feedback to me and our leaders that we don't yet have the level of trust needed for people to feel comfortable giving and receiving it.

People mentioned that they would not like to assess others and be able to give feedback more openly, especially more appreciation. A great idea that was shared was to turn the current form into a format similar to user interviews, asking about how many times a person interacted with someone they are giving feedback to and then talking about that situation.

What worked, what we still need to work on

In our journey to improve the feedback culture, I have seen a few things work well so far.

1. I took inspiration from the book https://www.radicalcandor.com/ and the suggestions on where to start: ask for feedback and acknowledge and accept it publicly. I ask for feedback in every one-on-one, experimenting with different questions. When I receive it, I try to mention it in our town hall so that other people feel encouraged to give it.
2. We use anonymous employee NPS feedback monthly and retrospectives quarterly to give people a chance to give feedback in different formats. Both have been powerful tools to surface topics that people were not comfortable addressing in direct conversations. To make them work, ensure you have a process to close the loop. We reply to every feedback we receive in the eNPS, take action, and report on the initiatives coming out of the eNPS feedback and retrospectives.
3. Work to improve the foundation for trust in teams using the 5 dysfunctions tools https://www.tablegroup.com/topics-and-resources/teamwork-5-dysfunctions/.
4. Track and encourage making feedback a habit. For example, a simple table counting the number of times a person gave and received feedback.

As mentioned above, we still need to work to give space for trust to grow more broadly in the organization and improve the process around 360-degree feedback, making it more frequent, open, and based on interactions.

Do you have feedback or advice for me?

None of this is new, and yet experiencing it is powerful. Creating a strong feedback culture takes time and explicit investment. I would love to hear if you have any feedback or advice on what worked in your organization.