The fine art of feedback

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a piece on performance management. It looked at why much of our effort expended on performance management misses the mark. I also had a pop at some performance management driven “HR quackery” (I now own this term, but am able to licence it out to suitable on-brand partners). The reality is that your performance management system, hidebound as it is by technology, forms, process and an overly optimistic view of how many things it could ever hope to fix, is nothing but a methodology. And like all methodologies, it is probably wrong (but it may nonetheless be useful).

So we can happily spend much less time vexing ourselves over what system you choose, the optimal performance rating approach, how many pie-charts to depict on your dashboard and the steepness of the distribution curve. And focus all of that time now saved on the real value-add. Being what you put into the system to fuel it. Or feedback. 

Every organisation I have worked in has been terrible at feedback – both giving and receiving. My guess is that the inevitable increased pressure on organisational performance and headcount management will exacerbate this problem, not improve it. As will increased remote working. Look out for quality feedback in your next appraisal such as, “you turned your camera off in my leadership briefing”, or “how hard can it be to check you are not on mute before you start?”. So we do now face a compelling issue to address in the short term.

I am not in a position to provide a feedback master class. But, as I seriously dislike both giving it and receiving it, I can at least preach on process improvement in the space with an independent eye. In the same way that people who cut hair always seem to have the worst haircuts. 

So what is the answer?

Feedback is a muscle. Like all muscles it requires looking after. You cannot hope to run a marathon next year if you do no running in the meantime. Hence, you cannot hope to conduct feedback collection a couple of times a year and hope it will turn out ok. 

To bring this point to life, the type of feedback I am talking about does not need to be written down. You can if you prefer, but you do not need to. The purpose of writing feedback down is to provide evidence, for a purpose unknown. Leave this evidence gathering for another day. It has nothing to do with feedback. 

With that point duly landed, I have four exercise tips – designed to make feedback part of our daily ritual.

Get over the discomfort

Most people who should give feedback in the moment avoid doing so. Giving feedback is uncomfortable and it takes a little bit of time. These two factors make it super easy to put off.   Ideally forever. So people need to fight this prevarication and get better at overcoming it. Conversely, receiving feedback can be tortuous – even when wholly positive. People expecting to receive feedback should also get better at managing the sensation. 

Practising discomfort is an intriguing affair. Once you set a task for yourself, which you know will be uncomfortable, and then complete it, the feeling of achievement is extraordinary. So we all have to set a task for ourselves each day that makes our “fight or flight” receptors tingle. It doesn’t have to be feedback related. The key is to set the task and do it. Without fail. Every day. 

For example, I have promised myself that when I buy a cup of coffee and it has that molten lava temperature that makes it both dangerous to drink and completely tasteless, I will take it back to the barista and ask for a new one. Some of you may think, “big deal”. To me, it has been a huge breakthrough. My previous method to address the disappointment would have been to bin the coffee and never go to the establishment again. Meaning I got nothing, and they didn’t even know there was a problem. 

Create a feedback framework

Let us assume we have adjusted our ability to endure discomfort to embrace the giving and receiving of real time feedback without prevarication. We have no need to write it down – so it loses its ability to potentially form a weapon or be taken without context. What then?

We need to set a framework for giving feedback that ensures that it is useful. I don’t mean mastery of the traditional technique whereby we hide our development point between two pieces of praise (I’ll not mention the sandwich filling – I’m better than that). Instead we need to be specific about what feedback needs to contain in order to be effective. 

For example, it needs to be clear – to ensure it is understood. And it needs to be given with a positive intention (if it is not, why give it?). Crafting this framework is not difficult, but each organisation should create its own - to ensure that participants can make the important connection between culture and feedback (how you give feedback is defining of culture).   

Build (and share) your feedback tradecraft

The framework is helpful, but only gets you so far. You then need to equip your people with some tricks of the trade to ensure the feedback lands well and is responded to correctly. Everyone will have their own favourites – again, they are particular to an organisation because they, in no small way, are defining of its culture. 

A couple of examples:

• For someone giving feedback…..silence….silence is very powerful. If giving feedback, make your point and then shut up. There is no need to fill the dead air with more words. Someone reading this will be laughing now – having been a recipient of feedback given by me and getting to the end of the meeting still trying to work out what exactly was going on. That’s what too many words does.
• For someone receiving feedback….receive with grace….you may receive feedback that is meaningless or that you do not agree with. Don’t leave the room without getting from it what you need. And the first step in that journey is pacing your reaction.

Trust

I’ll end on the difficult bit. If your feedback culture is not founded on trust, it does not improve performance. Building trust in a business is not something you can do with frameworks or tradecraft or training. And it is usually the reason that feedback cycles are not effective. 

So rather than explain how to build a culture of trust in an organisation in a paragraph, I will end on this thought. Feedback starts at the leadership level – and unless you can get it right at that level, there is little sense in seeking to improve its effectiveness throughout the business. 

Which means that leaders who do not listen, or who use feedback to show they are in charge, or who provide feedback to show how clever they are or who use it in search of a quick fix, may wish to have a high performance culture (and may well think they have one). But they will not have. 

Most importantly of all, leaders need to be able to receive feedback. If there is one step that any leader could take to improve trust in his or her business – it would be to show the people in that business that he or she is open to receiving feedback and able to respond to it authentically.