How to create a culture of feedback?

Feedback is indeed one of the best ways for us to know if we’re doing something right or wrong. Every business has guidelines about how feedback is handled. A strong feedback culture welcomes feedback and uses it to foster the growth of individuals, teams, and the organization. Creating a feedback-rich culture leans on the foundation of trust, healthy communication, and safety. The onus is on the leadership to establish healthy habits centered around communication. Without feedback, organizations remain stagnant and hold themselves back. Hence, instead of being exploiters of talent, organizations with feedback cultures are actually investors in talent.

In order for us to become more effective and fulfilled at work, we need a keen understanding of our impact on others and the extent to which we’re achieving our goals. Although direct feedback is the most efficient way to gather feedback from people, a conversation between two people - the most interpersonal form feedback can take - can actually trick us into seeing it as a product of the relationship while it’s equally a product of the surrounding culture. Even people who aren’t interested in or skilled at giving or receiving feedback will participate in the process, and improve while working in a feedback-rich environment.?

So, as leaders, how do we build a feedback-rich culture??

What does it really take to cultivate an ongoing commitment to interpersonal feedback??

Here are some essential elements that could help you:?

1. Nurture a growth mindset

People with a growth mindset believe their abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work. Strong feedback cultures value this mindset. They value learning and development and view feedback as an opportunity to improve. And they don’t just say they value these things—they show it and integrate it into their business.?

2. Safety and trust

To give and receive truly candid feedback, people must feel a sense of safety and trust.? As leaders, we need to foster the relationship between positive emotion and performance to ensure that colleagues learn from feedback. This does not mean avoiding confrontation or offering only support and comfort. It means being highly attuned to people’s readiness for a challenge and their emotional state in a given interaction.

3. Balance

We often think that good feedback is honest criticism, but that’s just half the story. The other half is truly meaningful positive feedback, which is all too often absent in organizations. You can’t have one without the other, but so many obstacles prevent us from offering and accepting positive feedback. We worry it will sound insincere. We worry it will make us look like suck-ups. We worry it will make us seem weak. And since we don’t do it very often, we’re not very good at it.

But recent research at Ghent University in Belgium indicates that positive feedback promotes self-development. Further, as University of Washington psychologist John Gottman has noted in his study of long-term relationships, in the most successful ones the ratio of positive to negative interactions is 5:1 even amidst a conflict. Strong relationships rely on heartfelt positive feedback — so we need to practice.

4. Normalcy

Training and workshops can create space for people to be open to new ideas and experiment with new ways of communicating, but the next day everyone goes back to the real world. You have to integrate the behaviors you want into your team’s daily routines in order to normalize those behaviors within the organization’s culture. If feedback is something that happens only at unusual times (such as a performance review or when something’s gone wrong), it’ll never really be an organic part of the organizational culture. It has to show up in everyday life — on a walk down the hallway, at the end of a meeting, over a cup of coffee.

5. Personal Accountability

As leaders who want to promote a feedback-rich culture, we have to walk the talk every day. Research by Harvard Business School’s Lynn Paine and colleagues makes clear that employees are more sensitive than leaders to gaps between companies’ values and practices. Our teams will take their cues from us as to what’s acceptable, and if we don’t take some risks in this area, they won’t either. Why should they? This doesn’t mean we’re going to get it right all the time. If we’re taking some meaningful risks, then of course we’ll make some mistakes. The key is to fail forward and view those mistakes as essential learning opportunities. Let those around us know that we’re trying to get better at giving and receiving feedback, too, and ask for their input on how we’re doing.

What ideas have you deployed to create a feedback-rich culture in your organization?