It’s a book about feedback, which, cool, plenty of them, and plenty of conversations about feedback. The thing that’s different here is that it’s not simplified processes or models – it’s a book about how people respond to feedback and how to work with people’s normal reaction to help them effectively work with the feedback you have for them.
Some key takeaways:
Side with the person not the problem – this is huge, it depersonalizes the feedback and puts you on the same side as the person you’re giving it to, better positioning you to help them address it.
More positive feedback, it makes people feel seen – I love this, and have believed this for years – great to have the research and external source to back it up.
Listen first, it makes people more receptive – again, something that I have tried to practice for a while, it’s good to have the validation and encouragement and something better to offer other people than my own opinion.
Create the space to neutralize defensiveness – builds on the previous two. If someone’s feeling defensive (like they don’t feel their hard work or strengths are recognized, they haven’t had the opportunity to explain), they are less likely to hear you. But beyond that, if you’re going to give someone really tough feedback, this is about creating the space and being willing to walk through it with them.
At the end of every chapter, there’s a useful summary that will make it easy to refer back to, and at the end there’s section on how to do deliberate practice. It’s so helpful, and I highly recommend it.
Slides and commentary for a talk I gave (internally) to Qz in Q4 20202.
When I think about growth, I think about drowning rats and boiling frogs. Because this is what growth often feels like – or looks like – especially when it’s hard and not going particularly well. The rat drowning school of growth is to throw someone in the deep end and let them figure it out. If they do, they’ll be a good swimmer. The frog boiling school of growth is to gradually turn the heat up so the frog doesn’t notice, and if they survive they’ll be heat resistant…
This metaphor sounds violent, and yeah, it’s less than ideal. But what I like about it is that hard periods of growth feel difficult. These metaphors capture the feeling of “can I do this?” and “can I sustain this?”
For all I like to write about – and practice – what good management looks like, the reality is that most managers aren’t that good, and even good managers, operating under their own set of pressures, aren’t good for everyone all of the time. Very few people get everything they need to be successful, when they need it. Everyone has their moments where they are struggling. If we’re lucky, these are the moments where we learn most of all. If we’re not, they are moments where the best thing we can say about them is “I survived”.
The question is – particularly right now, when almost everyone is finding life harder than it used to be – how do make it more likely that we learn and grow as much as possible? What resources can we draw on?
Professionally, whether we are growing or stagnating is the gap between our Capability vs what is required of us.
Capability smaller than requirements = hard growth
Capability bigger than requirements = stagnation
Requirements a bit bigger, but with help = sweet spot
Hard to find the sweet spot of growth, let alone sustain it. Can also go between periods of hard growth and recharging periods closer to our comfort zone. Don’t necessarily see real growth even month on month, but year on year. Also, might be growing in different ways – e.g. in depth rather than breadth.
Growing through necessity – stretching. Adding necessary capability to succeed at what we’re currently doing.
Growing from comfort zone – courses, side projects. Growing in the ways that interest us, laying groundwork for what’s next.
There’s a great book by Marcus Buckingham, called Now, Discover Your Strengths (Amazon). In it, it has the concepts of strengths and controlling weaknesses. The idea is that everyone has weaknesses, and often those weaknesses are the flipside of people’s strengths. They are only a problem if they are limiting factors for someone’s growth, a “controlling weakness”.
Great managers: focus on developing strengths, and when they work on weaknesses it’s just to build them up so they are no longer controlling.
Coming back to growth is being out of your comfort zone with help, what kinds of help are available?
Mentoring – teach to swim (maybe in swimming pool)
Active help – give a life raft
Coaching – view from the bridge – what can you see? What can you find? What can you make? (Get to small rock, build a makeshift boat, sail off to sea)
Therapy – in a puddle but think you’re drowning
Management, go between all of these (except for therapy!)
The problem people have when they start with coaching is that it requires patience, and seems inefficient.
Why don’t you tell me what to do?
Why don’t you help?
Co-active model of coaching says: client is capable, whole, and resourceful.
I can’t tell you what to do – you know better.
I can’t help – I’m not there.
At the start of any coaching relationship, we talk about “designing the alliance” – setting the parameters of the relationship. This comes up, along with confidentiality, and how to work with someone effectively. Designing the alliance is a really powerful concept in coaching that personally I use to define a lot of my professional relationships. It’s the agreement for how you plan to operate together.
The first step of being more coachable is being open to the process. Someone is trying to help you figure out how to be your best self. It’s not about helping you, but about growing your capability. This is inherently uncomfortable. Sometimes the people who are the best at coaching others are the hardest to coach. They understand the process well enough to evade it. The best book I’ve read about this is Lori Gottlieb’s Maybe You Should Talk to Someone (Amazon) – it’s about doing this in therapy, but similar things apply.
In terms of approaching growth, coachability is made up of two factors: receptiveness to feedback, and how highly actionable you are (what you do with it).
What makes someone highly receptive to feedback? We can easily identify people who aren’t receptive to feedback. They:
Respond defensively.
Blame others, and are reluctant to take any responsibility (everything is someone else’s fault).
Discount the value of the input or person giving it.
In contrast, people with high receptiveness to feedback:
Listen and work through what the feedback is.
Are self-aware and prepared. They can fit the feedback into their mental model and adjust it accordingly.
Believe they can learn from everyone.
Similarly, we know exactly what people not acting on feedback looks like. People who are low actionable in response to feedback:
Make minimal changes or adjustments.
Make any changes they do make slowly.
Are very literal (apply same feedback to other situations without nuance).
But what does highly actionable look like? People who are highly actionable in response to feedback:
Experiment, iterate, and change behavior (both in response to explicit feedback, and implicit feedback, and also because they are continually looking to try things and improve).
Return to those interested with things they are trying / have tried and solicit input on how it’s working.
Seek out other perspectives and information to learn more.
You can think of these two dimensions as a quadrant.
It’s worth noting that we should be in different quadrants with different people high-trust-high-respect relationships will be further up and to the right and low-trust-low-respect relationships will be down on the left. This is understandable, and to a certain extent healthy. Whilst we can always learn from feedback, even that given in bad faith or with an agenda, we need to consider some input (from low trust sources) more carefully than we do from people who we know care about us and want us to be successful.
Let’s talk about coaching in each quadrant of how people take feedback.
Highly actionable && highly receptiveness: This might seem like the ideal, and on some level it is, but taken too far these things can lead to someone over-indexing on what everyone else is thinking, which can make them too reactive and appear a bit chaotic or inauthentic. This is the quadrant with least friction, so giving feedback in this quadrant should feel – and be – really minor and contain a lot of affirming or validating feedback that what the person is doing is working. Take a curious mindset and encourage self reflection, support them in thinking critically about what feedback means and what they want to do with it.
If you’re the person in this quadrant everything feels very clear. It’s easy to fit feedback into your mental model, and adjustments feel natural and build on what you’re currently working on. This comes from having a good idea yourself about what is happening and how you think you can improve.
Highly actionable && low receptiveness: You have to really work to get this person to take feedback, but when you do they do so much with it that it makes it worthwhile. Work on understanding why this is – are they scarred by too much bad feedback in the past? Do they struggle to trust your opinion (or that you have their best interests at heart?) – work on building that trust with them. Try asking for their opinion and show you value it, in return.
In this quadrant it can feel like the feedback doesn’t fit into your mental model, often your self-identity. If it did, you’d act on it, but it conflicts with the other information you have. The first step to moving forward is to reconcile that conflict.
Low actionable && highly receptiveness: This can be frustrating – it seems like they’ve taken the feedback well, but then… nothing happens. Dig into why that is. Are they overwhelmed? Do they not know what to do? Make sure you set time to follow up post feedback and agree on concrete steps, and follow up on them regularly.
If you’re in this quadrant you feel a bit stuck. The feedback you’re getting makes sense and feels clear but… you you can’t act on it for whatever reason. The first step is figuring out what’s stopping you.
Low actionability && low receptiveness: Coaching people in this quadrant is like banging your head against a brick wall. Generally it’s a place where I try not to spend my time. In this quadrant, you need to be very direct and concrete in what you want to see. Focus on getting a single concrete change, and accept that you may never do more than that.
This quadrant is a miserable place to be. How does someone get there? The two ways I’ve seen (nice, capable) people end up in this quadrant are:
Being completely over their head, maybe because they are so lacking in capability for whatever situation they’re in
Or they’ve been bullied.
If you recognize you’re in this quadrant, and I really hope none of you are, then it’s time to consider how that is situational – and how to change the situation.
If you’re being coached, consider how you’re likely to hold yourself back and what you can ask for to get the most out of the relationship. If you think the feedback is fair, but don’t know what to do with it, ask for concrete suggestions and hold yourself accountable to them. If you’re struggling with the feedback, consider if you can take that struggle elsewhere, or be open about why that is.
There’s a great book called Thanks for the Feedback (Amazon) that I really recommend, and one of the things there is that it talks about your first score – the feedback – and then your second score – what you do with that. People who do well at the second score, will get better and better over time. This is the core of the growth mindset.
Like everything else, we can work on becoming more coachable. This is a really powerful catalyst for individual growth, with really strong long-lasting effects—because coachable people are easier and more rewarding to help, they get more help and do more with it.
So how do we do that? Five ideas.
1. Build your self-awareness
The most exhausting people to give feedback to are those who are so invested in some image of themselves that you can never really talk to them—only their ego. The easiest people to give feedback to are those with few self-illusions, and a level of self-worth such that they don’t find it threatening to know what they can improve.
In short, the more self-aware you are, the more people can connect with you and not the story you need to tell about yourself. Self-awareness is often hard won, but professional coaching can help, as can therapy and good friends who are willing to call you on your bullshit.
2. Broaden your perspective
Broadening your perspective helps you see things in different ways, to be more open to possibilities outside your world view. Three good ways to help with this:
Read a broad array of fiction. Reading fiction makes people more empathetic, especially if it involves a broad variety, written by people who are not like you. Memoirs can also be good for this (two I read recently and loved: Becoming by Michelle Obama and How to Be Alone by Lane Moore – both links Amazon).
Cultivate a broader network of people. Start by expanding the choices of voices you listen to on social media; over time, try and broaden your friendship circle. It’s worth noting you probably have to make more effort to become friends with people who are less like you, and do more of the emotional labor.
In other times I suggest travelling outside your comfort zone, but maybe that’s just life in 2020 now.
3. Shed your defensiveness
As a rule, I try to never defend myself when someone gives me feedback. Defensiveness either shuts the conversation down or makes it about your feelings rather than what the person is trying to tell you. Try and accept that anyone who cares enough to try and give you feedback is not setting out to upset you; offer context they might be missing, yes, but remember that too much context is just a nice way to defend yourself. You will learn a lot more from the conversation if you ask questions and “get curious” instead.
Importantly, you don’t have to respond in the moment. You can take time to process—maybe work through your defensiveness with someone else—and come back to the person to continue the discussion. Removing pressure to respond in the moment can help you avoid being defensive, and give you space to decide what part of the feedback is useful to take. Remember, the second score is the most important one.
4. Own up
If you can admit what you’re bad at, the conversation starts with what you want to get better at, rather than forcing the feedback provider to convince you this is a thing you need to work on. When you start with a self-assessment that demonstrates self-awareness, a lack of defensiveness, and empathy for how your actions and stress fall on others, people are much more inclined to believe that their feedback will be heard and acted on constructively.
5. Ask for advice
Often people are afraid to give feedback for fear of upsetting us, and are particularly unwilling to risk this if they think we are doing well overall. Their assumption can also be that they have nothing to add, or that they are missing too much context to be useful.)
For most people, it’s easier to give advice than feedback, so try asking for that instead. This can be as simple as, “what would you try?”
This is a great topic for this timeline, if we come back to drowning rats, the water is rising, there are fewer life rafts around. There may be nothing we can do about the practical realities – we’re still working from a place unsuited to it, with various distractions and a deep underlying current of existential dread. The purpose of coaching or mentorship is not to ignore these things, but to expand our capacity even as we carry those weights.
I want to end this talk with a story, about someone I know, he’s a software engineer at Apple now.
He moved to the US from Jamaica, and he taught himself to code. As he was looking for entry level developer jobs, he saw something I tweeted about calls with under-indexed folk in mobile, and he booked one with me. He asked me for help on technical interviews, and I did a couple of things. Firstly, I bought him a book. Secondly, I did a couple of practice interviews with him and gave him feedback. Thirdly, I made an introduction to Glowforge, the company where I’m an advisor, and got him an interview.
I gave him practical help – a life raft. Because that’s really what most under-indexed people need when they try to break into this industry. But here’s the thing – I did a lot of those calls, and he’s the only person I heard from again after the first one. The only person who ever came back around and followed up. So each time he came back, I gave him a little more, and each time he multiplied it. He went to work at Glowforge, learned a ton there, and now he works at Apple. I really could not be prouder of him and everything he’s done.
He makes a point to tell me that I changed his life, which is, of course, really cool. But he is the person who showed me what it looks like to maximize what you get out of every such interaction, how to do the most with the life raft, the swimming lesson, and the view from the bridge. When I think about who I want to spend my time on, I look for people like him who will multiply whatever I give them and really make the most of it, and that’s the kind of person I try to be in turn.
I covered a lot of things today, the framework of coachability, the different things we can do to improve. Here’s the one thing I want you to take from this time together: as you go into any mentoring, coaching situation, your next 1:1 with your manager, consider, how can you get the most value out of these interaction? What do you need to ask for? And how can you get out of your own way?
A lot of things in management become clearer when you realize it’s much easier to measure a team’s progress than its state.
A team produces 30 units of “x” in a week. Is this good? Well, we could start by asking what the value of each unit is, or by looking at the contributions of each individual on the team…
Or, we could look at how many units are being produced over time, and whether delivery is getting more (or less) predictable. This will tell us more about the trajectory the group is on. Is the team gelling, working together better, delivering more? Or are members of the team struggling, maybe with a lack of clarity about their mandate, or because they are onboarding new people without the right process in place to support that?
There’s a concept of “self-managing teams,” which I prefer to reframe as “self-improving teams.” Self-improving teams have feedback loops that make getting better over time a team effort; they respond well to failure and learn as much from it as possible, they use estimation as a way to better surface the known—and unknown—unknowns. They invest in collaboration that levels up individuals and the collective.
The question that might emerge from this is, well, if your team does all this on its own, what is the role of the manager? Doesn’t it render you redundant?
My friend Camille told me once that women get too much feedback, and men too little. I think about this whenever I think about feedback because it captures some of the baggage we bring to giving feedback.
If you’ve got a lot of (low value) feedback you might think a lot about whether the feedback is useful, or whether someone already knows it.
If you’ve got very little feedback, giving feedback to someone else might seem like a strange and intimidating thing to do.
One of the things that can come from this in a formal performance review process is that people give their peers feedback (at most) twice a year. I worked with a guy who would bring up events from 3 or 4 months prior in peer reviews that he had never or barely mentioned in person (his manager at the time, “he does that to everyone” me, then and now: “that’s really shitty”). If this is connected to promotion processes, working with someone who considers peer review to be when they express every pent up grudge since last time can be not just irritating, but career limiting.
Then without a performance review process the risk is that people don’t give their peers feedback at all. They don’t tell them what’s good (“they must know, it was so complicated! But only a couple of weeks late and we only found a couple of bugs” whilst that person worries “it was a month overdue and we had to do that point release…”) and they don’t tell them what they wish they would do better (“I wish you would be more thorough in code review, I really value the comments you make and I think it’s important we both understand this”).
Perhaps most insidiously, they don’t talk about the differences in interpersonal style where minor adjustments will make them happier (“when you message me a question without first saying hi it feels like an emergency and you’re ordering me about” / “when you message ‘hi’ and nothing else I have no idea if you just want to chat or if there’s something you need me to do and it stresses me out” / “I know with timezones that meeting will be later for me, but it’s hard for me to make an 4pm meeting on Tuesday because that’s my day to pick the kids up – can we do that time on Monday or later, say 6?” Rather than have that conversation, the question gets resentfully answered, the “hi” goes unresponded to, and the meeting is flaked on. The “petty” thing that it didn’t seem worth bringing up becomes a source of resentment – and the other person has no idea why. Perhaps they even feel they were accommodating you by having an 8am call so you could finish your day on time – but half the time you’re not even there, so why bother.
This is the core of the Leadership and Self Deception framework – that unexpressed (or pooly expressed) conflict creates cycles of resentment. The trick, then, is to break that cycle by seeing the other person as a person, not the source of your frustration, to understand where they are coming from, and express how you feel and what you want.
Building on this, is the idea of Radical Candor – the idea that you care personally and challenge directly. These two things are very important. You can miss one or the other (or both) and call what you’re doing “radical candor” but that doesn’t mean it is and won’t prevent people from taking issue with it. When you care personally, you’re invested in that person doing well. When you challenge directly, you challenge that person – not your best friend, or your boss, or your Twitter followers. This isn’t to say that there isn’t sometimes value in abstracting feedback, or that subtweeting is always bad (I don’t judge). Just that if you have, and want to have, a good relationship with someone, you need to get to the point where you can tell them yourself. If you’re the boss, and you want people to tell you what they think directly, that work is heavily on you. With peers, and when trying to tell your boss, I’d suggest trying small things and working up.
Good feedback is timely, and contextual.
Timely means it’s not just close to the time that it happened, but that it’s a good time for them to do something with it – both practically, and emotionally. This is why post-mortem’s happen after the situation is resolved, once everyone has had a proper night’s sleep (or three). Once the crisis is over, people are more emotionally ready to deal with how it happened. And practically, they’re not distracted by having to deal with it.
Contextual means in in the context of what you’re giving feedback about. But it’s also contextual in what else was going on at the time, and your relationship with that person. For instance, if someone was brusque in a crisis, you might also want to consider if they are brusque in more every day situations. If someone is going through some kind of upheaval in their personal life, the feedback “you’re not as focused” is pretty meaningless – of course they aren’t as focused, but 1) what is the effect? 2) does it matter? 3) are there things that you can do to help them get that back (e.g. doing some planning together and breaking down tasks). And finally, the context of your relationship. If you don’t normally take much personal interest in someone, giving them personal advice is not a great place to start. If you just let someone down, it may not be a great time to ask them for more. It’s worth asking yourself, “Is this the right time? Is this the right context? Am I the right person?” It’s tempting to convince yourself that you are not the right person, so if you’re tempted to say no there, ask, “If not me, who?”
At the core of both Leadership and Self Deception, and Radical Candor, is the idea that it’s not just what you do, but how you do it. You can be right, but if you’re right in an obnoxiously aggressive way, it may not matter because people won’t hear you. If you’re right, but you don’t speak up in some way, what difference does it make.
The key thing I want you to take away is that conflict is usually much worse in your head than in reality and not saying things rarely results in improvement. Conflict is not inherently bad. It’s not inherently good either, but it’s not inherently bad. It’s just a function of humans interacting – the difference is what you do with it. Whilst corrosive conflict is destructive of everything around it, productive conflict makes for better decisions and stronger teams.
The challenge then, is this:
Think about a piece of feedback you’ve not expressed.
Use these frameworks to think it through. Is it still true? What do you really want to say.
Talk it through with someone you trust (your coach or manager, a peer in another org, someone outside the organization).
The premise of Thanks for the Feedback (Amazon) is that we should get better at receiving feedback. I started feeling a little resentful of that because I think most feedback is bad (and quickly turns into advice). But I quickly got over it because the book is really helpful, and yes, it gave me some better tools to receive feedback, but that’s not passive – it gave me ways to be more involved in the feedback so that I get the kind of feedback I want and need in a way that is useful. AND it gave me some tools to better give feedback, too.
I was recommending this book to people before I had finished it, so spoiler: I think it’s great and I really recommend it (especially if feedback is important part of your job, e.g. you’re a manager). But some highlights that I pulled from it:
We have three reactions to feedback: truth, relationship and identity.
Truth: just feels wrong – it’s not inline with the facts we have.
Relationship: this is a reaction to your relationship with the feedback giver.
Identity: makes you question how you see yourself.
Three types of feedback: appreciation, coaching and evaluation.
Appreciation: I see you and I value you.
Coaching: direction / suggestions / guidance.
Evaluation: where are you?
We need to distinguish between types – often we hear evaluation in coaching, and it makes us anxious. We might need the evaluation before we can get the coaching.
“Wrong spotting” in feedback: where we look for what is wrong about the feedback and reasons to discount it. Look for what could be write about it instead.
Feedback is where information becomes judgement, skewed via the experiences of the person giving it.
To understand the information, ask questions.
Blind spot: we focus on our intentions and the situation, others focus on our impact.
Feedback is a mirror: honest mirrors and supportive mirrors.
Our friends are often supportive mirrors, don’t necessarily say what they really think.
Need honest mirrors. Ask “how am I getting in my own way?”
Look at a system: it’s rare that just one person needs to change, there are interactions.
Take a step back, look at the system, break the cycles.
Take a growth mindset and score yourself for how you respond to the feedback – not just what the feedback is.
The first score is the feedback (the evaluation).
The “second score” is what you do with it.
Doing well with the second score pays off over time.
You get to have boundaries around feedback: what you want, when you want it, who you choose to accept it from.
It’s fine to set those boundaries. If you choose not to take it, and it effects others, work with them to mitigate it.
Coach your coach – understand how you take feedback best, and help them give it to you in a way you can process.
One of the things I found most surprising when I started my current job, is that I would ask for feedback and people would tell me concrete things that they thought I had done well, and tell me why they appreciated it, or what they thought the impact was.
For comparison, a manager at the conglomerate responded to me asking for feedback along the lines of “don’t worry, I’ll tell you if you’re doing anything wrong.” (And oh! How he did. And oh! How much I disliked him).
I’ve learned instead to say thank you, and talk about why I’m doing that thing, or things I’ve learned doing it.
It also pushed me to consider more how I give feedback, and how I can do it better. Good positive feedback says I see you and I appreciate you. “X was great” is nice. “I saw how you did Y and Z and I think they really contributed to the overall success of X” is better.
We talk about feedback like it’s just negative aka “constructive”. And as a result we can sometimes discount positive feedback like it’s not real, the only real feedback is the “constructive” kind.
But it’s also constructive to know what you are doing well, because we do better when we focus on our strengths.
And when we negate positive feedback, we can project lower confidence, which can – ironically – make it harder for people to give us the constructive feedback we need, because they are afraid of our reaction; they don’t want to hurt out feelings.
If we embrace it with gratitude, we can also take the opportunity to talk about the things that were hard and that we think we could do better, and maybe get some insight.
Or we could just bask in the joy of being appreciated for the hard work we do. That’s fine, too.
I just ran a thorough feedback cycle for the managers (leads) in my team. This is what it looked like.
Motivation: It’s hard to get feedback as a manager, the hope was that people would be more candid if they 1) submitted feedback anonymously 2) to someone else. Because we tend to amplify negative feedback, there was a benefit to having someone else go through it, find trends, and repackage it for the recipient.
Process
Put together a document of questions and discussed with people who to send the feedback requests to (everyone on their team, other leads in mobile, people on projects owned by that lead).
Sent those questions to those people using our anonymous feedback system.
Gave people a week to respond (and then extended it so they had two).
Asked people getting feedback to send me a 3-2-1-Oh! Put it in a doc for each person.
Collated responses in a spreadsheet (and in the doc for each person). Made sure these were private.
Color-coded the spreadsheet (green = positive, orange = actionable). I would have used red if there was anything that was particularly worrying, but thankfully I had no need to 🙂
Went through and summarised under two headings: What Your Team Appreciates About You and What Your Team Would Like to See From You.
Put together a section called Takeaways which contained 4-5 actionable things from the headings above (including things to keep doing).
Copied relevant content into a new google doc (excluding responses), and shared it with the person. These were called “Name – Private” (my working doc) and “Name” (the one I shared).
Had a call and discuss the content.
Sent to HR.
Questions
On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate XXX’s overall performance as a lead? (one being “they suck” and 10 being “they don’t come any better”? Explain your rating.
What’s the best part of working with XXX?
What’s the hardest part of working with XXX?
What are three of XXX’s strengths?
What do you wish XXX would do more of? What do you wish XXX would do less of?
If you had one suggestion for how XXX could go from good to great, or from awesome to awesomer, what would it be?
If you were having lunch with a friend and talking about your job, how would you describe XXX as a lead?
Complete the following, “My ideal lead is someone who…”
Describe yourself when you are at your best. Is there anything XXX does to enable that?
Keep track of who I sent requests to – mainly to have an idea of how many responses I was expecting, and be able to remind people via email (would have to be all of them) instead of posting general requests in Slack.
Adjust the questions for people who aren’t on the team (e.g. have peer questions, and perhaps also project IC questions).
Time Commitment
Researching and thinking about the questions: several hours. I asked a colleague and three of my CTO friends for advice, and ended up having my coach help me with the more detailed questions.
Sending out feedback requests: 15mins / person.
Collecting feedback into the doc / spreadsheet: 30 mins – 1 hour per person (I also read it through which got me thinking about the feedback before I started processing it).
Going through the spreadsheet in detail, colour coding, and writing up detailed feedback (including the HR feedback questions I was sent): 2-3 hours per person.
Note: this is just the time commitment for me to run it. Writing the 3-2-1-Oh!s and filling in feedback for others also took up time on the team.
What People Said
I loved this feedback review mostly because of how structured and transparent it was. Not only did I know everyone who was getting reviewed, but I knew everyone was getting the same questions. That relieved a lot of the stress in wondering “why did I get this review request?”. The question format of listing things (name one thing, what are the three things, etc) also made it super quick.
There weren’t any big surprises in my feedback, but I appreciated getting the reinforcement that I’m on the right track — knowing what you’re doing well is always motivating. I liked that the top-level points were broken down into “what your team appreciates” and “what your team would like to see” — where criticism is presented as concrete things that can be improved or changed.
I’ve always been apprehensive about getting feedback about myself just because of a fear of failure. Internally I can feel like I am succeeding but still get nervous when I go through a feedback process. This process eliminated a ton of that upfront fear because I knew what questions were being asked and trusted the process to be fair and unbiased unlike in previous jobs. I love getting actionable things to do or try out!
There are two things we should talk about before talking about feedback.
First is the idea that feedback is just when you tell someone they screwed up in some way or need to do better. This makes us dread giving feedback (well, for those of us who aren’t sociopaths who enjoy tearing people down), and it means people dread receiving feedback too. It’s noticeable that we more often qualify “positive feedback”, because the default is negative (aka “constructive”).
Obviously constructive feedback is necessary, and something we need to get comfortable both giving and receiving. But we also need to get comfortable with the idea that feedback is just observations of another person’s behavior reflected back to them – ideally it’s normal, and not some big event.
Secondly is that feedback is often a very gendered experience. My friend Camille once observed to me that women get too much feedback, and men get too little. Women have often had the experience of receiving a lot of low quality feedback, which they then have to filter through to the pieces that are useful. Men are often not used to receiving feedback at all. Whilst this is not universally true, it’s worth thinking about how your own experience can affect your expectations.
Regardless of the baggage we bring to giving feedback, we can learn to be good at it. Step one is understanding where we are coming from.
Receiving Feedback
Implicit Feedback
Implicit feedback is feedback you observe rather than receive. It’s something I particularly look out for in communication. For example, when I communicate a complex topic to people, I always pay attention to see what they say about it later, because this tells me a lot about what they took from whatever I said. If what they are saying doesn’t fit with what I intended, then it’s a sign we need to talk about it more – and that I need to be more clear.
Other places to look for implicit feedback include: velocity, morale, and collaboration. For instance if you start doing standups, and it seems to improve team (or individual) effectiveness – that would be an example of implicit feedback.
Explicit Feedback
An important behavior to model as a lead is the act of listening and acting on information – including things that make you uncomfortable (e.g. “constructive” feedback). Bear in mind that it’s really hard for people to give their boss feedback, and that feedback more than ever is likely be based on partial information.
E.g. Someone gives you feedback that you’re not managing poor performance well, but what they don’t know is the context of that poor performance (e.g. events in someone’s personal life).
Or, someone gives you feedback that you’re not sharing information, but what they don’t know is that your boss isn’t telling you things, and you found out in the same meeting they did.
Or, they complain that you’re not involved enough in the day to day of the team. But what they don’t realize is that you’re spending most of your time being a shit umbrella.
Feedback that lacks context helps you understand what the person is experiencing, even if it doesn’t (shouldn’t!) inform what you are doing. Say thank you, highlight what you are doing, and be honest about what you’re not going to do – for example something you’re going to consider more before acting on.
Owning Up
Because people are less likely to give their boss feedback, it becomes all the more important for you to give yourself that feedback to them. To own when you screwed up, and apologise. To acknowledge what you learned and what you would do differently. To recognize implicit feedback, and make it explicit between you.
Giving Feedback
Positive Feedback
People often talk about building a relationship where you can give people constructive feedback and they’ll listen, and mention positive feedback in that context. Yes, it’s important to build a relationship where you can give constructive feedback. Yes, positive feedback helps with that. No, that’s not the only reason to do it.
In general, people like to be appreciated and recognized. Noticing what someone has done really well, or worked really hard on, is not a very arduous thing to do. It’s part of your job as a manager to recognize what people do well, and not just at performance review time, but continually. It’s good to recognize what specifically was good, in order for your feedback to feel personal, and not bland (and meaningless). Aside from this being a worthwhile endeavour in and of itself, it’s a safe assumption that people want to be successful, and telling them what’s appreciated is a way to get them to do more of that.
Pre-emptive Encouragement
This is encouraging people to do things they’re unsure about or a bit uncomfortable with, especially things that will result in positive feedback if they do them (or “constructive” feedback if they don’t). For example, at work, we have an internal blog, and I want to see people posting on it more. One thing I do to encourage that is to ask people questions about things they’re working on – their support rotation, or a project. Then, I listen to them. If they seem engaged by the topic, or I learn things from the conversation, I suggest to them that would make a really good blog post – and offer to help with that, e.g. proof reading it.
Constructive Feedback
There’s a lot written about giving constructive feedback, and I don’t feel much need to add to it. A couple of points.
Firstly, this is something that we often put off in some misguided idea of kindness, but mainly because it makes us uncomfortable. It’s not kind not to tell someone that they will eventually discover. For example, finding out that they didn’t get promoted because of something you didn’t tell them six months earlier. These conversations are hard, but not having them is harder.
Secondly, it’s important to ask yourself why you want to give them this feedback. Are you trying to make your life easier, or them better? People will often realize your motivations. Often the people I’ve learned the most from are also the people who have stressed me out the most. My life might be easier if they pushed me less – but neither of us would be better off.
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There (Amazon) initially irked me because it fell under a class of book that I call “Advice for White Men” (my blog post on this topic). It’s about how you can be oblivious to certain characteristics, and never receive feedback on them – and of course all but one of the examples in the book were men.
My friend Camille observed to me once that men get too little feedback, but women get too much. And definitely one of the things that I’ve found helpful with coaching is sorting through feedback – some direct, and some implicit, and deciding what of it I should take.
Anyway, even though I don’t think the content of the book applies as much to women, it was still useful, and once I got over my annoyance I found it so. How do you ask for feedback? How do you get someone else bought into you taking it and changing? It also gave me some observations that I could use to talk to other people about taking feedback and changing.
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