Give better feedback this week!
Feedback takes a lot of energy to craft and deliver, and there’s always a risk that you’ll harm an important relationship with a poorly timed or poorly delivered bit of truth. Feedback is also the fastest track to getting good at something, and often a gift only our best friends give us. That’s a missed opportunity!
Feedback is information from the outside world caused by our actions (or inactions). When we stub our toe, it’s feedback that we are not stepping high enough. When our boss keeps piling on work, it’s a sign that we are doing a great job.
In the backcountry, performance can be life and death, and relationships quickly get strained. It becomes vital to give feedback early and often. In the office, giving feedback might not feel as compelling as when your teammate exposes you to physical risk in the backcountry, but your team cannot attain high performance without near-constant feedback. Here are ways to get better at this critical skill.
What's so hard about giving feedback?
Here are five common reasons we avoid giving feedback, with quick ideas to help overcome them. Keep reading for the in-depth analysis you expect from Cairn Leadership below!
1. There is no obvious time to give it, so we let the opportunity pass.
→ Operations needs to schedule regular feedback opportunities and provide a clear structure for people to use. Here are some recommendations to get started.
2. Feedback feels like personal attacks more than helpful guidance.
→ Clarify the type of feedback you are giving (appreciation, coaching, or evaluation) and use the situation-behavior-impact model to depersonalize it.
3. It feels unkind to give critical feedback, and people don’t listen anyway.
→ Use Kim Scott’s radical candor model to ratchet up the direct challenge just enough to be heard while maintaining the appropriate level of respect.
4. It takes a lot of time and emotional energy to give hard feedback, and we tend to ruminate until it’s done.
→ Know when the juice is worth the squeeze, and move on when it’s not. Determine your threshold equation for feedback and apply it!
5. It’s hard to give feedback across power differences.
→ Develop psychological safety in your culture so that people can give the boss tough feedback, and learn to ask for the feedback you want explicitly.
Make room for feedback in your operations
It drives me crazy when people claim they prefer immediate feedback. Usually, the moment is hectic, with many other priorities on the table. Leaders and team members likely can’t stop doing what they are doing to give one person feedback, and frankly, it seems selfish to ask for that. Additionally, when people give immediate feedback that cannot be implemented immediately, it becomes distracting and frustrating. Usually, the moment is also emotionally charged. Basically, the moment is the wrong time to give feedback unless you’re a sports coach.
Instead, leaders and teams should foster a culture of note-taking on feedback and establish regular check-ins where sharing feedback is expected. At Cairn Leadership, we solicit specific feedback and provide feedback every Monday in a weekly meeting. We also literally schedule feedback between guides every evening when we work with clients in the outdoors. These checkpoints enable us to course-correct frequently enough without causing friction and confusion in the moment.
Don’t expect feedback in the moment. Schedule and enforce feedback (or demonstrate it as a leader) during every scheduled opportunity. If you don’t have any feedback as a leader, you’re not paying attention. Check out our recommendations for an excellent performance management system here.
Learn and systematically use the SBI model
Myriad models exist to give feedback, but the SBI is the simplest and most effective we have come across. It’s so simple that you might initially dismiss it. Still, I promise that your feedback conversations will improve if you structure your thoughts in this format, mainly because it depersonalizes the feedback.
Instead of triggering the defenses by saying, “You’re always late” (not specific and a direct attack), try “On Mondays for our team sync (Situation), I noticed that you tend to show up 5 minutes late (Behavior). When you come in, it’s distracting to me, and I feel obligated to revisit the first few agenda points, which I think frustrates the team (Impact on me and the team).
Before you jump into the SBI, though, consider what kind of feedback you want to give. Heen and Stone outline three primary types of feedback in Thanks for the Feedback: appreciation, coaching, and evaluation.
Appreciating people is never an emergency, so it often gets dropped. We do it every Monday on our team because it helps build relationships and motivates great work. People usually fail at this when a direct report needs appreciation, and instead, you give them coaching or an evaluation. Try writing a thank-you note for a specific action every week.
Good leaders provide continuous coaching feedback, and great employees always seek more. Unfortunately, when we fail to label it as coaching clearly, it often comes across as evaluation. Don’t leave this up to interpretation, or “can you go a little deeper into this topic during this training” (intended coaching) becomes “I think you’re too lazy to do the work right” (perceived evaluation).
Evaluation is, of course, important, and labeling it as such also helps. If you are considering firing someone for poor quality work, ensure they’re aware you’re evaluating their performance. If they leave thinking you’re a great coach, they will be devastated when you fire them next week.
Check out this podcast episode for great examples of mixed feedback type signals.
Use radical candor to be just direct enough
Kim Scott provides a great tool to help balance challenge and empathy in Radical Candor. You should care about the person you give feedback to, but also provide them with direct feedback. People fall short if they give direct feedback without caring (Obnoxious Agression) or fail to give critical feedback because they want to be “nice” (Runious Empathy). This can lead to hurt feelings when someone is fired without being clearly informed that they did not meet the standards.
I like this tool, but it requires more nuance to get the most out of it.
You might not care. First caring means you respect a person, not that you are their friend. Still, it takes very little “care” for me to tell a stranger they have toilet paper stuck to their shoe. A better test here might be considering whether the feedback is for the person’s benefit or yours. Observing that an employee’s presentation was poor to help the employee develop looks and feels different than picking apart their presentation because you are tired of your boss yelling at you for their poor performance. Honestly, it’s usually both, so take some time to see if you’re coming from the right place.
They might not need challenge– Some people take a subtle hint, others need a slap in the face. If you don’t know the person well, start with a lot of care and a little challenge. Then ratchet it up until you’re sure they get it. Listen to an example of Cheryl Sandberg doing this at Google with Kim Scott here! To make this work, you’ll have to check for understanding often.
Be intentional about your feedback threshold
Giving feedback takes a lot of energy (at least emotionally), can take time to plan and deliver, and could risk important relationships, such as your boss’s favor. Not giving feedback can also drain your energy and poison relationships. People need to know when to give it and when to avoid it; then, either way, they need to move on.
Create a decision-making aid to help you determine when to give feedback. Run the numbers that work for you, and if it’s not worth giving the feedback, stop ruminating about it. If it is worth sharing the feedback, well, stop ruminating and give it!
Here are some key variables to consider:
Expected duration of relationship – if your boss’s tone drives you crazy on day one, you’ll be insane after two years of snide comments. Get ahead of it. If someone from another team rubs you the wrong way, but you see them once a year, maybe don’t burn the bridge.
How much you care – If it’s your best friend, you have a responsibility to call a spade a spade. An acquaintance might not need your direct feedback, and the shallower relationship might not weather the storm.
Identity proximity – If your feedback calls someone’s identity into question, you need a good reason to give it. You might begin by asking gentle questions to understand the situation better. “You seem to value professionalism on your team, but I notice you arrive late to meetings. What’s going on here?”
Long-term or temporary conditions – If your friend is exhausted and cranky, you might avoid giving them feedback, with the reasonable expectation that they will be in a better mood in the morning.
Your skill – If you don’t know how to give great feedback, study up on all of the above. Giving feedback at the right time and in the right way makes all the difference between destroying a relationship and strengthening it.
Enable feedback up and down
Psychological safety allows people to speak to power.
Dr Edmondson defines psychological safety as the collective belief that it is OK to take interpersonal risks on a team. Telling the boss they are wrong certainly falls in that category. Any worthwhile leader knows that getting that hard feedback is critical for their decisions and for the team’s success, though. The best way to develop psychological safety as a leader is to listen to feedback and take action on it. Even if you disagree with the feedback, do your best to take action on it in some way. For example, if you work hard to build consensus, and then someone tells you you did not consider their point of view, DON’T try to point out all of the times you actually did ask for their opinion. DO swallow your pride and ask what you could do differently next time to ensure they are heard, and then try it.
Don’t be lazy; great questions encourage great feedback.
It’s lazy to just ask people for feedback. That puts all of the burden for the outcome on them and forces them to figure out what you actually want. Instead, start with the type you want: tell me what you loved (appreciation), help me make it better (coaching), or tell me how I did (evaluation). Even better, put some thought into what you actually want to know. Asking what your COO thought about your cadence in your presentation is much better than just asking them to give you some feedback on it. Read this Harvard Business Review article for ways to create better feedback questions.
Feedback is the heart of quality communication
It can seem like feedback is a distinct skill, a nice-to-have. In reality, all quality communication requires quality feedback. The two skills are so intertwined that they can’t stand alone. Good feedback is inherently quality communication. Quality communication requires us to provide a closed loop – or feedback. Teams need to identify the key feedback skills that work in their culture and then expect everyone to use them.
