Why you need a feedback culture and how to get started

The thoughts for this article started quite a few years ago when I started realizing that companies tend to say they have a great feedback culture without actually practicing it. Here is an article outlining the reasons you need to get cracking on that culture and some tips on how to get started.

Feedback is the guide to improvement

Feedback is a word that holds a lot of meaning. Some people view it as an organization’s yearly review or randomly expressed opinions when you don’t like what someone is doing.

What I am referring to as feedback is a consensual conversation with constructive thoughts based on specific activities. Feedback given in this way is one of the most important ingredients in building constructive relationships and thriving teams.

It will help you:

• Learn more about your strengths and weaknesses. Feedback will teach you what your strengths are and what you should keep doing. It will also clarify what your less appealing sides are where you might want to improve.
• Find areas to focus your development. Reflecting on both positive and negative feedback can give you great directions for personal development.
• Get motivation. Yes getting feedback will get you motivated to keep performing or to do better.

In an organization it will help:

• Form stronger teams. Feedback can help clear up misunderstandings and issues. We all have different backgrounds and cultural norms, which means we don’t all experience every situation the same way. Talking about a problem and solving it rather than letting it fester will help a team work smoother. Just as important, if your team works better in a certain set-up, bringing that up in feedback might help you become more efficient as well.
• Create a common understanding. Being open about expectations and point of views will lead to a clearer understanding of goals and perspectives, making it easier to identify potential traps before they happen.
• Build trust. The honesty that comes from a feedback culture allows people to speak up if they don’t agree with something. If you don’t have this trust you’ll end up with a bunch of yes people just agreeing with everything, potentially leading to disastrous decisions.
• Develop employees. Feedback taken the right way will help all the individuals in your organization to develop and flourish, building new skills and improving on others.

Get over it — it’s easier to improve if you know what you’re bad at

To receive a positive feedback feels great. It makes you more self-confident and like you’re on the right track. But it doesn’t give you direction for improvement. It only tells us what we should keep doing.

Negative feedback on the other hand.

Yes it might hurt your feelings and make you feel demoralized, but this is where the power lays. Negative feedback is the true source of improvement. It provides us with the insights of what went wrong and highlights areas that can be changed and improved upon.

To receive and give feedback requires self reflection, humility and transparency. Don’t get me wrong, it’s easier to write than to practice. I still question myself after some negative feedback, but try to stay humble and don’t automatically assume you are more knowledgeable than the person in-front of you.

Negative feedback might be hard to take, but it can be a great map for self-improvement.

I remember the first time I had an issue with a boss after starting at a new company many years ago. I thought, perfect, we just need to be more open with each other. If she understands me and I understand her our team will become a well oiled machine. I was still young and naive then. After multiple attempts I realized the most important rule for feedback.

You need to be open to feedback for it to actually work!

The higher up in the hierarchy you are the more likely it is that you need to work harder to be open to improve. After all you feel like you’ve gotten there for a reason. You are great at what you are doing, so why should you listen to some new puppy out of Uni (this podcast from WorkLife about Bridgewater Associates brings up this point and is worth listening to).

Johari Window

I feel like Johari window is a good illustration for why feedback is important. The basic principles of it is that we have 4 different kinds of information about a person.

1. What you know about yourself and others know about you
2. What you know about yourself, but others don’t know
3. What you don’t know about yourself, but others know
4. What neither you or others know about you

The Johari window is a technique that helps people better understand their relationship with themselves and others.

What you want is to make the first window (point) as large as possible. The more of a shared understanding you have of who you are the less of a risk you’ll have for misunderstandings and issues.

A couple of years ago someone shared with me in a feedback session that I sometimes look angry and dithering when listening to ideas and suggestions. After getting it confirmed from other people I realized that I have a listening bitch-face.

Thanks to the feedback I could now make the first window larger. I acquired the same information about myself as everyone else and could act accordingly. Now when I work with new people, I tell them that I might look angry when I’m concentrating. This minimize the risk of issues based on this behavior of mine.

Of course sharing every personal detail about yourself might not be important or even good depending on different cultural backgrounds, but in my experience the better you understand each-other the better you’ll work together.

Get your feedback on

In general, the more you practice feedbacking, the easier it gets, and the more you get out of it. But there are a couple of rules I’ve picked up along that you should follow, for it to work.

• Have an open mindset — As mentioned above, you need to be open and willing to change. You need to go in with the mindset that you don’t know best(easier said than done).
• Don’t be defensive — Don’t respond to feedback you’re receiving with an explanation. That probably means that you aren’t receiving it. Just say OK! Reflect on it and if you don’t agree that’s OK.
  Once I was told that answering with an explanation was a cultural thing and that I should accept people responding in different ways. If you can think of what to reply, explain and reflect all while listening, you are a truly remarkable person.
• Listen —Related to the first point. Learn to listen. More often than not, when someone is talking, we tend to focus on what we will say next. Learn to ignore that. You don’t always have to seem smart by having an answer at the tip of your tongue.
• Be specific — Try to be specific when giving feedback. Behaviors you have observed and their results. Avoid judgment and generalization.
• Speak from your point of view — When giving feedback say it from your point of view. Explain what you see and feel. No-one can question your feelings, because they are yours.
• Be kind— Feedback can be brutal honesty, but that requires a very special culture. Feedback isn’t a weapon, it’s suppose to help both the receiver and the giver.

Feedback isn’t a weapon, you’re supposed to help each-other.

Tools to get started

I got a jump start into feedback culture when I studied at Hyper Island . Because of this I mainly use tools I learned there, but there are plenty of other ones if you just google a bit.

Create a common understanding

You might want to start by defining what helpful feedback means in your organization. This way you can ensure that everybody gets more out of the feedback sessions. This exercise from Hyper Island is a great way to get started.

I also tend to start every session I do with a question of what kind of feedback the person I’m talking to actually want to ensure that they’re open to the feedback they’re getting.

Start with yourself

One of the best ways to start working on a feedback culture in your company is to start with yourself. At my previous company I had two junior designers that constantly asked for feedback. But you can’t just say; do you have some feedback for me. That is way to vague. A better example would be:

What is one thing that I’m doing (or failing to do) that is getting in my way?

It is a question that automatically is assuming that there is something you can improve (and believe me there is), but it can also be shaped depending on the circumstances. Let’s say you are holding a development meeting every week. Ask a participant; What is one thing that I can change or improve to make this meeting more efficient?

A ‘go to’ feedback exercise

Start, stop, continue. I think most people that have done Agile development are familiar to this one to a certain degree. It’s quite common to do something similar in Retrospectives, but it works just as well in one on ones.

The basic idea of it is to tell the person you are talking to:

What I would like to see more from you is _______. I think you should stop _______. And I would love it, if you did more _______.

In the beginning it might be tough to do the stop one, since it could feel to confrontational. If that’s the case, start with the other to and build up to that one.

Before you start sharing, spend a couple of min to reflect on the feedback you want to give. I suggest writing it down on post-its. Not only to remember what you want to say, but that way you can give the feedback physically to the person as well.

And remember. Listen, don’t answer. Though you can always ask questions later.

An exercise for personal development

Hyper Island has another exercise named Personal SWOB Assessment. To me this is a great way to do some self-reflection and it’s also a great tool if you’re a manager to help your team develop.

Try one of the exercises above and start your journey to self-improvement.

Some nice links

• TEDx talk — How to use others’ feedback to learn and grow (video)
• WorkLife’s — How to love criticism (podcast)
• Hyper Island Toolbox (collection of exercises)
• Freakonomics — When Is a Negative a Positive? (podcast)

Final words

I didn’t mean for the article to get this long, but if you made it all the way down here I assume you at least got something out of it. So in the spirit of feedback let me know if there is anything you don’t agree with or that I could do better. Also if you have any other tips I’d love to hear about them.

Also wrote this article about the reasons why organizations seem to fail in creating a great feedback culture.