The Feedback Culture is Backwards

Ben Madley, 07 Jan 2023

Many companies have a feedback culture, where employees are encouraged to give each other feedback - normally ad-hoc and on request. Often, this results in a lot of positive feedback (I would still argue not enough). The other side is constructive feedback. Constructive feedback can be crucial to personal development, but many people feel like they don’t get enough. I think we’re looking at the problem backwards.

How to get more feedback

With constructive feedback, the feedback recipient gets more benefit than the feedback giver. The recipient has the feedback forever, while the giver only has the benefits of the feedback for as long as you work together. To add to this, the more distant the feedback giver is from the recipient, the less benefit they are likely to receive from giving feedback.

If you accept that the feedback receiver is the major beneficiary of feedback, then it’s up to you to make it easier to give you feedback. With that in mind what are you trying to overcome?

Feedback puts the feedback giver at risk

When someone is giving you constructive feedback for the first time, they’re not sure how you will respond.

People are nice

By and large, people want you to succeed. Even the people who think you might not be doing the best job don’t want to harm your career.

Feedback takes attention

Most people you work with, won’t be spending any of their day looking for ways for you to improve.

Feedback takes effort

You’re adding another task to someone’s todo list. A surprisingly time-consuming task.

How to make giving feedback easier

With that in mind, let’s look at how we can get more, better, constructive feedback. Long story short, you’re going to have to work for it.

Make your feedback requests easier to respond to

Make it as simple as possible for someone to give you feedback. To start, don’t make generic requests for feedback e.g.

• Let me know if you have any feedback on my talk.
• What did I do well? What did I do badly?

This is maximising the amount of work that the feedback giver has to do. This is the person who is doing you a favour. Instead, do as much work for them as possible. Ask specific questions about things that really matter to you

• I worked hard to get the pacing on the talk right for this audience. Do you think it was suitable?
• Over the past week, have you noticed anywhere I could have taken the initiative to offer better results for the client?

These questions are a lot easier for the feedback giver to handle. You might get simple “everything is fine” answers, but they’ll probably give you the answers as opposed to ignoring your request. And now that’s information about something that matters.

Don’t give people a “right” answer

Another improvement in how we ask for feedback, is making our questions neutral. Don’t make it obvious what the “correct” answer is. Instead of asking

• “Am I too nit-picky when we’re working together?” - “No, of course not!”

Why not ask

• “When we’re working together, would you rather I pointed out mistakes earlier, or let them play out so we can see what happens?”

When it’s less clear what the answer that will make us happy is, we’re more likely to be given the real answer. You can help this further by making it clear that you know that you’re asking for a personal preference.

Ask for advice

A Harvard Business School study found that asking for “feedback” is one of our main problems. Their research suggested the word “feedback” didn’t prompt “critical and actionable” responses. Instead they suggest you ask for “advice” (or particularly ask for constructive feedback). This prompts people to think about what you could do differently in the future and not focus on the past.

Ask in advance

Pick someone who will be in your meeting, your talk, or your team and let them know you’re looking for feedback and the focus. Then give them the time to watch and take notes. In no other area of our work would we expect our colleagues to work purely from memory with no preparation. Why do we decide that feedback is the exception?

Have a discussion

If you’re lucky enough to have a mentor, peer or other colleague whose opinion you trust, ask them for a sit down chat to do feedback. This allows for more nuanced feedback.

Take notes throughout the conversation and share them with the feedback giver after the meeting to confirm you took away the right points.

Respond well to the first time you get feedback

For each person, you only get one chance to receive constructive feedback for the first time. The feedback giver has put themselves out there. Thank them. Immediately if possible. After a short silence if required. If you don’t encourage the feedback giver at this point, you will never get constructive feedback from them again.

So what now?

These are some ideas to help you get more constructive feedback, but what I mainly want you to take away is that it’s up to you. You can increase the amount of feedback you get, but you need to be the one making it easier.