Cultivating a Culture of Feedback

Feedback. The word alone is anxiety inducing enough for many people let alone being responsible for providing it or, more daunting, on the receiving end of it. We’ve all been there where we struggle to give feedback, or we’ve been on the receiving end of feedback that has been provided less than gracefully, and how many times have we ourselves been resistant or defensive or just downright shut down or have seen this in those we’re attempting to give feedback to?

It can come in all forms. A message on Teams or Slack, a comment from a manager in the moment, a bullet point in a 1-1. Depending on the person providing it it can range from so softly delivered that a person may not actually realize its feedback to so harsh that it's a wonder what the person's pain threshold is for tolerance because clearly they must find joy in inflicting pain.

Feedback is often seen as a ‘necessary evil’ from all sides and is often delivered with less than stellar capability or can even be filled with assumptions or accusations and not provided with growth intent. Poor and weak leaders can deliver feedback with malice and well intended leaders will often shy away from feedback or be too soft in their delivery as a means to protect those they serve. Neither of which actually support a healthy dynamic or growth of the person or outcomes.

This doesn’t have to be the case! Feedback can be integrated into the day to day as an authentic means of support and growth. When integrated properly, feedback becomes not only a positive thing but will also start to happen automatically. Suddenly the opportunity for growth and what you and your teams are capable of becomes something with ease, and it is a beautiful thing! This requires cultivating a culture of feedback within your team and/or your organization.

Culture of feedback

For teams that successfully integrate feedback into their day to day, there is quite a bit that happens to support this. No one magic thing will create the conditions where feedback happens or that creates the safety to do so. Leaders have the greatest responsibility to be mindful of their contribution to the dynamic around feedback, to recognize (and honor) the humanity at play within their teams, to create a community within your teams and to advocate and champion for this work relentlessly. It can be easy to give up as you stumble, and you will absolutely stumble, but there are ways that you can intentionally work to support the path forward

‘Flawed 5’ - things you can do to support a culture of feedback

1 - Model taking feedback

Creating any sort of intention or element of change begins and ends with the personal responsibility of leadership. Creating the conditions where feedback can happen requires a safe space. Creating a safe space starts with you being vulnerable. You must first model receiving feedback, and doing so in a way that shows the positive benefits and how it can all support growth. When you make receiving feedback visible to your teams, you can show them that it doesn’t have to be this scary thing. You can show them what resilience looks like, how to take feedback and channel it into growth.

This can happen in quite a few ways. Anytime you receive feedback from your leader or others around you, you can amplify that feedback to your teams. You can share an update with them about the feedback you received, validate its merit, and connect the way in which you plan to take that feedback forward in your own growth path. It can also be really helpful here to give your team a call to action to provide accountability to you directly regarding the feedback you received. It's always easier to give feedback than to receive feedback and this can be a helpful way to get the muscle memory for a culture of feedback started.

Another call to action to model receiving feedback would be to invite feedback directly from your team to you. At first this might require you ‘calling yourself out’ so to speak where you self-identify opportunities that could merit your team giving you feedback. By you modeling and speaking up, your team can both begin to recognize opportunities that warrant feedback and start to get familiar and comfortable with feedback happening around them.

2 - Celebrate people speaking up, even if their communication is rough

As your team starts to speak up and highlight opportunities and start to share feedback, there is a high likelihood that the way that they provide feedback is going to potentially be rough around the edges. Something that holds people back is comfort of course, but it is also that they don’t really have the means to provide feedback. Oftentimes this means that people wait, and wait too long, to a point where their level of frustration outweighs their discomfort around sharing.

This early feedback can be and feel very emotionally charged, so as a leader your responsibility is to model the grace with which you expect all feedback to be received and to praise the act of sharing itself. Even if the way the feedback is provided is terrible, the point at this stage is to reinforce the act of sharing to grow that instinct and behavior and make it more comfortable. You can work on and refine what the approach looks like in the future, but you’ll not have the opportunity to do that if people are not sharing. It is like the chicken and the egg, but in this case you have to have communication happening before you can refine how it's happening. You’ll never make any traction if you require this work to happen in a specific format from the start.

3 - Define an approach to feedback

While you don’t want to expect a specific way for feedback to happen as your teams are getting comfortable sharing, you will want a framework and structure for feedback. This can help those struggling to share (which to point 2 will still likely be rough). Basically what we’re talking about here is to create some sort of model that you can use in part or in full.

The number one mistake people make when giving feedback, and it's often well intended, is that they go directly from giving their observation to telling the person what they can or should do about it. The critical miss here is that the person doesn’t then have the opportunity to respond to provide what could be much needed perspective until you’ve already told them all the things they need to do. This can create real problems and shut down the flow.

The best approach to any model will start with an observation that is based on objective observations regarding the subject of the feedback, and then you will STOP. You must must must stop and allow the person to respond. This will provide the opportunity for them to confirm that you’re both understanding what you’re talking about, and they can provide any context or information that your observation may not have. From there you can clarify and work forward but the other person has to have the opportunity to respond early on.

Feedback is not a one directional process and to happen in a healthy way requires a partnership.

4 - Put intention into how communication happens

To further help the deliverability and receiving of feedback, beyond a model to provide feedback it is really important to be mindful of communication assumptions. These include packaging feedback in a way that might assume ill intent, or might disproportionately assign blame or contribution. These communication assumptions can be communication killers and must be filtered out.

The difference between ‘You didn’t finish the project, don’t you care?’ and ‘I wanted to check-in on the project, it was due Friday and it looks like there is work to be done’ is night and day. You can kill any capability right out of the gate if these communication assumptions are in play. A good rule of thumb is to turn the tables and imagine you were receiving the feedback. If you feel yourself feeling some kind of way it's best to regroup on it. You can be clear but you don’t need to be a dick!

5 - Integrate feedback into everything and make it a non negotiable expectation

Even with a safe space, and a model, and intention with your approach, there is still a lot of work to create a culture of feedback. It takes a lot of effort and consistently. You will need to utilize all types of opportunities to integrate feedback to make it automatic and threaded into your day to day. Make sure feedback is happening in all its forms and all mediums where any other communication is happening. Feedback should be integrated into your day to day, into meetings, into 1-1s, and should happen written and verbally. Anywhere and anyway that you communicate needs to support feedback.

Feedback can be this amazing way to support growth. It will not be easy. It will take effort. There will be people that really struggle with it. It IS possible, though, to cultivate a culture of feedback with the right intention and approach.