Feedback That Lands

Summary

In 2023 I reworked the feedback training I use with my teams and made it open source. It starts from one principle: feedback is about what you do and does not define who you are. Receiving it well means listening, saying thank you, and deciding later. Giving it well means caring personally and challenging directly, with clear ground rules, a simple structure, concrete examples, and regular practice.

Open training material

In 2023 I set out to work further on my own feedback and reflection skills. That meant spending more time with my teams at Vorwerk Home, supporting and mentoring them, and role-modelling what a healthy feedback culture looks like. I reworked the training material that had served me well for several years and made it open source.

The slides are at feedback.niklausgerber.com. To change or extend the material, use the complete repository at github.com/niklausgerber/feedback. This article is the written version of that material.

“Feedback is your relationship with the world and the world’s relationship with you; it’s how you impact others, for better or worse. So it’s all around you—the question is just whether you’re paying attention to it.” Sheila Heen, Harvard Law School lecturer, co-leader of Harvard’s Negotiation Project, and co-founder of Triad Consulting Group

A guiding principle

Skilled people make feedback a positive experience. Everyone leaves feeling valued, even when the input is challenging. Feedback is about what you do. It does not define who you are.

Feedback is a gift

When you pick a gift for your spouse or your best friend, you think about what is right, pick it, wrap it, and write a thoughtful card. You care about the person, so you put in the effort. Feedback deserves the same. A comment thrown over your shoulder as you leave a meeting will not help the other person grow.

Why receiving feedback is hard

Our brains are sensitive to feedback because of negativity bias: negative experiences have a bigger psychological impact on us than positive experiences of the same size. However often you hear good things about your work, the one time it went wrong sticks. The good parts need more effort to reinforce.

“Receiving feedback does not mean I am the worst person ever. It only means someone cares enough to tell me how to improve.” Joseph Folkman, The Power of Feedback

Receiving it well

I wrote about receiving feedback in depth in Feedback at Five Levels. Here is the short version. When people hear critical feedback, they tend to move through five stages.

1. Discard. “This has nothing to do with me.”
2. Defend. “No, that’s not how it was.”
3. Explain. “Yes, but…”
4. Understand. You listen and accept.
5. Change, reinforce, or remain. You process the feedback and make a conscious choice.

Five steps get you to the fourth stage and through the fifth.

1. Respond, do not react. Unless you are a surgeon or a bomb defuser, feedback is rarely so critical that you need to act on it in the moment. Listen, ask for real-world examples, and thank the person, even if you did not like what they said. Thanking is not agreeing. It recognises that they cared enough to speak up, and it buys you time.
2. Consider its value and context. Feedback is only one facet of who you are, and it can be inaccurate or biased. Did you ask for it? Who gave it, and how do they relate to your work? Is it about how you do something, or about how you are? Being told you need to be different is not particularly helpful.
3. Corroborate and challenge. Ask trusted colleagues, sponsors, mentors, and peers whether they recognise the behaviour. Then you are not changing on the strength of one person’s view.
4. Turn it into a goal. Decide what will change, the steps along the way, who can support you, and how you will measure and celebrate progress. Without a plan, a goal is only an idea.
5. Return to the source. Unless the feedback turned out to be poor or biased, tell the person who gave it what you made of it, even if you decided not to act on it. They learn their input was considered and are more likely to give feedback again.

“We can’t just sit back and wait for feedback to be offered, particularly when we’re in a leadership role. If we want feedback to take root in the culture, we need to ask for it explicitly.” Ed Batista, coach and lecturer

Care personally, challenge directly

For giving feedback, I start from Kim Scott’s Radical Candor. Her model asks two questions: do you care personally, and do you challenge directly? The answers give four quadrants.

• Obnoxious aggression. You challenge directly but do not show that you care. It is brutal honesty: praise that does not feel sincere, or criticism delivered unkindly.
• Ruinous empathy. You care personally but do not challenge directly, to spare someone’s feelings in the short term. Praise is too vague to help, criticism is sugar-coated, or there is silence. It feels safe, and it does damage.
• Manipulative insincerity. You do neither. It is flattery to someone’s face and harsh criticism behind their back, often a self-protective reaction to obnoxious aggression. It is the worst kind of feedback failure.
• Radical Candor. You care personally and challenge directly.

Most of us were told as children that if we have nothing nice to say, we should say nothing at all. Then we become the boss, and saying the difficult thing is suddenly the job. Challenging people is often the best way to show you care. It does not make your view the truth. It means sharing your humble opinion directly.

Ground rules

• Speak from the “I”. Say “When this happens, I feel…”. Nobody can argue with what you feel. “You caused this” places blame and can sound judgemental or aggressive. And you cannot speak for others in the team, because you cannot know what they feel.
• Do not tell people how to fix it. Ask questions that make them reflect, and coach them to explore and experiment. They learn more that way.
• Put the stinky fish on the table. The stinky fish is the thing you carry around and do not like to talk about. The longer you hide it, the stinkier it gets. Once it is on the table, colleagues relate to each other, share more easily, and find what to learn.
• Drop positive and negative. It is feedback. It should be critical in its thinking, not in its tone, and add value to your colleague’s work or to your working relationship. Give a healthy mix.
• Be concrete and actionable. Give a specific example of the behaviour or the moment instead of “you always do this”, and make sure it is something they can change. If they are open to it, give it soon, before the message blurs.
• Pick the time and ask permission. Not everyone likes surprises. Ask whether the person would like feedback, and think about timing and place. They may be having a bad day, and it is fine for them to say no; follow up another time. Choose a quiet moment, not one when they are in a hurry or preoccupied, and give them time to absorb it.
• Concentrate on behaviour. We cannot always control our feelings, but we control our behaviour. Feedback on behaviour stops judging the person. Only people can change themselves, and feedback lets you work on it together.
• Do not trigger anxiety. Some people get anxious when you offer feedback. Do not write “Can I give you some feedback?” in Slack and then leave them hanging for two days, even when the feedback is positive.

Tone of voice

Four habits keep the tone right.

1. Make neutral observations, kept apart from interpretation and evaluation.
2. Express feelings, kept apart from reasons and interpretation.
3. Express needs, the deeper motives behind them.
4. Make requests that are clear, concrete, and feasible, without an explicit or implicit demand.

Structure it with E.A.R.N.

E.A.R.N. is a simple way to frame feedback. It keeps the observation on behaviour and away from the personality.

1. Event. What was the situation?
2. Action. What behaviour did you observe?
3. Result. What was the impact or consequence?
4. Next steps. Which behaviours should continue, and which should change?

Put together, it sounds like this.

• Event. “During yesterday’s remote team meeting…”
• Action. “You were texting on your phone throughout…”
• Result. “When we have time set aside for meetings, it’s important that you’re present and focused. By being on your phone, you are neither…”
• Next steps. “How would you feel about leaving your phone at your desk during meetings, or only answering it in an emergency?”

Tips for delivering it

• Personalise the relationship. Learn up front how each teammate prefers to give and receive feedback. You can even ask them to write a user manual on their values, tendencies, and preferred ways of working.
• Skip the sandwich. Do not sneak criticism between two slices of praise. Give feedback often instead.
• Deliver it privately. Do not embarrass people in front of their peers.
• Allow breathing room, but not too much. If a colleague is upset about their own performance, wait a few hours or a day. Do not wait more than 24 hours, because the details start to fade.
• Give critical feedback in the morning. Not necessarily first thing, but sooner rather than later. When we are worn out, our self-regulation drops, and we are more likely to deny that negative feedback is valid.
• Do not lecture. Feedback belongs in a welcoming, two-way conversation. The Science of Delivering Tough Messages recommends a 50–50 split between questions and statements.
• Offer constructive praise too. Studies found that high-performing teams receive nearly six times more positive feedback than less effective teams.

Examples

Some of these lines are worth copying. Others show what to avoid.

• Describe the behaviour, not the person. “I feel like you’re not listening to me when you finish my sentences for me. You did that a few times when we were talking about the project plan. I’d prefer to finish what I’m saying before you add your points.”
• Do not judge or label. “You are autocratic”, “You are inflexible”, and even “You are creative” are labels. Look at what the person is doing or saying instead, and leave their character and motives alone.
• Focus on performance outcomes. “It’s frustrating for me to lose valuable time with you: if you arrive late, we can’t discuss everything we aimed for. We need to get this right, because the team needs a good decision from us.”
• Do not try to change others. Avoid lines like this one: “This is precisely what caused the trouble last time. If you could work early shifts, we could meet at 7 am, and this would be solved.”
• Speak plainly and clearly. “The whole team needs to understand the impact of wide-screen on our future development plans. I’ve noticed that you haven’t kept your team up to date on this. So you should include wide-screen updates in all your team meetings.”
• Avoid being vague. A line like “Well, it’s pretty obvious what’s going wrong here” tells the other person nothing.
• Say that you would like to give feedback. “Can I talk to you about the start of our meeting today? Would you like to hear some feedback and my ideas? I’d like us to get more out of our meetings. Can we talk about how we can achieve more?”

Keep practising

Feedback is a muscle

Feedback gets easier the more you practise it, and the more comfort and trust a team has. It works like exercise: do it regularly and you build the muscle, and you may start to crave more.

A healthy team gives feedback easily, building trust, transparency, and each other. Give feedback broadly and often, and be open to receiving it the same way.

Walk the talk

How you react to feedback is as important as your openness to it. If you do not act on what your team offers, they will stop offering it. What you do with feedback says a lot about your potential.

The feedback you choose not to give is as important as the feedback you give.

“Every day, leave at least one thing unsaid.”

A group exercise

The training ends by putting the guiding principle into practice. Each person writes a sticky note for every other member of the group, with two sentences to complete.

Dear [name]. One thing I appreciate most about you is […]. One thing I would like to see more of is […].

1. Write. Everyone has five minutes. Address each note, complete both sentences using the principles above, and sign it. My tip: keep it short.
2. Share. When everyone is done, people deliver their feedback one by one, out loud, and hand each note to the person it is for.
3. Thank. The person receiving each note says: “Thank you for your feedback.”

References

1. Radical Candor. Our approach.
2. Quartz. How to take critical feedback.
3. Shopify UX. There’s no “I” in feedback.
4. Hyper Island Toolbox. Feedback: I appreciate…
5. Willcocks, T. Giving and receiving feedback in teams. Medium.