Is giving feedback really useful?
A high performing team feels safe enough to give one another candid feedback and does so frequently. But creating an environment that encourages this is a big challenge. There are lots of frameworks and methods to give feedback (I won’t cover that here) but if you want to dig deeper, take a look at
- Radical Candor by Kim Scott
- Non Violent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg
- or The 5 dysfunctions of a team by Patric Lencioni
All 3 books cover feedback and in different ways and if your team is struggling to be open with one another, the 5 dysfunctions of a team can be a real breakthrough.
One of the big upsides to encouraging more feedback between peers is it stops some of the political lobbying that goes on in an organization. For instance, if Tony doesn’t like Sarah, and they work together, and every time they have an issue, they both complain to their manager, they both miss out on the direct feedback that might actually improve their performance. These actions suck up time from a manager and the information is usually skewed. The ideal scenario is both Sarah and Tony address their concerns head-on with one another in a constructive way, without aggression.
If you can get peers to give feedback to each other, you encourage them to resolve problems on their own. It’s not easy to do, but even if you increase feedback 10% between a few staff, the time savings are big and the performance and morale upsides are massive.
A trick that might help
Half the battle is just turning the process of giving feedback from a negative to a positive. Obviously what makes people want to give each other feedback is seeing positive results. But this technique can help push things along.
To assist, one thing I tried over the last couple of years was to use a feedback grid, and they look like this. To make one, just write up everyone’s name in the team along the top, and along the side. The pink boxes you don’t need because Sara doesn’t need to give Sara feedback, obviously.
I put the grid on a wall and mentioned to everyone we were going to start tracking how often everyone gives feedback to someone else on the team. The more feedback — the better. That was the goal.
- The goal for everyone, each month, was to give at least 1 piece of constructive feedback to another member of the team. We don’t need to know what it is, but you have to chat with them - In person.
- The feedback should be simple, meaningful and actionable, (so not things like ‘you suck at design’, but instead, things like ‘I’ve noticed you keep forgetting to allow enough whitespace in your figma files.’)
Then, each time someone gives someone constructive feedback, they go up on the board and mark off the space with an X. After a few weeks, It ends up looking like this.
You can see really quickly who is reluctant to give feedback, and it can help you get to the heart of why with them when you talk next.
You’re obviously not going to capture everything, but the idea is to change behavior, and it does have a way of making feedback a bit more front of mind. If you make a big song and dance about ticking it off, people will catch on. It’s less goofy than it sounds too.
What I found is it became a bit of a positive (and competitive) game. And not in the lame ‘Let’s turn this into a game’ kind of way. When we tried it, we would encourage others to give feedback when they had lots of white space on the board. Myself, 2 designers, and another product manager gave it go to start with, then one of the team leaders in customer experience saw it and tried it with his team as well. This is something that is cheap to implement, easy to do and has a net positive effect pretty quick.
Any other tips?
So each month, we would just tear it off the wall, print out a new one, and start all over. In truth, if we had a whiteboard in the office, we probably would have done it on there. Doing it weekly might be a bit overkill. Monthly was a good rhythm for us.
After a while, we started continuously marking off the boxes, instead of doing it once then moving on. So ours ended up looking like this.
So you can see in the above example, Tony is really the one who’s embracing this. Now it could be an indication that Tony is really enthusiastic about the exercise, really loves giving feedback, or is the most dominant voice in the group, but what you want to see is balance on the grid. It doesn’t really matter what it shows, but the outcome is that the team feel safe enough to give each other constructive feedback, leading to continuous improvement.
