Feedback is a really important developmental dialogue, but it’s not the only developmental dialogue. Let’s think about what feedback is and how it compares to other options we have, and when would we use each of these different options, depending on the situation.
When to Give Feedback
Feedback is giving somebody new information about the impact of their behavior on you. You want to focus on feedback in situations where the choices they made, they might have had options. There’s no right or wrong answer, but you just want to let them know that the choice they made didn’t work for you.
You may say, “You chose to use a table to present all those data. And for me, I couldn’t focus, I kind of zoned out. And I would love to have seen that in a graph, or in a picture.” Because it’s subjective, it’s not right or wrong to use a table versus a graph.
Or you might say that, “When you asked that question at the end of the meeting, I loved that. I thought that was exactly where we need to go.” That’s your perspective. Somebody else might’ve been thinking, “Come on, no more questions, let’s get out of here.”
Feedback is really perfect when you want someone to understand the impact of their behavior on you, but it’s subjective. They might get different answers from different people.
When Not to Give Feedback
A lot of times what we need is not to give somebody feedback at all. When it’s not about the impact of their behavior on you. Here are some scenarios where you might want to take a different approach.
Feedback Alternative One: Give Instruction
We don’t need to give feedback for something that’s a process. We don’t need to go to the effort of giving feedback when it’s something objective. Instruction is just simply saying, “The date in this column needs to go in the format of month, day, year.” You don’t have to give it as, “This was the impact on me when you put year, month, day.”
Instruction is perfectly viable. But don’t give instructions in a situation where there are options. That overstates what you know.
Feedback Alternative Two: Give Advice
Another thing we can do is we can give advice. Advice is encouraging someone to do something based on your past experience.
You might say, “When I have that much information to convey, I find it’s good to send something in advance with all the data tables, and then in the room I share it as a visual.” It might’ve worked for you before. It’s a situation where you’re saying, “I don’t have all the information and I’m not saying you have to do it this way, it’s not an instruction, but I want you to consider this.”
Great advice is teaching them what you’ve done before and what works.
Feedback Alternative Three: Coach The Other Person
The final option is instead of any of those, you could coach the person. Coaching is using open-ended questions to help the person understand what they’re trying to accomplish and give them new ways of thinking about accomplishing it.
You might say, “Okay, when you were thinking about presenting those data, what do you want the audience to take away from this presentation?” And then when they answer that question, say, “So how might you present the data in a way that’s going to lead them to that conclusion? That’s going to highlight that takeaway.
Coaching doesn’t tell them what to do, but it teaches them how to think, and that’s really valuable.
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These are four excellent options for development dialogues:
- We can give somebody feedback where we give them more insight about how their choices affect other people.
- We can give them instruction, which is simply to take them straight to the right or wrong way of doing something.
- We can give them advice, which takes our past experience and offers it up to them.
- We can coach them to get them thinking differently about the problem and achieving their own objectives by paying attention to new things and having some new insights.
Don’t Resort to Judgment
The only one you want to avoid at all costs is judgment.
Judgment where you act as if you own the truth in something is really subjective, and that’s never a good idea. Positive judgment, just in the form of praise like, “Wow, you’re awesome!” is not bad, but it’s not very effective. Negative judgment is where you act as if they’re doing something wrong when it’s only a subjective thing like, “That presentation sucked.” That’s never a good thing.
Feedback Series
Passing on feedback to someone else