One of the most valuable tools we have to grow, develop, and improve is feedback. But I’m willing to bet that you don’t really give people feedback and you don’t really receive it. And when I say that, I don’t mean that you don’t think you’re giving feedback or that other people don’t feel like they’re giving you feedback. I mean we’re doing it wrong. Often what we think is feedback turns out to be instruction, judgment, or advice—and none of that is feedback.
The Importance of Feedback
Feedback is something very special. It’s information about how one person’s behavior affects another person, and it’s so rare. Feedback is super important because it helps us build our self-awareness. And while many people claim to be self-aware, research shows that only about 10 to 15% of us truly understand how our behavior affects others. We need that information about our impact, and that’s why real, helpful feedback—focused on our impact rather than our intentions—is so important.
The Components of Helpful Feedback
So, what are the components of helpful feedback? Essentially, feedback involves:
- Talking about that person’s behavior,
- Explaining how that behavior affected you, and then (ideally),
- Including a question to open up the conversation so that you can understand how they experienced it.
In great feedback, we’re actually sharing our truths with each other.
What Does Helpful Feedback Look Like?
For example, when you share that someone’s behavior had a particular effect on you, you are sharing your truth—not the truth. You might say, “When you put six text slides in a row in your presentation, I found myself looking out the window and losing focus.” This doesn’t necessarily mean their presentation was bad. It just means you didn’t like their text-based style.
By handing them your truth about how their text-heavy style lost your attention, you open a space for dialogue. When you end your feedback with a question, like “How did you think about the structure of your presentation?” or “How could you make things more engaging?” you’fe giving the piece of feedback to the other person and letting them share their truth with you. Maybe they’ll say, “I was playing with images, but I wanted to get through this section quickly to have more time for the next section,” or “I was so focused on the content that I didn’t think about how it would be received.”
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This sharing of truths is incredibly helpful. Helpful feedback helps people understand the impact of their behavior on us, which is important because, as I said earlier, most of us aren’t very self-aware. One of the best things we can do is to share openly and honestly the impact of someone’s behavior on us, or to ask about the impact of our behavior on someone else.
When we get that feedback, that information, that truth about the impact of our behavior, we’re able to make much better decisions in the future. In the next post, we’ll look at some things that people commonly mistake for feedback.
