Feedback is so valuable because it’s the one thing we can’t get on our own. We can’t know how our behavior affected someone else; we can only know what we intended. When someone is willing to tell us how our behavior landed with them, it’s absolutely amazing. Unfortunately, most of us are pretty darn bad at this, and we tend to pass judgment, give instructions, or share advice instead. None of that is feedback. Let’s talk about how to deliver great feedback.
Delivering Positive Feedback
I’m going to start with giving positive feedback because it’s a much better place to practice. If you practice with delivering negative feedback and you get it wrong, you might get an angry person coming back at you. If you deliver positive feedback and do a bit of a kludgy job, everything’s going to be fine.
Step 1: Orient The Person
The first step in giving great feedback is to orient the person to the specific situation you’re discussing. It’s likely you’ve been thinking about a positive interaction you’ve had with them, but they might not have. Start with something simple like, “In our team’s call this morning…” to orient them to the context of what you’re talking about.
Step 2: Don’t Judge!
The second step is one of the most important and probably the hardest, and the one most of us get wrong. We tend to only want to give someone feedback when we’re judging them. In this case, we’re judging them because they did something that we think is amazing, but judging is not very helpful. So we want to translate. That’s the second step: translate from the judgment we’re making to the behavior that made us feel that way.
For example, instead of saying, “You were really helpful at our team meeting,” which is a judgment, focus on the behavior: “You added a lot of notes during the presentation.”
Step 3: Expose How Their Behavior Impacted You
The third step is to expose how the person’s behavior impacted you, because this is what’s new and what they won’t be able to see without you telling them. You might say, for example, “I felt really stupid during that presentation, with all the acronyms I couldn’t understand, and your notes in chat helped me keep up. I felt so much better.” That’s the effect their behavior had on you.
Step 4: Invite Them to Share Their Truth
The fourth and final step is to invite the person to share their truth with you. What you’ve given them is your truth. “I thought that your comments in chat were really helpful.” Someone else may not have liked it at all, but you liked it.
Now you have a chance to hand it over to them, to give them a chance to work with your feedback. So you might say, “How did you become so knowledgeable about this?” or, “What else could you teach me to make sure I’m up to speed on this topic?”
When we ask that question at the end, we pass the baton of feedback to the other person so that they can internalize it and work with it. It’s a really good way to come full circle with feedback, and in some cases it’s a really important place for them to then share their truth, to make the feedback a dialogue instead of just your monologue.
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Getting positive feedback that gives us more insight into how our choices have affected other people is precious, but it’s so rare because we don’t know the mechanics of how to do it well. Remember, you’re trying to tell someone that their behavior had a certain impact on you. Start by orienting them to the situation, then translate your judgment to their behavior, expose your reaction and the impact of that behavior, and finally invite them into a discussion about their truth on the matter.
Giving positive feedback is the easy part, though. In the next post, we’ll look at the much more uncomfortable task of delivering “great” negative feedback.
Feedback Series
How to Accept Positive Feedback