How to give potentially impactful feedbacks

Have you ever received feedback at work that has completely impacted your career?

Yes, I do. I’ve also received feedback about having impacted people’s journeys through the feedback I’ve given. I write this post to share some tips on how we can make these experiences more recurrent.

Feedback?

According to the definitions of Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries,  feedback can be defined as advice, criticism, or information about how good or useful something or someone’s work is. 

There are several types of feedback in the work environment, in this article, I’ll only talk about the main and most used:

• Positive feedback: positive information
• Constructive feedback: points that the person can improve

What to remember when giving feedback to a person?

1. Pay attention to the way you communicate

A few years ago, I participated in a workshop about feedback at work, where such a pyramid was explained. I didn’t really understand where that information came from, but this content never left my mind and completely changed the way I communicate with people at work. Sometime later, while researching the topic, I discovered that this pyramid is actually related to the logical levels of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming).

• Identity: (Who?) Who a person is. 
• Values ​​and Beliefs: (Why?) What is the purpose of the person acting how she does
• Characteristics: (How?) What are the abilities that a person has? How she does what she does? 
• Behavior: (What?) What happened in a situation. 
• Environment: (Where? When?) What is the context that involves a situation?

When we communicate with someone, we may be “accessing” different levels of this pyramid. When giving feedback, we can refer to work situations and behaviors and our perceptions of them, or we can try to say what the characteristics and even the identity of a person are. See these examples:

Avoid talking about the identity of a person! The most recommended levels to talk about in the feedback moment are “environment” and “behavior”. It’s possible to talk about “characteristics” in the feedback, but you have to be careful.

“Values ​​and Beliefs” and “Identity” are areas that should be avoided when giving feedback. We don’t have the power to say who people are, the value of right and wrong for them, or what they know how to do. I try to avoid communicating with this language!

Avoid phrases like:

• You are… (or You aren’t)
• You know… (or You don’t know)
• You should… (or You shouldn’t)

Normally, in the feedback moment, we talk about the specific situations related to the job, like a meeting, a communication, coding… and it is very complicated to define a person by a situation (or a lot of them). Remember that it’s just work and we are talking with a person who has a career, dreams, family, and a lot of other areas in her life. The best approach is to communicate about behavior (example 4 in Image 4). Sometimes I talk about capabilities in the feedback meeting, but it’s just possible with a lot of examples (behaviors) that build a perception.  

The example below happened to me. I just said to a person: “You are a very organized person” and the person answered me, “You say this because you can’t see my room.” So I perceived at the moment that I was trying to define a characteristic of a person (or her identity) by a very specific situation.

Focus on environment and behavior

What happened, where, when, and your opinion on it. Good examples:

• During the pairing, you said the sentence… I think the way you expressed yourself was a little pushy.
• In our team meeting, I noticed that you spoke several times without respecting the “raised hands” feature in zoom.
• I consider you a reference within the area in which you work.

2. Feedback is also a reward

The moment to share feedback is a moment to recognize the good things that the person has been doing very well. Many times we just remember feedback like a hard moment, to share difficult situations, and to give constructive feedback. But remember how important it is to tell about the good things, even if it seems to be obvious. 

For example, a person is well known for her ability to do talks in public. Everybody says good things about this person and her ability, and this person probably already received positive feedback about his characteristics.  Even so, tell the person that. 

Verbalize positive feedback! It never hurts to hear good feedback.

3. Feedback is about different perspectives

When I think of feedback at work, the image that comes to my mind is exactly the image I tried to represent in the drawing below: me in a room full of people, like a party or the hall of a corporate event. Each person in that environment sees me from a different angle, and I see each person from a distinct perspective.

The closest people can give more specific and intimate feedback, such as “you have leftover food in your teeth”. People who are a little further away are not able to give such specific and deep feedback, but they can give insights into my posture and tone of voice, for example. Most people in the environment view me from afar, and probably the most they can share feedback is a shallow perception of me. However, there are more people seeing me from afar than up close, and collecting feedback from these people helps to understand what the collective perception of me is like.

Likewise, at work, it is essential that we collect and give feedback to people who are at different distances from us so that we know (and share) not only specific feedback but also potentially collective perceptions about a person’s work.

Don’t restrict feedback to just people who work on the same team as you or just people you’ve worked on a pairing with! Each interaction gives us the opportunity to gather insights into our work.