Are you about to share feedback with one of your peers? Great! Here is a short guide that may help you out.
Did your peer ask you for feedback? If not, make sure you ask them for permission before you start giving feedback. This will create more psychological safety around the activity of giving and receiving feedback and should yield better results. The receiver should be the one that chooses the time and place (within certain constraints, e.g. a week).
Is your feedback touching upon a particular situation? What were the facts that you experienced/observed? Distill facts and decouple them from your judgments or perceptions (e.g. “I think you did a lousy job with this project” (judgment) vs. “Your project was not delivered on time”).What behavior(s) did you observe and how did they make you feel (what was the impact)? Again, try to reflect the reality. For example, “You behaved in an unprofessional way” vs. “When you said ... next to our customer, I felt ... (own your feelingsthat were triggered by the situation)”.What are your judgments / interpretations of what happened? Think through and challenge yourself on the assumptions you’re making. Beware, assumptions about others' intentions are rarely true. Build awareness around your self-talk.Decouple intentions from impact. Once you know the impact and the assumptions of other’s intentions, perform a mental exercise to decouple the two. We often think that we “know” someone did this to “embarrass us” / “spoil the relationship” vs. someone indeed “made me feel embarrassed” but he / she “most probably didn’t intend to”. People rarely have bad intentions. Good practice is to treat/see others as we treat/see ourselves (does anybody tend to think of oneself as “not trustworthy” or “malicious”? But we tend to think this of others).It is good to note down everything that you discover while doing this exercise and bring it to the feedback conversation.
It’s rather rare that we have difficult/unpleasant situations that are fully caused by one person (potentially the feedback receiver). Therefore, it is important to approach this conversation as a learning experience and instead of accusing and blaming, together discover the contribution system.
Discover:
- How the receiver contributed and what they can do differently next time
- How you contributed to this situation and what you can do differently nexttime
- How other factors (systems surrounding you) contributed to the situation and what can be changed
- Depending on how personal the conversation is, it might be a good idea to engage another, neutral person, who may help out with keeping you on track (in Holacracy system, you may even create a role for this!).Bring your notes and discoveries about the situation/feelings/behaviors/intentions. Use them to build a meaningful feedback session. You can approach all the above however way you wish; here is one suggested sequence:
.1Moderator: Open the conversation by reminding everyone what it is about (for example, if there is a clear difference about a certain situation, you may open it with ‘The following event happened. Both of you were engaged in this situation and both of you have your own understanding of it, which is normal. Now, let’s open our minds and try to learn more about it.) Goal: clarity on the situation this feedback conversation refers to.
.2Person A (initiator/feedback giver): Share facts, impact (feelings) they had on you, your assumptions about other’s intentions. Person B is actively listening. Moderator makes sure facts are not judgments.
.3Person B (initial receiver): Receive the information by restating what the other person said (ensuring you understood). Share: facts (if any difference), your intentions and any impact you observed/felt.
.4The conversation may continue until both parties feel that there is a mutual understanding of facts, intentions and impact. Avoid: judgments, biases, accusations, victimizing and the like.
.5Build a contribution system together: invite both parties and the moderator (each with their observations) to look at the system described above. What/who else influenced this situation?
.6Write down the next-actions/habits/projects/checklists that may help in the future.
The above schema might be used for any type of feedback conversation, especially in a context more complex than just giving someone a friendly tip. When noticing a certain fact/behavior, we should ask ourselves “What I’m noticing, where does it live?” Role space? Organization space? Personal space? Mixed? It’s good to be aware of the space that you refer to. If you think it is in the role space, here are some questions you may ask yourself:
- Is there a direct relationship between the behavior/facts that you observed and a role?-
- Which role? Which accountability? Can you actually expect it of this role or is it a more implicit expectation?
- Do you expect the receiver to take action on the basis of your feedback? Any specific action?
- Do you have any tips or suggestions for the receiver?
Two roles:
- Research (accountability: Seeking understanding of the client context and passing on relevant findings to the Service Developer role)
- Service Developer (accountability: Developing better service for clients)
Research role has been producing a lot of reports that indicated some potential improvements and information relevant to the Service Developer role. Service Developer didn’t use any of the reports to improve the service because they found them too long and lacked time to go through them. During one of the meetings, Service Developer unexpectedly said “You know, I never used any of the documents your role produced”. A few days after hearing this, Research role initiated a conversation to learn more about this situation and see how to improve the relationship between the roles.Learnings after the feedback conversation (after discovering the contribution system):
- Contributor & Learning 1: Service Developer should have been more open and make this remark earlier. Next time, they will raise concerns sooner after noticing them.
- Contributor & Learning 2: Service Developer (and possibly other relevant roles that receive written/spoken information) will stipulate the format that they find useful so that Research role (and other relevant roles) can serve the information in most useful way for the receiver (baked in as a Policy).
- Contributor & Learning 3: Research role discovered that they could ask for feedback about the form earlier to make sure the reports generate value for the receiver.
- Contributor & Learning 4: During the conversation, Service Developer also admitted to that they had too many roles allocated to them. This meant that they were too busy to reflect on their work. They will open a new project: 'Contribution and value of my roles reassessed and communicated to the Lead Link’.
- Contributor & Learning 5: The system itself. There were many things happening in the private life of the person filling the Service Developer role that influenced their wellbeing.