Who never felt frustrated when cooperating in a team, or after submitting a significant piece of work, for not receiving or exchanging feedback?
Having timely-triggered, constructive, collaborative, and action-oriented feedback sessions as well as knowing how to receive feedback is not self-evident but can be learned. Moreover, social- and cognitive science has demonstrated that positive feedback loops have a strong positive impact on individual and team performance.
Therefore, there are the keys to establishing effective feedbacks that improve team cooperation and experience
Feedback has the purpose of learning and continuous improvement process. It can be used in different situations to praise, coach, or evaluate. Researchers from Standford University in California showed that a critical success factor for feedback effectiveness is that it should be timely and frequent.
In the best case, feedback should be provided within 24 hours after the targeted observation to be fresh in everyone's memory. It makes the discussion more specific, concrete, and impactful. Frequent feedback also drives better results for two reasons: similar to timeliness, they focus on the purpose but also generate a habit of sharing feedback, providing a secure and positive context for everyone.
Feedback is not about providing a judgment but inviting for a productive discussion. It provides team members with an opportunity to generate a constructive and objective dialogue by getting rid of individual bias through the exchange of multiple perspectives on how to improve.
Feedback should not aim at keeping everyone in their comfort zone but to create a context of confidence and safety to generate productive discussions.
Quote: “When you did [...], it made me feel [...].
In the future, I would recommend that you do [...]"
McKinsey, a consulting company, has developed a model to provide structured and effective feedback. According to the model, feedback should be:
Too often, a feedbacks are pictured as an uni-directional process. That should not be the case. Feedback are forward-oriented (some people use the term “feedforward”) interaction that binds both, the giver and the taker, to improve future outputs. Without collaboration, alignment, and psychological reciprocity, the feedback will be lost (i.e. not taken into account) and the virtuous cycle that has been initiated will be broken: no more feedback will be exchanged.
Sharing feedback means working together to find solutions for a given situation.
Normally, getting feedback triggers emotions and acceptance issues. However, being emotional about feedback prevents one from benefiting from it and from the positive outcomes that it can generate.
Introspection is a challenging exercise for everyone in the first place. Subjectivity and personal bias act as cognitive barriers from the outside, especially when discussing matters that are related to us. Receiving feedback is not a straightforward exercise but needs to be heard, understood, and accepted.
Behavioral scientists have identified three triggers that condition our reaction to feedback: truth trigger (feedbacks provide you with a new indication about how the world sees you), relationship triggers (how the context of my relationship with the other person influences my perception of the feedback) and identify triggers (how the feedback confronts with my values and what is dear to me).
Acknowledging these reaction triggers is a critical step to accepting feedback and therefore maximizing their benefits for individuals, teams, and fine organizations.
Asking for an opinion while having a strong pre-defined fixed idea of what to do is not a best practice. Feedback is not meant to provide confirmation or validation. On the opposite, outcomes might be open. Therefore, it is important to steer but not try to force the conversation.
As mentioned earlier, providing a recommendation is critical to engage the discussion (short or long) and generate a concrete outcome. Asking closed questions and deep-diving on a specific topic also helps to maintain a focused discussion.