How Effective is Your Feedback?
Sometimes, providing that difficult or embarrassing piece of feedback to a coworker is hard to do. That’s where nicecritic.com comes in, “the anonymous way to send a helpful message.”
The gist of the site is this: let’s say a coworker of yours needs some generic feedback. Perhaps their breath is befouling your personal space, you don’t like their tie, or they are taking credit for others’ work. You can use nicecritic.com to send an anonymous email, providing that person with the feedback (for example, “You sometimes dominate meetings; please let others participate more” or “There’s a significant stain on your blouse/shirt”).
Anna C sent us this hilarious link, along with this commentary: ”We had a big office discussion about this. [Our] consensus- this counts as ‘challenge.’ Additionally, we decided to replace our 360′s [performance-review process] with this. (joking…)” I have to agree with Anna–this site seems like it may cause more harm than good in cultures that are trying to foster healthy relationships between employees.
This actually got me thinking about what “good” feedback looks like. What are its characteristics? What are best practices to deliver good feedback?
In the Science of Success, Mr. Koch says that “effective leaders provide frequent and honest feedback that identifies opportunities for improvement in a way that stimulates dialog and change.” Additionally, the Guiding Principles should always guide our behavior in an MBM organization, and Humility and Respect seems especially pertinent. So let’s use this as a rule-of-thumb standard for “effective feedback”:
- frequent;
- honest;
- identify opportunities to improve;
- stimulate a dialogue;
- lead to a change in behavior;
- approached with humility; and
- respectful.
If that’s the standard, what best practices are out there? I know from personal experience that there are many practices to avoid using if the goal is to help someone improve. Top on my list of personal feedback-screw-ups are not being specific, providing too strong of a message to where the person “shuts down,” and simply not providing feedback that someone needs to hear because I’m too afraid to hurt feelings.
The last one–simply deciding to not provide feedback because it’s the easy way out–is one I struggled with most until a friend of mine pointed out how feedback ties to respect. By not providing feedback to a coworker–she said–I’m enabling them to fail long term and I’m signaling “I don’t care enough about you to help.”
What best practices have you used or seen that were actually effective in helping someone improve?
- 6 Comments »
- Posted in Knowledge Processes, Principles
From my own limited career, I have found that it is very important to be clear and direct when giving feedback. This sounds very obvious but there have been many times when I have given people unclear or indirect feedback because I didn’t want to be confrontational or come off too strongly. Instead, we both left feeling good but there was no change in behavior and the conversation was basically a waste of time.
I’ve found it’s important to have relationship “capital” built up. In my experience, the most important, hardest and best feedback (i.e., behavior changing) has come from people who have demonstrated to me beforehand that they care about me. I guess it’s the difference between being poked by a needle and getting a shot of medicine. They both hurt, but one is productive and other just hurts.
Paul, i’m going to tag on something to the end of your comment:
“…basically a waste of time. And furthermore, made the followup feedback which addresses the lack of change in behavior more awkward than necessary.”
As an employEE, I proactively seek feedback from my mentors and supervisors. I find that they are more and more willing to tell me the difficult things (the things I REALLY need to know) when I prove to them through my actions (positive REactions to the hard-to-hear stuff) that I sincerely desire the true feedback and that I’m not just fishing for a compliment.
Ann, thanks for the link! I had been telling people I wanted to invent that site, but now I don’t have to.
My domain was going to be “badbreath.org”.
So, I am a few weeks behind on my MBM blog, but I still felt the need to post about this. When I originally sent in the link and we had our office discussion on this, we all realized that Nicecritic.com was probably not the way to go about providing feedback to coworkers. I agree with Andy that honest and direct is always the way to go, even though it may be harder than just clicking a link.
I also think that the guiding principle of respect plays a big factor into feedback as well. By sending an anonymous message to a coworker, you are sending very clear and strong signals about your level of respect for them. There might also be a bit of integrity at work here as well… but we can save that for another day (or another month because I am so bad at staying on top of things)
Which reminds me, did any of you send me an email from nicecritic.com about my tendency to fall behind? Just joking…
I’m prone to defend NiceCritic because I would have invented it if the stars were aligned. having said that:
Your comment about sending a very clear signal about your level of respect for someone does not account for anonymity. If the comment is anonymous, then the person being criticized can only say that someone out there doesn’t have enough respect for a face-to-face. It wouldn’t be tied to you.
I do agree that it’s inferior to honest and direct. So my only argument is that NiceCritic.com is better than NoCritic.com
@David McGinnis: For the point about whether it’s disrespectful if the person never knows the feedback came from you (or if they found out you withheld feedback from them): maybe it’s more of an Integrity issue at that point, as opposed to Respect. That is, if I ~know~ that giving feedback is imporant, and if I ~know~ that it’s respectful to help the other person grow, I should have the integrity to act on that knowledge by providing the feedback. My favorite definition of integrity is “doing the right thing even when no one else would know.”