Whats Wrong With That

March 19, 2023 - 2 minutes read - 363 words

What’s Wrong With That

This week, I participated with members of my management cohort in a retrospective of a training course we took on sharing feedback. What struck me the most about our discussion was how we took the idea of giving feedback from a one-way communication to one that is more… human.

Giving someone feedback can be tricky. Receiving it can be too. Putting thought into how someone else may feel, and how best to prepare to have a meaningful conversation is at least as important as what you’ve got to say.

Why go to all that trouble and effort? Why not just drop the feedback and move on? Isn’t it their responsiblity to take it and act on it?

Well that was the cool part of our conversation. The more we talked about what it’s like to give and get feedback, the more we focused how important it is to approach the feedback interaction as a conversation with a teammate. We landed on the idea that the best feedback conversation is one where we work together to identify and solve a challenge.

That’s probably going to take more than one conversation, because you as the one delivering feedback has a few distinct advantages over the one receiving it.

There is very often a difference in real or perceived power between the one providing feedback and the one receiving it
The one giving feedback has been thinking about it for awhile, but it’s a complete surprise to the one receiving it

So the whole process will look like:

Prep for the conversation
Prep the other person for the conversation
Give them time to process the conversation (soak time)
Follow up a few days later to move the conversation forward

Sounds Woke

It is. Treating each other as human beings takes some thought and effort, but isn’t it worth it to work with people who respect each other and show some grace?

We were all affected by how changing our perspective from having feedback be potentially confrontational where we assume we know what’s going on, to being collaborative and human. It was a pretty cool thing to take part in and watch happen.