These notes were produced to accompany a Facebook Live video delivered by Tom Jones, Trainer at Wiser Academy. The original video can be viewed at www.facebook.com/wiseracedemy.co.uk.
Today we are going to be looking at feedback! This is key to keeping motivation levels high for yourself and your workforce. Feedback is a give-and-take process, but how and what we offer and gain impacts the efficiency of the feedback process and the productivity it can encourage. We will split this into two broad sections, the delivery of feedback and the reception of feedback. Effectively what you’re putting out there for others, and how you react and use what’s directed at you.
Delivering
Firstly we will look at delivering feedback. Well, isn’t that just a case of having an opinion and giving it? Yes, essentially, this is feedback at its most basic. Although, as you might expect, If you just let your mouth be a conduit for your brain, you’re going to run into a few problems (lots of people learn this at quite a young age).
So it’s important here to establish the reason we give feedback. Should we give feedback just to offload our opinion and be done with it, or can we use our feedback to help us achieve our goals? Can you ensure that the feedback you provide will result in your desired outcome? So if you want your feedback to provoke a response, you need to think about how those receiving the feedback will react. It’s this reaction that will shape what’s to come.
People don’t always want to hear negative opinions about themselves or the work they are producing. Suppose you structure your feedback badly, and it does seem like a scathing critique. In that case, you’re likely to leave the recipient demotivated and potentially provoke feelings like rejection, pessimism and even a defeatist attitude towards the situation.
In contrast, if your feedback is not critical at all and you feel there was an issue that needed to be resolved, you won’t have passed on your opinion, and therefore, you are unlikely to provoke any change. So how can you strike the right balance? We can help to give balanced and effective feedback by using the feedback structure to our advantage.
A well-used and effective way of doing this is to employ a method known as (amongst other things) the sandwiching technique. By layering your feedback, this technique can encourage positive and proactive responses while not missing the point of your feedback. It will also encourage you to deliver positive feedback, which is often harder than being solely critical and often overlooked. Remember, you don’t have to congratulate people on everything they’ve done.
But it might be worth dropping them a little bit of motivation somewhere along the line to keep them chipper, especially if you are going to say something critical or negative.
Sandwiching requires you to give positive feedback (something that went well or impressed you), followed by critical feedback (what you want to be done differently or what didn’t go so well), then another positive bit of feedback (how close to perfection they were, how easy it is to correct any errors, or just something nice).
Think about the impact you want to have and the changes you want to encourage. This will form the critical piece of feedback with which you hope to affect change. Then think about how you could potentially assist or offer advice with correcting or improving the situation.
For example: “Tom, you spoke well with a lot of confidence. I felt you could have given a better example of the technique you were trying to explain. If you had used a real-world example, it might have improved the overall quality. You summarised and sequenced the information made it easily understood.” So you’ve got three bits of information there, be careful not to use words like however or although, particularly before the critical element of your sandwich.
Using this technique will make it much easier to bring about the changes you want to see. It will encourage others to see your point of view and invest in your way of working without the risk of making them feel victimised or demotivated.
So that’s my advice on how you can improve how you give or deliver your feedback.
Receiving
This feedback area is almost the inverse of what we have already discussed. But in this case, we will assume that whoever has provided you feedback has not had the benefit of listening to the first half of this video. So they may well not have given you a lovely sandwich technique. And we will look at the types of things we can do as individuals to decipher and utilise the feedback we receive.
It’s important to understand the motivation behind someone’s feedback or why they gave the feedback in Lehman’s terms. Unfortunately, you may occasionally find yourself in a situation where someone is providing you with negative opinions about you or your work with no other intent than to impact your emotions negatively.
This is not feedback, this is called someone being horrible. However, people are usually motivated positively. Even if the feedback you receive seems negative or unhelpful, the intent is to get you to change or change the way you are doing something.
It would be foolish to write this off immediately because it could be that those changes are going to benefit you. Obviously, most people want to improve themselves as much as possible, which is a key route to doing so.
This is important to take this on board, it does not necessarily mean that you have to act in the way that is being suggested, but you should not discount it before considering its benefits. Try to look into your feedback and split the opinions from the facts.
It might be that the feedback you received is entirely opinion based, in which case you may want to establish some facts. For example, if somebody has told you that they think the way you have explained something is confusing, you may want to ask, which particular area has confused them, and why they found it confusing.
The chances are that if one person feels a certain way, many others might feel the same, and therefore you might improve the standard of your work by tailoring it to suit an individual’s needs. However, you may also want to consider who the individual you are receiving feedback from.
If you are receiving it from someone, you might expect to find this confusing, while others (your target audience) may find it straightforward. You might not want to tailor it to the extent you usually would. I’m not suggesting you ignore the advice but potentially dilute it slightly. You might want to reword it in a slightly less confusing and complex way that meets your target audience’s requirements.
If you have been given factual information in the feedback, for example, you’ve spelt this wrong; this will be worth you acting on as it will improve the quality of your work. You might find that you receive a combination of both. For example, the font colour is red, and lots of people hate red fonts. So from here, you need to separate the two pieces of information. Fact: the font is red. Opinion: lots of people hate red font. The fact here is important. Did you realise that the font colour was red? If not, you might want to change it. The opinion, however, is also important. You might not initially agree, but as we mentioned earlier, don’t dismiss it just yet.
Why not query this opinion with others? If you find a recurring theme of people hating red font, it will be a great move to get that colour changed ASAP. If you’d dismissed that opinion, you would not have reached that conclusion and could have produced a brilliant piece of work that nobody wants to read. This is the key to receiving feedback.
No feedback is bad feedback. You might not agree with it initially, or ever, but the time you take to consider it will help you to ensure that you establish any marginal gains you can make towards improving yourself or your work.
So those are my handy tips on how to deliver and not only receive but also gain from the feedback you receive. This is by no means a comprehensive guide. There are lots of other things to consider, like when best to seek out or give feedback or how best to source your feedback, among other things.