Week Six Discussion: Giving and Receiving Feedback

I currently work for a big corporate entity, and one thing that’s a constant is feedback. We get feedback on our work through reviews and approval processes. Feedback on our performance through weekly check-ins, quarterly updates and annual reviews tied to merit and bonus plans. And we get feedback on the actual business outcomes of what we’re doing. Over the years I’ve come to realize an important distinction, which has greatly impacted my wellbeing. That feedback is not something which is happening to me. It’s happening for me. It sounds so simple, but for me it’s been a very powerful reframing. It has helped me adopt more of a growth mindset, and to not see feedback as criticism, whatever its form, and it’s enabled me to just not take things so personally.

Over the years it hasn’t always been like this of course. Feedback can feel personal, and there are times of course where people are just being jerks. No-one likes to be told they’re doing a bad job, and I have a particular aversion to the ‘feedback sandwich’ as an attempt to soften what you really need to say. I prefer the more direct approach, as it gives you a more concrete place to move forward, but it also just gets out what needs to be said. This will vary by person, and I don’t mean it as a means of removing empathy, but I do believe there is a truthfulness and honesty in someone just constructively telling you what they think.

A few years ago, I had to put someone on a performance improvement plan, and take more rigorous action around their performance. As part of this process, they got a lot of feedback from me. But I told them that the PiP was not onboarding for being fired. That this was happening for them, not to them. And that we needed to have a serious course correction, and what happened next was down to them. These kinds of corporate processes can be terrifying, and they are inherently stressful for those receiving and delivering them, because you just don’t know what’s going to happen. In my experience, people go one of two ways. They either collapse and just resign themselves to getting fired. Or they treat it as a wake-up call and do everything they can to turn things around. What’s important here is the setting of crisp, simple, actionable expectations. It’s being able to articulate ‘this is what needs to happen’. It could be around communication, style and tone of working with others, how they work, when they work and more. It also really helps to say ‘by when’. So it’s ‘this is what we need and this is when we’re going to do it’. And then do everything you can to get the person there.

In my current role I am required to give others a lot of feedback. For the most part it’s something I enjoy, although at times it can be exhausting when it gets repetitive. But its rewarding to give someone feedback, have them act on it, and see them grow. Recently my team has gotten a lot of feedback about data literacy. Understanding the numbers behind what the ship each day. And having a quantitative confidence in knowing what’s happening out there in the real world with our millions of users. A lot of this work can be intimidating, especially when feedback comes in from our executive team, and there’s often a sense of making the feedback into a personal reflection of one’s worth at work. But we hold team workshops, give feedback regularly throughout the day on Slack, and talk about it in our weekly 1:1s. What’s been key here is signaling that it is OK not to know the answer. Do your homework so you are prepared, but if you don’t know, say that you’ll go and find out.

In terms of effective feedback, I’ve found it helpful to try and be ‘in’ the problem with the other person. To signal that the feedback is happening because you both want the same thing. And to be clear about expectations and what happens next. To use repetition and to ask ‘does that make sense?’ to make sure the other person understands what I’m saying. I try to tailor this to the individual of course. Some folks on our team prefer the direct approach, others want it more nuanced and couched in softer ways. When needing to deliver more serious feedback, very often I’ve told the person ‘no-one is mad at you, but this situation is something we need to come out of’. Reframing what’s happening around what needs to happen next, and away from what’s happened is something I’ve found effective. It’s like Rocky Balboa says, ‘it’s not what happens when you get hit, it’s how fast you can keep moving’.

Over the past four years at Penn, I’ve received a lot of feedback. Grading isn’t something I’ve had in my life since the 1990s, and there’s always that quantitative pressure to keep the numbers up in Canvas. Very often the feedback has been incredibly patient and constructive, and it’s in these spaces where growth and learning has really happened for me. Understanding where I might have improved, and why someone is saying this. In many ways the grading process, and how it shapes what happens next is where the real eduction happens, even if it might not feel like that in the moment. Even these reflections are a form of self-feedback. And building more muscles around giving oneself unprompted reflection builds in a helpful autonomy for what’s next. But it also motivates a rigor. Am I being truly honest with myself? How might this actually be better? What else could I be doing to improve things?

 


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Week Six: Resource Reflection