👏 Feedback

Types of Feedback

Criticism

Critical feedback is designed to help someone understand their areas for improvement. It is not about hurting people or making them feel bad. When done well, critical feedback will help you become your best self by highlighting the growth opportunities in front of you.

Critical feedback should almost never be delivered in a group setting. Criticizing someone in front of others may make them defensive and less likely to actually hear the feedback in the first place. The other people in the group also may not have the context necessary to understand the feedback, which may give them the wrong impression or cause them to incorrectly act upon the information themselves.

Learning to receive critical feedback is a difficult skill, but once you learn it you will start to seek it out. It's one of the fastest ways to level up when you are learning.

Praise

The arguably more important type of feedback is positive reinforcement or praise. This is where you help someone understand the things they are doing well in an effort to get them to continue doing so.

Unlike critical feedback, you should almost always praise in public or group settings. It's a great feeling when you are recognized in front of your peers or manager for doing exceptional work. The desire to recreate that feeling will help drive you to continue the behavior that lead to the praise in the first place. Further, by praising in public you are setting a high bar for everyone else in the group to aspire toward.

Receiving Feedback

How to receive feedback:

To help you receive feedback well, we have a few helpful tips that you can apply:

• Try not to react. Training yourself to not react when you receive feedback will help you actually internalize what you're hearing. Your default reactions will either be to dismiss the feedback or to accept it. Suppressing these default reactions will give you time to reflect and actually hear what the person is saying.
• Ask clarifying questions. Focus on making sure that understand the feedback being given to you. Don't be afraid to ask clarifying questions to ensure that you're following what the person is saying. For example, knowing you did a good job during your Show & Tell presentation is nice, but you'll never be able to do it again if you don't know why it was good.
• Write it down afterward. To help ensure that you remember the feedback in the future, write it down somewhere you can look back on it in the future. Consider keeping a retrospective file for each of your major responsibilities or projects that you look back on before starting a new initiative. Our brains sometimes play tricks on us, having the feedback in writing is a good way to ensure you also don't misremember it.
• Ask for the feedback. In the same way that you need to shift your default mindset to receive feedback well, you may need to help your colleagues shift their mindset so it's okay to give you feedback. The best way to do this is to ask them what you did well and what you could have improved after each major project you do together.

Giving Feeback

How to give feedback:

To help you give feedback well, we have a few helpful tips that you can apply:

• Be timely. Try to give feedback immediately, don't wait around until it festers or becomes stale. All of us know how frustrating it can be to receive feedback that you could have acted upon sooner if you had just known.
• Be specific. By focusing on the specific action or issue, you're helping to disconnect the feedback from the person receiving it. You're also removing any ambiguity from the equation.
• Use "I" statements. You're the world's leading expert on yourself. Sharing feedback from your own perspective helps to ensure that it is factually accurate and contextualized.
• Provide a suggestion. If the feedback is critical, you should try to pair it with a suggested action that the person can take to improve in the future. There's nothing more frustrating than receiving feedback that you don't know how to address.