Leadership Lab #33 | How to Give Feedback People Want to Hear
Using feedback to empower better people, teams, and relationships.
I’m going to guess a deep dark secret of yours.
You struggle with giving and receiving feedback.
Even if it’s not true for you, it’s a safe bet for most. I’m constantly surprised by how many leaders find it challenging to give candid feedback. Even when you know that feedback is a game-changer, differentiator, and needle mover, you still struggle to give it.
Many of us withhold feedback, allowing tension to go unaddressed and robbing our people of growth-inducing conversations. The result: ineffective teams and underdeveloped people.
Why is feedback so hard? What can you do to make giving and receiving it easier and more effective? How can you speak challenging things such that the relationship is better for it, rather than worse?
Feedback is hard because we think about it wrong. In this essay, I’ll explore how you can create a new paradigm around feedback that allows giver, receiver, and the relationship to be better off for it.
What is Feedback?
What do we mean when we say “feedback”? A quick google search yields a useful definition:
Information about reactions to a product, a person's performance of a task, etc. which is used as a basis for improvement.
This is a strong foundation. A few tweaks and we’ve got a powerful working definition for leadership:
Feedback = Sharing information about our perception or experience of a person, group of people, or their behavior with the goal of helping them achieve a desired outcome.
There are a few keystone elements of this definition that are worth digging into. As you come to understand and embody each, you’ll find that feedback is easier to give—and easier for those you give it to to receive and use it effectively.
Feedback is Perception
Let’s get this out of the way right now: your feedback is just your opinion.
Many leaders struggle with whether their feedback is “right” or not. The unconscious image they hold is that of the feedback-god, purveying feedback as objective fact and requiring others to make a change in line with their opinion.
This model of feedback is misguided.
Any feedback that strays beyond the purely objective—“there is an objective target and you objectively did not hit it”—is perception. It’s opinion. That includes if you start to dig into why somebody may have missed those targets.
Once you’re beyond the realm of 1observable, measurable, concrete fact, it’s all perception and opinion. It’s your story about what might be holding someone back or unlock their potential. This story might hold useful information for them, but it is by no means the final say on the matter.
Feedback is Given with the Purpose of Helping
The goal of giving effective feedback is always the same: to help someone achieve a better outcome. This means increasing the quality of the outcome or the likelihood of success.
It’s important that this outcome is something that they care about or are aligned with. If the outcome is something that only you care about (and not them), you need to either create alignment or realize that what you have is not feedback, but a request.
Desired outcomes can include:
A personal goal
An outcome that their team or organization, and therefore them by proxy, are trying to achieve
A relationship dynamic that they want—with you, a manager, peer, or significant other.
This also means that effective feedback is not given from a place of ego or the need for control or to be right. It is given to help them achieve a goal of theirs.
Feedback is Reinforcing or Aimed at Change
In attempting to help someone better achieve an outcome, feedback takes one of two flavors:
Feedback as Positive Reinforcement: This style of feedback points out something you perceive to be helping achieve an objective. The goal is to encourage it to continue or increase over time.
Feedback as Catalyst for Change: This style of feedback points out something you perceive to be hampering their ability to achieve an objective. The goal is to make it stop or lessen. This might also include a behavior they are not doing which you think would be helpful. In this case the goal is to introduce something new.
This further specifies the goal of feedback: you want to help by either encouraging something you perceive as positive to continue or increase, something you perceive as negative to stop or lessen, or something you perceive as missing to start.
How to Give Feedback
Embracing the reality of what feedback is radically changes the context within which feedback is given. Below are six contexts which, when put together, create a powerful container for giving feedback.
Invite them Into it
One reliable way to reduce the effectiveness of feedback is give it when someone isn’t ready to receive it.
You only have to have done this once and have it backfire to know what I mean: you can feel the immediate defensiveness, see the hurt in their eyes. These are the external signals of being blind-sided.
If you want to be effective with feedback, practice inviting people into it, always. That can be as simple as “I have some feedback for you. Open to it?”
To be even more advanced, ask someone how they want it, especially for feedback aimed at change. One way to do this is to ask how direct they want the feedback to be: “You want it straight or more soft?” or “You want a fastball or a softball?”.
Slowing down to ask these two questions adds very little time to the process, but allows someone to ready themselves to receive feedback. And feedback is dramatically more effective when the receiver is ready for it.
Tie it to an Objective that they care about
The most important thing about tying feedback to an external objective is that it depersonalizes the feedback.
Leaders who are sensitive to how their words impact others often struggle to give feedback. They have a story that honest feedback might hurt the receiver. This assumes that the feedback is personal—that it’s saying something is wrong with them as a human, and is therefore pushing them down rather than calling them up.
When you make feedback about an external outcome, you depersonalize it. Instead of “the way you do this is bad”, feedback becomes:
“I notice that when you do “A”, it makes me feel “B”, which is negatively impacting my ability to show up with you…”
“I notice when you do X, Y generally happens, which I believe is hampering your/the team’s ability to achieve its desired objective.”
This feedback is less about the person and more about how the way they’re showing up impacts their or the team’s ability to achieve it’s desired outcome.
Communicate Feedback as Perception
Feedback is perception. Communicating it as such sets the stage for a productive conversation. That includes prefacing it with things like “My story about this behavior is…” or “my experience of you is…”.
This clearly communicates that this is your perception, which opens the doorway for the receiver to provide their own input. This allows the two of you to create a shared reality by which to improve from.
Make Feedback a Discussion
For feedback to be truly effective, be prepared to spend time discussing what to do about it.
The people that you give feedback to live in complex systems: teams and organizations. Their behaviors and reactions don’t exist in isolation. As a result, the person shouldn’t be expected to solve it in isolation.
Be prepared for a conversation about how you or the organization are contributing to their positive or negative behaviors. Be prepared to receive feedback around your feedback, and use all of the information provided (by you and them) to help everyone be more effective.
Feedback as discussion supercharges the feedback process. It allows you to understand feedback loops: the positive things that you or the org do that spread more positivity, and the negative things that create more negativity. When you stick around to discuss feedback, you can get to the root cause of behavior. If you can get there, you can create more of the positive and root out the more of the negative.
Give Feedback from a Place of REAL Support
There are two ditches that you can fall into while driving down the feedback road:
Being overly callous. This looks like giving feedback so bluntly that it isn’t actually supportive of the person because they aren’t able to receive it .
Being so careful and padding the feedback so much that the person can’t receive it because the message is unclear.
Allow me a brief detour…
As a leader, it’s your job to support and challenge your people. By supporting your people when they’re struggling and challenging them to be better when opportunities arise, your team is put into a positive feedback loop of improvement.
When was the last time you experienced a real depth of challenge and support in an organization? It’s rare because it’s almost always out of balance. People either feel so challenged that they can’t function, or so “supported” that they can’t actually discern how to be better.
Why? Many leaders confuse support and challenge with making someone feel challenged or making someone feel supported. These aren’t the same thing. To challenge is different than to make someone feel challenged. To support is different than to make someone feel supported.
The feeling may happen in tandem with the action. But it’s possible to make someone feel supported without truly supporting them and make someone feel challenged without truly challenging them.
Real challenge doesn’t trigger, because then you’ve just triggered someone, not challenged them. For a challenge to challenge, it must be received, considered, and worked with.
The definition of challenge is to invite into competition—the etymology of which is to aim or seek at together. So to challenge someone is to invite them to aim or seek at something together. If the person isn’t receiving that invitation and going there with you, you’re just triggering them.
Real support is to support someone on their journey to their highest self, not just making them feel supported. It’s a calling to authenticity, vision, potential, and joy. It’s not just about feeling good.
The definition of support is to promote the interests or cause of. Real support is promoting the interest or cause of their highest interest—even if that means saying something that might be hard to swallow.
To truly support and challenge, you need a container, be it a culture or relationship, that creates support and challenge in balance, at a 10/10. You must be willing and able to support someone’s deepest wants and desires while challenging the hell out of what is in the way of that. You must be willing to risk being hurt or saying something that temporarily hurts them in the name of true support and challenge. And you must be invested in them, not you — you can’t be attached to ego, rightness, certainty, or your stories.
If you wish to effectively support or challenge, you must be willing and committed to doing both. Challenge without support is merely attack or triggering. Support without challenge is false positivity.
To give feedback from this place is to give it from a place of opportunity. Opportunity for the other to achieve their highest potential and achieve the ends which they deeply desire.
So drop in. Plug into someone’s potential and deep desires when you give feedback. From this place of true support, there’s one last thing to do:
Give Feedback Directly
Feedback should be direct. It should should say what it means to say, even when that feels difficult.
To be fully supportive, you need to be willing to go wherever is required of you. What often gets in the way of this is, once again, a fear of hurting or disempowering the other person. As a coach, I’ve come to find that if you’re truly operating in someone’s best interest and dropped into full support of them, the risk of this becomes trivial. You’d be amazed what you can say to someone if they are clear that you are genuinely saying it with their best interest in mind. Almost nothing is off limits.
On the other hand, it’s amazing what you can’t say if someone believes it’s being said with intent to undermine or attack. This often shows its place in relationships that have soured—if a relationship is broken down and malintent is assumed, even a compliment can’t be received for fear of it going awry.
So once you’re dropped into that place of support: just say the thing. Don’t overly pad it (unless they requested it). Say it so that it can be heard, and if there is some hurt or defensiveness, stick around to clean it up.
In Summary
Notice that all of the contexts compliment each other. As you stack them together, feedback becomes multiplicatively more powerful. To master the art of giving feedback:
Invite them into it, including how blunt or compassionately they would like it to be given
Tie it to an objective that the receiver cares about
Make it clear that this is your opinion, intended as data for them to process and decide what to do with
Stick around to discuss and collaboratively problem solve how to move forward
Give feedback from a place of support for that person’s highest self and highest objectives
From that place, give feedback directly. Say what needs to be said. Make sure that the point is communicated and received
When these contexts combine, magic happens: Feedback becomes a gift.
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Objective, measurable, and concrete means that it is what a tape recorder would have captured. It’s what everyone would agree on if you watched the tape. “You made your voice louder” or “you pointed at me” are objective. You were mean, is not. There’s still value, and your perception is still true “I perceived that you were mean.” But we get to differentiate between the two.