Most feedback is not actually that helpful, so here’s how to give useful feedback …
Some people like to give feedback; indeed, some almost can’t help themselves whenever they feel the urge.
And there are some who love receiving it, but only if it’s positive, while others can hear nine positives and dismiss them all, their thoughts fixating on that one critique among the bunch.
And still others just feel awkward, whether asked to give it, or expected to receive it.
We’re all different, and often how we feel about feedback depends on the situation, who we’re with, what’s going on in our lives at the time, and maybe a dozen other factors.
For example, I’m often asked by individual participants if I can give them some feedback after we’ve spent time in a workshop or a seminar.
When I first started consulting, I used to dread that kind of request. I mean, they were probably one of a whole bunch of new faces I met that day and for most of the time I was likely concentrating on running the session: making sense of the conversation; ensuring everyone got air time; wondering how to curtail a monologue; desperately trying return a heated debate to something like the original topic.
What could I add that’s genuinely going to be useful to them, other than “don’t ramble on so much”, or “speak up a bit more”? Even those two things say far more about what would have been useful to me on that day, rather than what might be useful for them in the future.
Feedback without context is invariably like that. Whether it’s asked for, or unsolicited, most feedback is really about what would be useful for the person giving it, not necessarily for the person receiving it. And sometimes it can be actively unhelpful.
I once had a coaching client who was trying to shift his leadership style from being “the driving force behind everything” to one that was much more based on inspiring and enabling others.
It turned out it had been something he’d started quietly working on a few years before in order to create some desperately needed work-life balance, but his boss at the time had given him some entirely well-intended feedback, along the lines of: “…the thing I most value about you is that you bring so much energy, you make things happen, you’re the one I’ll always turn to if something really needs driving through!”
He took that feedback to heart, refocused his development plan, and less than two years later, on the brink of burnout, he quit. He ended up taking a six-month sabbatical to recover and had only just stepped back into full-time work when he asked to speak to me.
Don’t get me wrong, good feedback can be very helpful, often enlightening, and sometimes invaluable in pointing out our blind spots – those things we’re completely unaware of but are obvious to everyone else.
But unless you understand someone’s context and what they actually want to achieve, your feedback is rarely going to be anything like as useful as you think. In my experience, I reckon about 70% of all feedback is of marginal value at best to the person receiving it.
Which is why is so important to understand how to give useful feedback.
These days I’m a lot more comfortable being asked for feedback because I’ve learned to respond. I ask about that context first: what their aims and ambitions are, how to they want to be seen and to come across, how they think they’re doing right now, and where they think they might need some more work.
Often, to my own surprise, once they’ve shed some light on those things, I find that I do actually have some thoughts and observations I can share based on what I saw.
But as often as not, what we find is that they can’t easily answer those questions. And the conversation that follows from there is invariably far, far more useful to them than any feedback I could ever give.
And that’s the key right there. If you want to learn how to give useful feedback, that learning begins by asking about the context of the person you’re going to give feedback to.
Now, have a think about those questions yourself – do you have answers for them? Are you sharing your context with people who can give you feedback? And are you asking for it before you offer them yours?