The tells of good feedback
So, what makes a good feedback ? I know there are a lot of articles out there about this, but that doesn’t stop me from giving my two cents, so bear with me.
Weather you’re giving feedback or receiving feedback, I find there are some attributes that make some feedback’s better than others.
Actionable
The purpose of feedback is to help someone improve. If the person receiving the feedback has no idea what they can do to improve themselves, then the feedback is like a bald hedgehog (pointless). If you want meaningful feedback, then it should refer to specific actions the person can take to improve themselves, which leads me to the second point:
Concrete
You’ve all hear it: You are doing perfect, keep it up! (followed by a warm pat on the back). This is useless! First of all: I have no questions that you are an overall great person, but, whoever you are, there is no chance that you cannot improve! And second (and this is more to the point): What am I supposed to to with that information ?! Where do I go from here ?! Certainly there are some things that I am doing better than others and I would like to keep doing more of those. Feedback should focus on concrete facts. Even if you are a superstar and you are good at everything you do, there must be some aspects of your work you could be great at, so try to focus on those.
Short
This one may sound a bit off at first, but feedback should be short. You do not want a laundry list of items on your feedback. We are not good at multitasking (regardless of what you might think), so focusing on a lot of things is just not going to work. For feedback to be truly useful you should find a few points that you can improve upon. I would recommend 3 or 4 key points so you can focus on those. If you tend to get a lot of items on your feedback list, it’s probably a sign you should have feedback chats more often.
Measurable
This one is sort-of dependent on the type of feedback you are getting, so it might not apply in some cases. It feels good to know you are making progress, and it’s useful to know when you are not, so why not have that information available for you to judge. This is easy if the feedback is accompanied by some kind of metric.
And now for the fun bit! Here are some examples of feedback that can be improved upon (granted there are a bit extreme examples, but I trust you’ll get the point)
- “I liked your presentation! It was wonderful! You should do more presentations like that! ” versus “I liked your presentation! It was the graphics that I liked the most! They really help get the point accros! Keep doing those!”
- “That meeting went bad! The clients are not happy with us! We should change that on the next meeting!” versus “The meeting went bad! We went in there unprepared and we were not able to address their questions! On the next meeting we should make sure we fully understand the requirements before the next meeting.”
- “You have been missing your deadlines lately. You should focus more on being on time.” versus “You have been missing your deadlines lately! Can you think of anything that takes time necessary so you can remove those ? “