one sign your feedback culture is strong
If you can give good feedback in very few words, it’s likely that your feedback culture is strong. Concision is an indicator of strength.
I’m defining “good” feedback here as feedback that:
Improves the performance of the recipient
Reflects the values of the team / organization
Fortifies (even super incrementally) the relationship between giver and recipient
I’ve written here before about leaders and colleagues who could steer me, after lots of reps between us, with terse emails or head nods. The single word “this” or an arched eyebrow were enough to meet the three criteria above.
By contrast, I’ve been on teams where nearly any delivery of feedback takes a ton of words, arrives through a clunky, standardized process, and issues from some complicated emotional labor.
Excellent news is that you and your team can start in that slow, expensive, and rather tortured place and arrive in a cheap, concise, and rhythmic place. Getting from A to B usually requires a leader modeling both sides of the feedback exchange and insisting on others following the model. The insistence is most legible (and obeyed) when it takes the form of feedback, especially praise.
In other words: ya gotta tell people you expect them to give the feedback, then give them feedback on doing so. You can also be the one who gives permission for the feedback to be short, fast, and raw.
-eric
