seriously, don’t take feedback so seriously.
don’t take this guy too seriously, either. Midjourney prompt: laughing flamingo in business suit, romare bearden, orange and green
If you take feedback too seriously, bad things can happen. Things you don’t intend. The culture of feedback you want for your team becomes some phony opposite thing. A culture of hiding.
Here’s a dangerous pattern for good-hearted leaders:
A leader takes feedback too seriously. This leader thinks, in good faith, “If feedback has been given, it must be acted upon. If it is not acted upon, the message conveyed is that feedback is not taken seriously here and that I in particular cannot or do not take feedback well.”
If feedback has to be acted on, every instance of feedback is going to trigger change.
If we have change triggered off all the time, we have Descended Into Chaos.
So we need to limit the number of instances of feedback.
We probably also need to make sure people have lots of preparation and structure for delivering Good Feedback.
Let’s make feedback an annual or semi-annual process / structure / event.
Implications of the pattern:
Feedback that occurs outside of the annual or semi-annual process is aberrant. Someone is talking out of turn or someone is in big trouble.
Feedback should be anonymous most of the time, even as the default, to protect everyone’s feelings and to encourage the giver of the feedback, especially if feedback is given across lines of difference (race, gender, role, rank, etc etc).
In my experience, this pattern chokes the growth of the team. It takes what feedback wizard Kim Scott calls “Ruinous Empathy” to scale. (If you care about this stuff at all, def go read Radical Candor. If you’ve read it already, re-read). Feedback seems like a big deal instead of a daily gift.
Where I have seen this go best, where a true culture of feedback has taken root and given forth the blossoms of new confidence, improving performance, and deeper trust, feedback is a) kinda ordinary and b) not taken deadly seriously in every instance. Leaders solicit it often, almost to an annoying extent, and everyone gives it - but no one assumes that every instance of it results in direct change in the specific way they asked for.
On these kind of teams, I tend to see moves like:
Leader of a meeting opening a t-table google doc in the last 3 minutes of a regular meeting (like an all hands or a team weekly) and asking for keeps and tweaks on that week’s version of the meeting. Records them live so all can see. Uses as many of them as make sense for the next go round.
Plus-infinity circles with no more than ~30 mins of prep time. Team stands in two concentric circles - inner circle faces out; outer circle faces in. You and partner exchange a plus (keep doing x) and infinity (start doing y); one minute for each person. At end of two minutes, the circles rotate and you talk to a new partner. Repeat until everyone has gotten feedback from everyone else.
1:1 meetings with managers each week include mutual feedback exchange as a set agenda item.
Leaders publicly thanking teammates for having given them challenging feedback.
When feedback looks more like this and it shows up more often, the pressure is off. Instead of a serious intervention, it’s just part of how we do things around here. We show up, we pay attention, we give our teammates the gift of a perspective beyond their own. They make use of that gift for the good of the team and our mission. We appreciate each other for practicing this, for showing up for each other in this way.
-Eric
