Lessons on Building a Feedback Culture — Anti-Patterns to Look Out For
And how to fix them
“You make decisions, take actions, affect the world, receive feedback from the world, incorporate it into yourself, then the updated ‘you’ makes more decisions, and so forth, ‘round and ‘round.” — Douglas Hofstadter
Feedback is uncomfortable, hard and not easy to give or receive. However it is an important attribute for both personal growth and high performing teams.
I’ve been fortunate enough to coach and be a part of building a culture of feedback and two different organisations. Whilst doing so and reflecting on my own experience I’ve come across six common barriers, or as I will call them — anti-patterns — that I see regularly which may be detracting you from building a healthy feedback culture.
Anti-pattern #1: Unsolicited advice
Probably the most common anti-pattern to feedback I see is giving advice rather than feedback.
Feedback is about perception, it’s about the event, what happened and how it made you feel — it’s not a solution. There’s a big difference between “It’ll be better if you didn’t talk so much next time” and “When you spoke over me it made me feel disempowered and like I didn’t have a voice”. The former is advice, the latter is what feedback should look like.
I believe it’s human nature, a natural response to want to give advice — we’re problem solvers by nature, we like to jump straight to a solution — how would I have done it differently? — the danger with this is that often the advice is unsolicited, comes across as poor feedback and is missing the crucial ‘why’ behind the advice.
Take the two examples I gave earlier, “It’ll be better if you didn’t talk so much next time” is some great advice but ‘why?’, why should I talk less next time, what was the reason — oh you felt disempowered ok, I’ll try and make sure you have an equal voice next time.
Quite often people will ask for feedback and also then follow up by asking for advice on how they might improve next time, and that’s fine — often it’s the ideal scenario but please don’t mistake unsolicited advice as feedback.
Anti-pattern #2: Only giving negative feedback
Studies have shown that high performing teams share six times more positive feedback than average teams. Giving positive feedback has been shown to also increase employee engagement and morale.
In many cases, giving regular positive feedback has in fact been shown to be more impactful than giving regular constructive or negative feedback. We often think of feedback as something to help someone to improve, but that also goes for the things that they are already doing great at as well.
This doesn’t mean there is an absence of constructive feedback rather in high performing teams they not only share the constructive stuff but also give recognition and positive feedback — often more than constructive.
The same study showed that the lowest performing teams were sharing twice as much negative feedback as the standard team.
Often I see companies or teams where they only give constructive feedback, often this starts to build a negative connotation around feedback. The more feedback becomes associated negatively the more stress and anxiety individuals start to feel around giving and receiving feedback. In extreme cases, this perpetuates to the point where psychological safety is no longer there and people start to dread anything to do with feedback.
Rather there is a balance to be had — a balance of positive and constructive feedback. A trick I try to do when giving feedback is to always give at least one positive and one constructive. By no means do I try to balance them I just strive for the feedback to have a good mix of both sides of the fence.
This is not your “bad news sandwich” style — that’s a terrible way to give feedback — I don’t try to butter things up — often I may lead with the constructive feedback and then go positive and possible back to constructive — it varies and depends on what feedback I have to give. It’s also not always possible to give one on each side of true fence and again that’s ok but it’s something I challenge myself to do as often as possible.
Anti-pattern #3: Treated as fact
Feedback is simply someone's perception. Period. Nothing more, nothing less.
This means that all feedback is somewhat flawed and never the whole picture. Simply it is based on the person’s knowledge and context, how they saw an event through their eyes — by no means does this make it a fact nor does it make one person right and the other wrong either — it’s just perception, that’s it, one of many points of view.
A common anti-pattern I see quite often is treating feedback as the whole picture, as fact. This can go both ways. Either the one giving the feedback delivers it as if they’re right and the person receiving the feedback was wrong. Or the person receiving the feedback treats said feedback like gospel and that they must action it right away.
I often think of it this way, feedback is simply information, what you choose to do with that information is up to you. You are the only one who can decide.
A popular model I use to help explain this is the Johari window — this matrix is commonly used in the personal coaching world to help frame receiving feedback. It describes four quadrants:
- Things which are known to ourselves and to others — this is our arena, where we spend most of the time.
- Things that are unknown to us but known to others — this is our blindspot and the specific quadrant that we try to shine a light on by asking for feedback.
- Things that are known to us but unknown to others — this is a particularly important quadrant when receiving feedback. Remember that feedback is one person's perspective, it’s not the complete picture nor the absolute truth. Remember that you know things that the person giving the feedback doesn’t necessarily know about which may influence your choice on whether to take the feedback on board or not.
- Lastly there are things that are unknown to you and unknown to others — basically there’s a bunch of stuff that we don’t know about ourselves and for what every reason others don’t know about us either — basically your up shit-creek without a paddle for things in this quadrant!
The Johari Window reminds us that feedback is but one of four quadrants and that the key is to filter any feedback based on other perspectives, other quadrants, such as your ‘hidden’ quadrant — maybe you already considered that feedback and had a good reason why you didn’t do something in a particular way — just remember that they didn’t know that so don’t take the feedback personally, it’s not fact.
Not all feedback must be actioned you can choose to simply thank them for the feedback and choose to do nothing because you had already considered it — the choice is yours.
Anti-pattern #4: Feedback is directed at the person, not the event
Feedback is about the event, what happened, what someone did and how you perceived it.
Just like the Johari window they might be key information missing — regardless feedback is about an event, what happened and never about them as a person.
Yes there are times where you may want to give character feedback and that’s fine, but make sure you are grounding it in behaviours — i.e. How is their character manifesting in daily behaviours and how did that impact you — not that they are a bad person or anything — that’s not helpful, nor is it actual feedback.
Anti-pattern #5: Speaking on behalf of others
Feedback is personal. As stated before it’s about YOUR perception and how it impacted YOU.
A reason for this is that it makes the feedback more powerful — no one can argue with how you felt, only you could know that. The other reason is because you can only truly speak for yourself. How do you know it had such an impact on others, did you ask them? Are you them?
In saying all that I recognise that it’s very common to find yourself in a situation where you were told some feedback second hand from someone else or the other way around. First, I always encourage that person to give feedback directly to the individual, as that’s the most powerful way to build a feedback culture. However I recognise that not all environments are supportive of this and not everyone feels safe enough to give feedback directly, and that’s ok.
Often I have created ways for anonymous feedback to be given, 360 feedback tools are great for this however I recognise that there are times where this anti-pattern needs to be broken, there are times where you may, almost need to, give the feedback on behalf of someone else. In these cases first you need permission to deliver that feedback on behalf of that individual, second my advice would be to be very specific and forward about the fact that the feedback is secondhand and you are only speaking on behalf of that individual because they don’t feel safe enough to deliver it themselves — and no matter what please don’t name the person who gave you the original feedback unless they’re ok with it — keep the space safe!
I will close this up by saying that these situations will occur but they should always be viewed as an interim stage, a temporary solution. The goal would be to understand why such individuals potentially didn’t feel safe enough to deliver the feedback themselves and try to solve that. Remember the end goal should always be to create an environment where those people feel comfortable to deliver the feedback themselves.
Anti-pattern #6: Not regular enough
Regular and timely feedback is really important. The more we are exposed to giving and receiving feedback the more we practice it, thus in turn makes us better and more comfortable with giving and receiving feedback.
This is another very common anti-pattern I see when it comes to feedback — I’ve seen places where feedback is practically only given once a year at performance appraisals, which is just crazy!
Often what starts to happen when feedback is not regular enough is that it starts to be be given a “special” connotation — rather than something that just happens and is part of our day-to-day lives it’s this big event at the end of the year — worse it often gets tired to promotions and financial incentives, talk about safe feedback culture, I think not. Once feedback gets branded as something special and not something mundane people start to make a big deal out of it.
Think of it this way, can you remember the first time you drove a car? How exciting was that? At the beginning it’s all new, we don’t get to drive that regularly so we are always begging our parents for the opportunity to dive — I doubt any of you still get that feeling of excitement now when you drive, it’s become such a mundane thing you don’t even think twice about it – you want feedback to be like that, regular and boring.
Wrap up
Building a feedback culture takes time, especially for organisations who haven’t had a strong focus on it in the past. It may seem strange, it’ll definitely feel uncomfortable at the beginning but the benefits are definitely worth it in the long run.
Expect there to be setbacks you might start to form some of these anti-patterns which weren’t there before but hopefully now you will know what to look out for and be better armed with how to resolve them if they arise.
