How to cultivate a culture of feedback
How often do you receive feedback on your performance in your role? Once a year? Twice?
If so, you’re not alone. It’s very common for leaders to only sit down with their teams and give performance-related feedback (of all kinds) at specific times during the year. But in my opinion, that is nowhere near often enough. If we want high-performing teams with a high level of trust, we need to make giving and receiving feedback an ongoing part of our culture. We need to get out of the habit of saving our feedback for reviews and instead make it part of our ongoing team conversations. In the best cases, I think reviews can serve as recap conversations of feedback that has already been discussed.
If you have a culture of infrequent feedback, I understand that it might be difficult to imagine how to get to a place where feedback is an ongoing ritual. At one time in my own company, feedback was infrequent at best, and I remember feeling discouraged because I didn’t know how to change that. So, this week, I thought I’d share six key things that can help build a culture of open, ongoing feedback—things we did on our own team, and things that we now teach other teams who want to achieve the same goal:
Understand the connection between feedback and trust
Think about this: Let’s say you only hear from your leader about the things you could be doing better once per year. That means that your leader spends a considerable amount of time withholding information or a perspective that could have helped you. When they finally reveal their feedback to you, how does that make you feel? Not great, right? This person likely had so many opportunities to share this feedback with you, but they chose not to. Instead they chose to save it for the review. This is the type of situation that destroys trust on teams. We are left questioning and wondering what someone might be feeling but not sharing. We can challenge that culture by giving frequent feedback ourselves and by asking for feedback. The more we do that, the more we build trust in our own relationships. And the more we show people that we want feedback, that feedback can feel safe. If your leader isn’t giving you enough feedback, what if you asked to include feedback in your one-to-one meetings throughout the year? Or what if you asked for a monthly check-in where you each bring feedback about what the other person is doing well and what they could improve?
Avoid the drama triangle & be a thought partner
If you’ve ever delivered feedback on someone else’s behalf, then you may be familiar with the “drama triangle.” Inserting yourself between two (or more) people and delivering feedback that isn’t yours to give rarely ends well—in fact, it usually makes things worse. So instead, when someone asks you to deliver feedback on their behalf, look at it as an opportunity to bring those parties together. Be that person’s thought partner: Talk them through how they are feeling so that they can get clear on the feedback they would like to give. If the people involved are concerned about meeting one-on-one, it’s perfectly okay for you to be present while the conversation happens and to help facilitate it. Just make sure that you are not the one delivering the feedback. Doing so robs people of the ability to build trust with each other. Now, there are certainly circumstances where it might make sense to insert yourself. Perhaps you are the leader of the team and there is a behavior that is making others uncomfortable or jeopardizing team values. Or perhaps one party has already tried to address the feedback with the other. These might be times where you do deliver that feedback without others present, and as leaders, we must follow our gut instincts when it comes to these circumstances.
Be an advocate for those not being heard
Nothing hurts a culture of feedback more than when someone gives feedback that never goes anywhere. If you know that someone on your team has been speaking up about something but they haven’t gotten a response from leadership or seen their feedback implemented, think about how you can be an advocate for them and make sure their feedback is heard. Maybe you could go to your leader together to share the feedback, or maybe you could follow up with your leader for a response. It doesn’t mean that all feedback given needs to be implemented. In reality, there will always be feedback that we can’t implement. In these cases, I think it’s important that the person who gave that feedback understands why it can’t be implemented. Otherwise, it could make that person feel like their feedback didn’t matter at all, and it might prevent them from wanting to speak up in the future. Being advocates for others helps keep a culture of feedback alive.
Stick to the 24-hour guideline
When it comes to giving growth feedback, I like to stick to the 24-hour guideline: Address feedback within 24 hours to avoid issues building up and to strengthen trust. Of course, 24 hours is not always practical, especially if you’re heading into a weekend or a break period. But the point is to address feedback as soon as possible. Committing to that 24-hour guideline holds us accountable to leaning into feedback, even when it’s hard to give. That being said, it’s important to be intentional and considerate with feedback. If you need more time to clarify your thoughts, calm down, or consider your words, take it. It’s better to let a little more time pass than to not be intentional when you give your feedback. Think about your own team and the people you work closest with: Together, could you commit to the 24-hour guideline? How powerful would that be?! (Regardless, you can decide that you want to commit to it and have this standard for yourself.)
Bring in the team
When creating a culture of feedback, it’s hard to go from 0 to 100 overnight. If your team isn’t used to giving feedback, you might need to start small. I don’t love anonymous surveys, but there is a time and place for them. For example, if you’re just starting to ask for feedback from your team, create a survey and ask people to answer anonymously. Ask questions such as, what is working in our culture? What’s not working? How do we feel about our team dynamic? Our trust? What's working in our processes? What is inefficient? Feedback on an individual level is important, of course, but feedback on a team level is just as important. Over time, you can work up to having these conversations in person (or virtually using video chat). But it’s important to acknowledge that there might be trust and psychological safety issues you need to address first. If you need to start with anonymous surveys, make sure you have an in-person team conversation afterward to discuss what will happen as a result of the feedback the team provided.
Get clear on the goal of feedback
If you’re waiting for the day when giving tough feedback gets easy . . . you’re gonna be waiting a long time! It’s never going to be easy. I’ve been cultivating a culture of feedback on our team for years, and I still don't feel totally comfortable giving it. But I don’t think that comfort should be the goal. Instead, we should aim to get to a place where we care more about our people and their growth than about staying in our comfort zones. We have to remind ourselves that if we care about the people around us, we have to be willing to do the hard thing—it’s often the most compassionate thing we can do. When we can think about feedback that way, it changes our ability to lean into it.
There we have it: Six key things that can help you cultivate a culture of feedback. If you want to learn more, two books that really influenced my view on feedback culture are Thanks for the Feedback by Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone and Radical Candor by Kim Scott. And, of course, you can download our guide called Giving and Accepting Feedback to gain more tools for communicating.
Hope this gets you off to a great start!
Big hugs,
