A Tip for Building a Culture of Feedback
Here’s my pro-tip for building a culture of feedback on your team: there’s nothing more powerful than allowing your whole team to see you, a leader, receive feedback. Witnessing a leader’s openness to feedback and interest in improving will set the tone for a growth mindset. Team members will naturally reflect the same behavior and take their own risks in giving and receiving feedback.
With a little planning, you can set up a situation where one or several people on a team have an opportunity to publicly give you some constructive feedback and see you model the skill of receiving feedback.
Using Case Studies Build Feedback Culture
My favorite way to receive feedback is to facilitate a case study. I choose something I botched, and review it with the whole team. It goes something like this:
Pre-meeting Prep: Make the work visible: Prepare a timeline of events, or some communication (like an email or a deck).
Set up: In my case, I used a response to a support ticket. Say, “Today we’re going to review a support ticket. Here’s a link to the ticket, take 2 mins to review, then I’d like us to consider what works and what could have been better.
Glows: Going round-robin, ask each person to share one thing that was strong
Grows: Next, share one thing you should have done better - make sure you go first, so you can demonstrate the type of language and tone you expect from the team. Then go round-robin again, giving everyone an opportunity to share feedback.
During the grows section, someone will likely say something indirect and passive like, “the response could have been sent sooner.” Flip this comment to sound like feedback, and give it to yourself. For example, “Anne, I think your feedback for me is that I should have responded sooner. I agree! What impact do you think that would have had?”
This is your chance to flex your feedback receiving skills!
At the end of the meeting, round up by thanking everyone for their feedback.
If this session goes well, repeat the case study exercise but focus on an event or deliverable that results in feedback for others.
