If you're only going to read one page about feedback on the web, this should be it. Feedback is a complex social phenomenon that can take years to explore. We have chosen to do so, as it is our speciality, but it should not be so for all people. That is why we have put together a good foundation for those who want to use feedback as a tool for developing people, relationships or processes.
What is feedback?
Feedback is the exchange of perspectives and information that can help change and strengthen a person's behaviour. Feedback is used when a person wants to share their perspective with another person about their behaviour or actions.
IFeedwork works with feedback between people, not the feedback that takes place between electronic components. More specifically, we focus on feedback in the workplace, although feedback is also an exciting topic within the four walls of the home.
So when we give feedback, it's about activating the observations we've made about our colleagues or employees. Perhaps we have noticed something about the way they carry out processes, or their approach to change, or the way they present during the team meeting? It's about combining our observations with our past experience and a well-meaning desire to help other people.
The 3 types of feedback
To reduce confusion and ambiguity when talking about feedback with our colleagues, we can usefully divide feedback into three main types; appreciative feedback, developmental feedback and evaluative feedback.
The different types of feedback serve different human needs, which is why it is a good idea to create a language about.
Recognitive feedback
When you want to thank your colleague or tell them that you have noticed their efforts.
- When you thank the colleague for helping you with your project last week.
- When you are told by your boss that he particularly liked pages 6 and 7 of your report.
Evolving feedback
When you want to help your colleague become more skilled, either by correcting or encouraging them to maintain a certain behaviour.
- When you tell the colleague what you see they can do differently to get their message across more clearly during the presentation.
- When you tell your colleague how you see them using their well-developed structure gene in other aspects of their work.
Evaluative feedback
When you rate your colleague's behaviour on a scale and relate their behaviour to your expectations.
- When you are told that the colleague thought you did a good job compared to what you normally deliver.
- When you as a manager tell your employees that the project is not at a satisfactory level yet.
The risk of misunderstanding is high if we do not speak the same language when expressing our wishes about feedback. There are big differences in the underlying needs that are met by different types of feedback.
- The appreciative feedback speaks to the need to feel seen and feel significant.
- The evolving feedback speaks to the need for development and momentum.
- The evaluative feedback speaks to the need for certainty.
The appreciative feedback makes us feel that our work makes a difference and that our efforts matter to other people. Developmental feedback helps us to become better than we were yesterday. Evaluative feedback gives us certainty about our situation and therefore helps to reduce uncertainty.
The idea behind the three types is that all people have these universal psychological needs. We are all different and the degree to which we need the three types of feedback will vary. So if you have a colleague who expresses a desire for your feedback, it might be a good idea to explore which need they want met.
Also ask yourself: What type of feedback am I usually most interested in? This can give you an idea of what feedback to ask for from your colleagues, but it can also make you aware of the type of feedback you typically give your colleagues.
Read also our article on examples of good feedback
What is good feedback?
Good feedback is feedback that creates learning, development, strengthened relationships and enhanced performance at the same time. Good feedback can look many ways, because as mentioned, feedback is a complex social phenomenon. Here you can read 8 principles common to good feedback.
1) Good feedback is dialogical
An old and erroneous notion of feedback is that there is an active giver and a passive receiver. A master and an apprentice. A sage and a counsellor. A teacher and a student. But this is far from the most effective and motivating way to use feedback. To create the most learning and motivation in our feedback practice, we need to aim for two active parties. In this way, we can more easily create a sense of co-ownership and involvement, while making it easier for the giver to be aware of what the receiver perceives and understands as central. The dialogue starts with the giver inviting the receiver to share his/her views, opinions and thoughts during the feedback conversation.
2) Good feedback must be precise and descriptive
To ensure a return on investment, while making the feedback easier to understand and apply for the recipient, we aim for it to be based on individual situations, concrete behaviours or specific experiences. One pitfall is that our feedback becomes based on a series of experiences and thus an overall impression consisting of many individual experiences. When this feedback has to be given to the recipient, the feedback risks becoming very general, reiterative and perhaps based more on gut feelings and memories. General gut feelings and memories can be difficult for the recipient to recognise themselves in and thus learn from. We therefore aim for more frequent feedback based on everyday experiences.
3) Good feedback is solution-oriented
Maybe it's in the word feed.back, that we should focus on historical events and past experiences, and that's often a good idea. See why in the model below. We just must not stop there, at past behaviour, chosen solutions and mistakes. To increase the sense of capability, agency, motivation and action, we need to offer the recipient a perspective that looks to the future. We must not dwell solely on the mistakes and choices of the past, we must look to the future. In short, we must focus on what the good solution might look like in the future. This can be done through both dialogue and direct advice in our feedback.
4) Good feedback is also informal
A healthy feedback culture is not built solely on MU conversations, product reviews or 1-to-1 conversations with the boss. It also includes an informal and spontaneous component in the form of "coffee machine feedback" or "across-the-desk feedback". In the small spontaneous sparring/feedback conversations between colleagues in everyday life, a large part of the feedback culture is carried. These can easily be backed up by more formal structures with good benefit. The same applies between managers and staff. Here we can usefully build up more informal feedback habits, so that feedback does not take place exclusively in the manager's office three times a year, but becomes more a part of day-to-day operational management.
5) Good feedback happens frequently
"We should rather aim for 1% improvement every week than aim for 10% every quarter." We often say. Big changes need to be taken in small steps. By making frequent small adjustments, the benefits become visible more quickly and the confrontations in individual conversations seem vanishingly small. The more often we give and receive feedback, the more ingrained it becomes in our habits and workflow. This results in a natural and at the same time continuous improvement of our feedback practices, as well as task performance.
6) Good feedback is fair
There is often talk about whether feedback should be corrective or appreciative/strength-based, but this may not even be relevant. Research by the Corporate Leadership Council in 2002 shows that it is more relevant to focus on the recipient perceiving your feedback as fair. In other words, for both corrective and appreciative feedback, the recipient should be able to see themselves in it and recognise the fairness of the feedback. Giving feedback that is perceived as unfair will kill your colleagues' motivation to engage in feedback with you.
7) Good feedback is accepted
Acceptance is an important component of learning, and therefore of feedback, as learning is often the goal of using feedback. This means that the recipient must have accepted to receive feedback before we start. Acceptance can be created in several ways, either through an agreement in the calendar, participation in known processes, it can even be (almost) built into your relationship. However, the informal and spontaneous feedback of everyday life requires a little thought about acceptance. Here, acceptance can be created by the recipient asking for feedback from you, or by you asking the recipient for permission to give feedback. The more feedback conversations that can be created based on the recipient's request, the better - both for the culture and the learning.
8) Good feedback motivates more feedback
Creating a healthy feedback culture is also about using feedback in a sustainable way. That is, a way that can last into the future. Therefore, each feedback conversation should leave the recipient with a desire and motivation to engage in feedback another time. If this does not happen, our feedback habits and practices will form a downward spiral that will eventually be invisible and non-existent. We do not want that. The counter to this is to create feedback conversations that motivate more. Motivate to take the feedback in and learn from it. Motivate to pass the feedback on to another colleague next time, this seems obvious.
Read also more about feedback questions
A constructive model for feedback?
To create a good structure for your feedback, it can be helpful to build your feedback according to a model that ensures you get the most important elements. The good structure will help increase the likelihood that your feedback will generate learning and recognition in the recipient. However, when using a constructive feedback model, one thing you need to pay particular attention to is adding some of your own personality and authenticity to the feedback. In this way you ensure that the recipient can "feel you" and your sincerity in the feedback, therefore you must also dare to break away from your structure if necessary. We recommend you work with what we call the OPF model. It is structured in these three steps:
1. Experience
As mentioned earlier, good feedback should be descriptive. This means that the feedback should be based on concrete experiences or observations. In this way we ensure that the feedback is concrete and relates to behaviour that the recipient has the opportunity to change next time. In this step, it is important to describe your observations and experiences as neutrally as possible.
"I noticed that you started the meeting by presenting the meeting agenda with the 8 points..."
"I noticed that you haven't offered so much at our team meetings the last few months..."
"I noticed that you said that project ABC is our most important project..."
By starting this way, it is easy for the recipient to know what situation the feedback relates to, and you can have a common ground for the rest of the conversation.
A rule of thumb is to be very specific and descriptive when describing your experience. If you fail to do this, your feedback will seem superficial, generalised and vague and the recipient will find it difficult to follow your feedback. It may help to use the video test as a rule of thumb. You must give feedback on the things you could see on video if the meeting had been recorded. On a video you can only see movements, hear the words chosen, the tone of voice, the use of body language. But you cannot see emotions, intentions, reflections, social effects or opt-outs on video. So these are not things we are going to comment on in step #1.
2. Impact
Sometimes we also call this step the impact, because here we need to address how the experience has affected you. Were you further motivated? Did you feel entertained? Did you lose perspective? Were you further motivated to work on the project? Did you feel that your agreements were broken? Did you feel supported by your colleague?
We need to get the weight on here too. Is the feedback about a small detail, a personal preference, a simple input or a fundamental thing, a vertical order or critical instructions that need to be corrected immediately? This difference is important to make clear to the recipient, because if we don't put it into words, it will be up to the recipient's interpretation, and that may not give the desired result.
Feedback is subjective and expresses how you are affected by your colleagues' behaviour. It is also here in step #2 that you bring your own personality and preferences into the feedback. These are important prerequisites for explaining to the recipient why you want to give them the particular advice that follows in the next step.
"...it might just be me, but I think it breaks with our agreements to have some more simple and focused meetings.."
"...and I miss your inputs because I think your background and the perspectives you've brought into play earlier have brought us big steps closer to our launch of the product..."
"... and it gave me the impression that I, my project team and our project DEF are less of a priority to the organization, even though our project is the one that generates the most revenue..."
3. Future
As mentioned in the principles, we want to ensure that our feedback is solution-oriented and that it offers the recipient a direction. We need to ensure this with step #3, and there are actually several ways to go here. Either with advice or questions.
Advice or questions?
Once we have described our impact, we need to offer the recipient a solution for the future, and we can do this either with good old-fashioned advice or, alternatively, by inviting dialogue. The choice of the right solution depends very much on the situation.
Do you have extensive experience in the field? Has the feedback been about a big mistake that needs to be changed immediately? Are you running out of time? Has your colleague asked for your advice? Then concrete advice may be the best way to go.
Does your colleague have a lot of knowledge on the subject? Are there many different good solutions? Do you have enough time to research possible solutions? Is your colleague very talkative? Does your colleague want to be involved? Well, then a question might be the way forward. The question could be "How do you think we could go from here?" or "What do you think about what I've said?"
Finding the balance between advice and questions requires immersion to master. We have written a guide to questions and answers in feedback, which can be your guide.
A key point about the OPF model is that it works for both corrective feedback and sustaining/recognising feedback. The model ensures three things if you remember to use it: 1) That you and the recipient have a common starting point and recognition of the situation. 2) That your feedback contains a wealth of information, in the form of your perspectives, which the recipient can build on and use to learn from. 3) That the feedback is solution-oriented and directional. In this way, we ensure that the recipient is not left confused after your conversation, but that he/she has a concrete idea of how to proceed from here.
Example
1) "I noticed that you started the meeting by presenting the agenda with the 8 items."
2) "I find the large number of points contradictory to our desire to have shorter and more focused meetings. I lost some focus already from the beginning of the meeting."
3) "Maybe you could split a meeting like this into two meetings in the future, and then invite only the most relevant people to each of the meetings? What do you think about that?"
Using a model for feedback can give you better structure and a clearer message, but using it too much or incorrectly can limit you and, in the worst case, make your feedback mechanical and impersonal.
What is positive and negative feedback?
Often the words positive feedback and negative feedback are used to refer to strength-focused restraining feedback and corrective feedback respectively. They're just not the best words, if you ask us, because they can cause confusion. For example, it can add value to how it is experienced to receive this feedback. That is, it is a positive experience to be praised and a negative experience to receive critical feedback. We think this is a confusing simplification. We would rather use a few more words to paint a clear picture and create a more nuanced language about the feedback.
Sustained and corrective feedback
Here we address the basis, or intention, of the feedback being given. In short, it is about whether we want to see more or less of the observed behaviour.
Sustaining feedback is feedback that is designed to reinforce, cultivate or maintain a behaviour. "I like it when you use humour in your posts, please keep it up." or "I appreciate your curious questions in a process like this. Thank you for them."
Corrective feedback is feedback that is based on changing, shifting or correcting a behaviour. "I would switch to a larger font size on your slides when you are presenting to as many people as we are gathered today." or "If I were you, I would try to use fewer and more carefully chosen words so that your message can stand out more clearly."
High and low quality feedback
The amount of learning and motivation that comes with a feedback experience is very much about how the feedback is served up to us. Therefore, it makes sense to talk about the quality of feedback.
Low-quality feedback can look many ways, but some characteristics can be:
- Contains no concrete information
- Lacks solution focus
- Lacks concrete descriptions or observations
- Delivered in a crude and rude manner
- Everything opposite of the section on "What is good feedback?"
High-quality feedback occurs when the giver makes an effort and has the receiver's development in mind. If you follow the principles of good feedback and try to structure it using the OPF model, you will be well on your way to giving high quality feedback.
For most teams, it can be beneficial to define locally what low and high quality feedback looks like. This exercise can help provide clarity on what feedback experiences you are striving towards.
What skills are important in feedback?
As mentioned several times, feedback is a complex social phenomenon, which also means that the range of skills brought into play is relatively broad. Let's look at some of the most central ones, which are basic disciplines of good feedback.
Listening and curiosity. Good feedback is, as I said, dialogical, and it requires that we engage in a shared exploration, creation and construction of the benefits that lie in that particular feedback conversation. A key prerequisite for this is that both parties are able to listen and show curiosity in the feedback.
The ability to ask good questions. Good questions give good answers and start interesting conversations. Some social constructivists say that language creates reality. This is also true in feedback. The good question can initiate the exchange of feedback. The good question can bring new perspectives into a stalled conversation. The good question can uncover new insights.
Empathy. The ability to understand and recognise other people's feelings is central to navigating relationships and interactions with other people, including feedback conversations.
Perspective taking. When you can see the issue from multiple perspectives, you can bring new insights. The ability to leave your own perspective to visit another is incredibly beneficial when exploring solutions and sharing experiences in feedback. Also, as a receiver of feedback, you will find yourself more receptive if you are able to visit the sender's perspective when trying to understand his/her feedback to you.
Emotion regulation. The ability to control, moderate or rein in your emotions can be incredibly beneficial in feedback, because yes, you are likely to be genuinely happy, disappointed or sad during feedback. If you don't want these pure and sincere emotions to run away and take over your focus, it is beneficial to have strategies for emotion regulation.
Good feedback tools. There are a wide variety of feedback tools and approaches, all of which are well suited to different situations and relationships. If all parties feel competent in using different tools in everyday situations, they will experience greater mastery and the outcome of the conversations will be better.
Aligned expectations. Is this really a competence? Well, no. Maybe not. But it's certainly important to get expectations aligned in every feedback relationship. Feedback can work successfully in many ways, the important thing is that there is an acceptance and agreement on how feedback should be used in this particular collaboration.
What is the role of feedback in management?
It is a big question, with almost infinite possibilities for investigation and answers. We see again and again that management and feedback are closely linked and deeply interconnected issues. On the one hand, feedback skills are a toolkit for the skilled manager whose employees, customers and stakeholders expect feedback. On the other hand, management and individual leaders play a major role in the organisation's ability to build a rewarding and healthy feedback culture. In the vast majority of organisations, leaders are both role models and communication hubs, connecting and distributing information across a wide network within the organisation. The use of feedback by managers in their daily work has a strong impact on the culture that is formed around them.
Feedback culture is also shaped by the other leadership behaviors of managers, where topics such as psychological safety, trust, goal orientation, recognition and curiosity have a major impact on a team's conditions for creating a healthy and productive use of feedback.
When feedback works best, it is given and received in all directions of the organisation, across both vertical and horizontal boundaries (if we look at classic organisations). This also means that the manager should ask for and receive feedback as often as he/she gives feedback. The leader, in the healthy feedback culture, is not an omniscient oracle who possesses answers to all the organisation's questions.
If you are a leader in an organization and thinking: "Well, how should I go about feedback?" Then a good move might be to encourage, demonstrate and motivate that more feedback is being sought. Healthy cultures are built on a foundation of demand or pull. The first steps for you could be to go out and demand feedback from your colleagues or employees, thereby showing them that you support this behaviour and that you are also an active player in creating your feedback culture. The next step could be to encourage your employees to seek feedback from relevant sparring partners on their own projects and deliverables.
Leadership and feedback are so closely linked that we always involve and engage leaders when working with feedback in organisations.
Read more about: systemic leadership
What is the goal of feedback?
Feedback is never the end in itself. Rather, it is the means. The means to other ends. These goals may vary, depending on the organisation. However, it is important to be clear about the goal, as the design of the goal determines how feedback is best used. For example, there are differences in how feedback is best used to ensure more innovative products and to increase employee well-being.
The targets can be diverse and there can even be several at the same time. Here are examples of what the goal could be:
- Creating a more learning organisation
- To lower the failure rate of products
- Optimising work processes
- To strengthen the well-being of the employee group
- Creating a more attractive workplace
- Creating better job performance
- Increasing the level of employee-driven innovation
An important point about targets and feedback is to include the target in the internal communication about feedback. That way, it will be transparent to employees, because they will definitely ask: "What's it all for?"
What else about feedback?
We could have turned a lot of other perspectives on feedback in this article. If you have a question you couldn't find the answer to here, feel free to browse our knowledge section where we have lots of articles, podcasts, short videos, free webinars, useful guides and much more.
Maybe you're at the point where it's best to call us and have a chat about your feedback issues? You're very welcome.
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