Leadership
Feedback fuels continuous improvement. We all have blind spots. We rely on our colleagues to help us see those, to help us fulfill our greatest potential.
But to give and receive feedback effectively requires a broader feedback culture where your whole team is comfortable with it.
Read on to learn the four keys to building up a feedback culture in your team.
As the adage goes, you have to be the change you want to see. Rather than preaching about the benefits of feedback, model it. And get buy-in from your fellow leaders and managers to do the same.
🤷 How?
If you want your team to give more feedback, you need to get comfortable giving it yourself.
Openly talk to your team about building a feedback culture where you’re committed to helping each other improve and succeed – as well as the first to celebrate each others’ successes.
Whenever you talk about it, find a way to link it back to your company’s values. How does feedback further your values, your greater purpose as a business?
It’s also useful to train your team on some simple guidelines for both how to give and receive feedback. Note that it’s important your team knows how to properly receive feedback. There’s no point giving it if the receiver isn’t receptive to hearing it!
Reframe feedback as an opportunity for learning.
As Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner write in this HBR piece, “Feedback is too often viewed through a frame of evaluation and judgment: Good and bad. Right and wrong. Top ten-percent. Bottom quartile. These frames raise resistance.
But when you frame feedback as an essential part of learning, it becomes less about your deficiencies and more about your opportunities.”
🚩 Acknowledge to your team that none of us naturally love feedback – but if we see a colleague doing something we know they could do better, it’s our responsibility as someone who cares about them to flag it.
Reframing feedback with this attitude reinforces a Growth Mindset culture (and vice versa, a Growth Mindset or learning culture will help people embrace feedback).
How can you make giving feedback just something you do regularly, as a matter of course? Where can you embed a feedback habit in a non-threatening way?
Think about all the formal and informal gatherings and communication channels in your team and the broader business.
Think about the opportunities where your team is together, where you could benefit most from accelerating your learnings.
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Fiona Young (she/her)
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Having previously led Learning and Development for 3,000 people at Europe’s leading venture builder, Blenheim Chalcot, Fiona knows a thing or two about how to build high performance culture. As Content Director at Hive Learning, Fiona pioneered the organisation's leading guided content programmes which are designed to turn learning into action. Most recently, Fiona led the inception, development and delivery of Inclusion Works by Hive Learning - the world’s first diversity and inclusion programme focused on turning unconscious bias into conscious action - created from over 1,000 leading sources.