Brain-Friendly Feedback

<aside> 💡 We are all better off if we understand our impact on others.

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Background

Regular feedback is one of the tools that teams need most. It’s a shortcut to improvement and better collaboration. Done well, feedback will help your colleagues, your team and your organisation. And receiving feedback about the impact you’re having on other people is a huge (often untapped) source of personal growth.

We can view it as ‘guidance’ rather than the dreaded ‘F-word’ - do more of this / less of that to be an even better colleague 😊 Helpful right? Yet still scary and incredibly challenging! And that’s why it is something that most of us struggle to do - because saying difficult things well is really, really hard! So we avoid it. So we’ve not practised a whole lot (just once or twice a year in many organisations), so we’re a bit rubbish at it. What else are you good at that you only do once or twice a year?

Luckily for us, cognitive psychologist LeeAnn Renninger has produced a wonderful five minute TED Talk about the secret of giving great feedback. LeeAnn offers a four-part formula and I’ve added an extra step at the beginning for good measure.

The brain-friendly feedback video

I suggest watching this video together with your team. You can do this using the wonderful Butter (and then never use Teams or Zoom again! 🤞).

http://youtube.com/watch?v=wtl5UrrgU8c&feature=emb_title&ab_channel=TED

Brain-friendly feedback - the steps 🔢

Intention: check your intention ****are you motivated by an intention to help?
- Is it for their benefit? If not, discard it! Or, make it helpful by adjusting your intentions.
- Never feedback if you are kicking someone in the shin - it hurts!
- This is a golden rule 🥇
Permission: give your colleagues' brains a heads up that feedback is coming by asking them if you can give them some feedback. For example:
- ‘Do you have some time to talk about how that conversation / meeting / project went?’
- ‘I have some ideas for how we can improve things, can I share them with you?’
- ‘Can I give you some feedback / reflections about ... ?’
- Warning: only asking ‘can I give you some feedback?’ is vague and can trigger fear in our nervous system as we wonder what it will be about.
Specific: be really specific, using only data and facts.
- What happened or did not happen? What did you see or hear? This must be factual. It cannot be opinion 🚫
- For example, ‘You said you’d send me the report by yesterdays deadline and I still don’t have it’
- So something that your colleague cannot disagree with.
Impact: then explain how #3 impacted on you. For example:
- ‘Because I didn’t get the report on time I got a hard time from the client’
- Or, ‘by getting the report to me early I was able to send it to the client ahead of schedule and they’re really pleased with us!’
- Be sure the link between the feedback and impact is clear and logical; this will help your feedback to land.
Check: have a conversation to see how your feedback landed.
- Ask them: How do you see it? What are your thoughts?
- Then listen to their response, have a conversation, and be patient.
- It can take a little while for the penny to drop and for others to see your point of view, especially with constructive feedback.
- Remember, you could be wrong, so be sure to be humble!
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