Russ — I’d love to hear more about “feedforward” once you’ve read that. I wonder about how it applies to one of those cases when the person recieving it needs to acknowledge past mistakes for the sake of growth.

Sharon — Interesting — and no doubt fruitful — approach. I’m going to consider how I might apply this in situations I face.

I take the following approach:
1) Acknowledge to yourself ahead of time that your assumptions/judgment may be wrong. This is small but critical.
2) Address the situation from a perspective of curiosity rather than judgment. It feels less threatening to the person being questioned, and we all learn something this way.
3) Assume that the person being questioned is an expert in their specialty (yes, even if you doubt it). They may have sound logic behind their choices. Ask for it. Nicely.
4) Allow the person receiving the feedback to be directly responsible for choosing a better path. Ask for their expert opinion on what you think are better options. If you allow them to think through a few options, they may reach your same conclusion. And this way, they’ll be more vested in implementing the solution. Let them retain their ‘guru’ title and worlds will open up for you.

I’ve got “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There” by Marshall Goldsmith on the way from Amazon. I understand he talks a lot about “feedforward.” The concept as it’s been explained to me is this: you share information with a focus on what needs to be done now in order to achieve a goal instead of what was done rightly or wrongly in the past. People tell me it’s powerful, I’ll be curious to see if the book lives up to the word-of-mouth hype.

This ties in with your comment of “pairing criticism with a dose of praise”. If you’re known for only providing criticism, everyone will expect a “but” (”I really like what you’re doing with this project . . . but”) and knowing its coming won;t make it easier to take — and will dilute the praise because we’re just waiting for the “but…” that always follows.

Take the time to be sure that you ALWAYS provide feedback. Ensure that positive feedback occurs more than half of the time. Become known as an honest and fair evaluator. Then, when you have criticism, no one will think “Yeah, but s/he’s always criticising.”

If you’re wondering how a company can set up an internal system – and culture – that would enable employees to give unsolicited feedback to their peers … hmmmm. Putting thinking cap on. What if the boss tells everyone that he/she would like to encourage feedback and creative innovation at all levels, first by being open to it him/herself. Then asking each employee to be open to it as well. And then a system can be put in place where employees (not using real names?) could drop feedback in each others’ ’suggestion boxes’. That’s one thought. Or am I complicating it too much?