Business Insight Zone

In the comments of last week’s post on unsolicited feedback, Vicki offered this useful corrective:

I’m concerned that you’ve used the term “feedback” in this post to mean criticism. Feedback can and should be of many forms, including praise, thanks, and kudos. Too often, people respond when something seems wrong but forget to say “great job” or “Thank you” when something goes right.

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.”

These are excellent points, and I endorse them wholeheartedly. In fact, I would go a (half-)step further and say that we should be giving honest feedback across a spectrum as a matter of course:

Unalloyed praise.

Sometimes a friend or colleague will just nail it. When they do, let them know it and let others know it. (Be careful not to put a shy person on the spot too much — the right setting for the public praise might be a toast at a team lunch rather than an all-hands meeting.) Frequency: rare. If you overdo this kind of praise, people will think of it as coming from your own over-the-top enthusiasm, rather than any objective assessment of others’ merits.

“Attagirls” and “Attaboys.”

This should be the most common mode of praise. Examples:

• “Hey, thanks for walking us through that proposal. You had a lot of good ideas in there.”
• “Thanks for taking this on — it’s obvious you’ve been putting a lot of good work into it.”
• “I liked what you said in the meeting. I think you handled Bill’s objections well.”
• “Right on — that’s good stuff.”
• “Thank you.”

This is the grease of everyday good relations, and it should be applied as liberally as possible so long as (a) you mean it sincerely, and (b) others take it as sincere.

Thinking-out-loud critique.

To me, this is the most effective form of feedback — not praise or criticism pe se, but an open-ended discussion of the ins and outs of an idea, a project, or a performance.

This is what I think of when I see veteran members of a sports team talking with each other or with coaches. You see them looking at the field, or using their hands to indicate positions of players, of bat and ball, or whatever. They’re probing for answers (“How are you handling that ball up and in?” “Where do you want me to put the pass when we run this play?”), not delivering packaged kudos or slams.

The “sandwich.”

A friend of mine says that this is her tack for delivering ordinary criticism: you sandwich something negative between two doses of praise: “I like what you did with X . . . I think Y would be better if . . . Overall, I think this is great.” If you do it sincerely, and if you mix it in with the other techniques here, you can avoid the “but . . .” reaction that Vicki rightly diagnoses.

“You’re doing it wrong.”

Once in a while, you need to tell someone that they’re wrong in the sense of being wrong. Not kinda-sorta. Not “It might work better if . . .”Not “From my perspective . . .” I’m talking about delivering an uncut dose of sour news.

Here’s where I need your help: I can tell you that this form of bad-in-a-bad-way feedback should be rare, and I can suggest that you might want to deliver this when the target of the criticism is in an open frame of mind, but . . . that’s about all I’ve got so far.

What say you — about delivering sour news or any of the rest of this spectrum? How do you deliver feedback?

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(Photo by srqpix.)