How to Give (and Receive) Feedback
Or, this might be the one thing your parents never taught you
Last week, I received some feedback. It was in a work context so we call it feedback but to put it bluntly, I’d upset someone and they wanted me to know about it so I could change my behaviour. When they told me they wanted to share this feedback with me, I felt a fear run through my whole body. Oh god, what if what I’d done was irreparable?
Feedback has a bad reputation. It’s the word we use to point out a multitude of sins. Although feedback can be both positive and negative, it’s rarely the former so nearly always the latter. In my experience, it’s often delivered in a tone that is cold and brittle. It often feels out of context, a bit like it’s come from nowhere. And it always leaves me feeling as though I’ve put my size 5 foot right where it doesn’t belong. There is an awkwardness in feedback, felt on both sides, that can be difficult to overcome. It’s the elephant that we drag from room to room with us, in every subsequent interaction.
I know I’m not the only one who feels like this about both giving and receiving feedback. It makes sense that we all find it so difficult, of course, because while we might dress feedback up as a professional skill, it actually sits right at the heart of our emotional intelligence. It’s not that giving good feedback requires us to understand the impact it might have on the other person - we can try but often when I’m helping coaching clients with this, they tie themselves in knots making huge assumptions about how the other person will react when really that’s the only part of the process that they have no control over. In order to give good feedback we have to spend less time analysing what the person receiving the feedback might feel about it, and more time understanding how we feel about it. Let me give you an example.
I do a lot of work with a gorgeous leadership development company called Lea_p and the week before last I’d run a workshop alongside one of their founders, Emmanuelle (Emmy). After the workshop, she had asked me if I’d mind sending the follow-up email to the client. I was so thrilled she’d entrusted me with this responsibility (once a class swot, always a class swot), that I really, really wanted to do a good job for her. I tried to make the email sound as professional as possible and, because it’s important to me to be seen as someone who is reliable and in control, I also tried to make it sound as though I was completely confident in writing this email and there was nothing for her to worry about.
And in doing so, I screwed up.
When Emmy said she’d like to give me some feedback, I felt my heart drop and a sense of panic enter my body. One of the reasons I chose to work for myself after 15 years working for other people was because feedback so often left me feeling as though I’d deeply offended someone but I wasn’t sure how, or what to do to repair it. In my experience feedback was someone telling you that you’d failed to be good enough but not telling you why or how to be better. In my past job, feedback was hidden under managers trying to be kind, which was a nice effort but led to a lot of miscommunication and then repressed frustration. Even if it wasn’t said, I could feel that frustration and it slowly shattered my self-confidence. How could I ever get it right if I didn’t know what I’d done?
Amongst her friends and colleagues, Emmy is known as the queen of acknowledgments. An acknowledgement is a coaching term and is probably most easily translated as a really good compliment. An acknowledgment asks you to look deep into the other person’s soul and tell them what you really see there. It can be an incredibly powerful tool and if you spend half an hour with Emmy, you’ll walk out feeling like you’re the greatest person to have ever graced this earth. The flip of the acknowledgment is feedback. And it turns out, she’s pretty great at this too. Here is what she told me:
When she’d read the email I sent to the client she’d been taken aback because although we had run the workshop together, I hadn’t mentioned her anywhere in the email. There had been a lot of “I” sentences and that had left her feeling as though we weren’t a team and her contribution to the day was unimportant. While other people might not have minded, she’d felt hurt by it. Next time, could I please remember to include her in the follow-up emails and try to use more “we” statements than “I” statements.
In professional terms we would call this feedback but I recognised it from my sex and relationship therapy training as, “a request for change”. A request for change acknowledges not only what has happened but the feelings behind it, as well as a request for something different in the future. It’s requires you to understand not just that you were hurt by a person’s actions but also why and what you’d want instead, and for you to then share that with them which can often feel vulnerable and a bit scary. The impact on the person receiving it is very different however.
When we receive feedback that is grounded in honesty, emotion and vulnerability, it feels very different. I might still feel painful or embarrassing. We might still find ourselves having an instantaneous reaction to it but we also find ourselves responding to the person in front of us. We stop making it all about us and start seeing the two of us as an interconnected pair, both relying on each other and needing something from the other. We soften.
When Emmy shared her feedback with me, I didn’t find myself tensing up or getting reactive. What I actually felt was sadness that I’d hurt someone I really respect and an immense gratitude that she’d told me so that I could make sure it didn’t happen again. I also felt relief that she’d given me a clear instruction about what I needed to do and a desire to make sure I got it right. Mostly though, I just felt grateful that she’d wanted to invest the time in making sure our relationship was clean and honest, rather than filled with unspoken resentments which would eat away at it.
Perhaps it’s strange to talk about a working relationship as though it were a personal one but the reality is that feedback, whatever the context it’s given in, will always feel personal. Even if it is about a very factual, skills based assessment - it still feels personal. Even if we try and deliver it in as dry and fact-based manner as we can, it still feels personal. When we lean into that and accept the emotion behind it, that’s when we find a place of connection where both parties can step into making a change in the future.
At Lea_p they teach a feedback model that Emmy used so powerfully with me. It’s called COIN and it looks like this:
C - Context. What is it you want to talk to them about? (eg: I want to give you some feedback on that email.)
O - Observation. What was the one specific thing they did? Feedback should never ben a long list of vague gripes. Make it specific and tight. (eg: You used a lot of “I” statements.)
I - Impact. What was the impact on you? We so often steer away from this in professional contexts but it is the thing that opens the space for connection and conversation. It’s how we guarantee feedback is really heard. (eg: I felt left out of the team and hurt.)
N - Next steps. What do you want to happen next? Or, the request for change. Again, make this specific and simple. The person on the other side might have their own view or what to negotiate, that’s fine. The Next Steps are co-created, not dictated.
This model requires vulnerability and honesty. It can feel uncomfortable and even inappropriate in a professional context. (Can I really tell a colleague they hurt me? Can I explain that I felt triggered?) But let me tell you as someone who has just been on the receiving end of it, it works.
Oh, and if you’re not sure how to receive feedback, it’s simple.
“Thank you for sharing that with me.”
That’s all you need to say. You can add your own Next Steps if you like. You can check in to make sure they feel heard. But the most important thing is to acknowledge the bravery it took to share feedback in a way that lands, and the gratitude you feel for being able to do something about it.
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Great piece as always. I buy in to feedback but had a recent experience when I got more than I bargained for. I know when I screw up and I’m always prepared to admit it but there’s a fine line between genuine feedback and putting the knife in, the sort that makes you feel insecure about doing something you’ve done well for years.
Feedback should never knock your confidence or be an excuse for seeing off the competition, which I clearly was in this instance. I’ve never worked with that person again!
Thanks for illustrating the COIN method so clearly! I always feel a bit weird when our woke HR team called People&Culture tell us we need to talk about our feelings when providing feedback (we're stuck with 'when you __ it made me feel __' statements).