3 Tips for Engaging in Constructive Feedback
Engaging in constructive feedback is difficult for the vast majority of us—myself included. We either completely shy away from saying what needs to be said or we come in like a bull in a china shop to forcefully ensure our message gets across. Worse yet, we may choose the route of passive aggressiveness in a back-handed attempt to send a message and avoid potential conflict. Ultimately, each of these communication methodologies will backfire and end up making matters worse for all parties involved.
In business and in our personal lives, honing the skill of both giving and receiving constructive feedback is essential to building trust and driving long-term results. Most of us philosophically recognize the importance of this skill, but struggle with its implementation in real life. In today’s video muse, I provide three tips for engaging in constructive feedback. This list is by no means exhaustive and we will circle back to this topic in future muses.
Use empathy as your guide: It’s essential to enter a constructive feedback conversation with an open mind. A necessary component of an open, agile mind is empathy—to understand and share the feelings/position of others. Remember that facilitated team building exercise where everyone took the Myers-Briggs or DiSC® assessment and you wondered “why the heck are we doing this” or “I’ll never do anything with this information?” Preparing for a constructive feedback session is precisely the place where the insights you learned about yourself and your colleagues from MBTI®, DiSC, or similar tools become invaluable. Compromise, consensus, and collaboration are several hallmarks of a successful constructive feedback engagement. If it’s “your way or the highway,” then compromise, consensus, and collaboration are unlikely to follow. So instead of rushing into a constructive feedback session, make the time to understand how the other side ticks. Know your audience.
Use data and facts whenever possible: Yes, opinions and feelings matter, but when possible, let data and facts be guide the conversation. Come to the conversation prepared and allow the other side ample time to prepare as well. Do your research. No one likes to be ambushed with a tidal wave of emotion and/or data. The result of an ambush is likely to be pushback and a defensive posture by the other side. If feelings have been hurt, engaging in constructive feedback as soon as possible is essential to prevent hurt from becoming anger. Use “I” statements to explain your position and why an event has caused a challenge for you. “When x happens, it causes the following challenges for me and/or makes me feel like y.” So take a deep breath, think carefully about whether emotion/feelings must be addressed, and lean heavily on data/facts.
Focus on the business and the customer: Consensus is easier to achieve if the focus is on adding value to the customer. At the end of the day, you work for a business to add value to that business’s consumers. Put simply, it’s the customer who pays the bills and provides the cash for your paycheck. Frame the challenge you’re addressing through the lens of the customer whenever possible. Personal vendettas and internal strife are much easier to mitigate if done in service to the customer. In many cases, unnecessary internal conflict stems from a lack of understanding about how the value stream(s) within the business function. Hence, investments in improving business acumen across all team members is the elixir that helps reduce internal conflict. To learn more about business acumen, tune into our miniseries on the topic on The Balancing Act Podcast.
Again, this is not an exhaustive list of recommendations for more effective constructive feedback/conflict conversations, but it’s a great start that we’ll build upon in the future. Engaging in constructive feedback is essential for a healthy corporate culture in which trust is balanced with accountability. The best way to ruin a culture is to paint over conflict and pretend that everything’s just fine.
When everything’s “just fine,” there’s trouble ahead.
