Feedback: Part I

Feedback does not begin and end in a one-on-one with your supervisor. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news! Feedback isn’t even confined to conversations. Sometimes it is the projects you are, or are not, asked to tackle, the ideation sessions you are asked to join, or the lunch out with co-workers you aren’t invited to (although that last one might just be bad manners on their part).

Feedback is tough; both in the giving and in the receiving. While I was an undergrad, I wrote an honors thesis on Latin American history. Every time I finished a chapter, I sent it off to my faculty mentor, a lovely, warm, and supportive woman, who then sent her revisions back to me via track changes in Word. I had a recurring nightmare that an entire 15 page draft came back in red. Seriously.

Clearly, there was a bit of underlying anxiety about the feedback process in my work. Now, working with undergraduates, I see a lot of that same anxiety in them. I hear it from my friends who are preparing for big presentations and annual reviews, too.

I think that this anxiety is exacerbated by the fact that no class in K-12 or college ever teaches us how to cope with feedback, or to give feedback well.

One of the most useful frameworks that I have come across for thinking about feedback is the one proposed by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen in Thanks for the Feedback. The authors also co-wrote another favorite of mine, Difficult Conversations. They separate feedback into three categories:

1. Evaluation
2. Appreciation
3. Coaching

I find this framework very helpful in unpacking the emotional baggage around feedback. I think the emotions and anxiety that people start to feel when they hear the word feedback comes from “evaluation” feedback. Evaluation is always a comparison between you and someone else, whether that someone is your co-worker or the ghost of Perfect Employee Past.

Inherently, there is evaluation involved in coaching; if you need coaching, you obviously still need improvement. On the other hand, ‘appreciation’ is also a type of feedback; I had thought about this type of positive feedback as something totally separate from feedback. Realizing that this positive reinforcement was in fact a type of feedback helped me think more holistically about feedback, and made me less nervous about evaluation.

Of course, I still get anxious about feedback. So, I’ll be exploring the various “triggers,” truth triggers, relationship triggers, and identity triggers, that Stone and Heen lay out in Thanks for the Feedback in future posts… and sharing my war stories along the way. Stay tuned!