Do you belong to those who believe feedback is healthy and necessary to create development? Or are you of the view that feedback does more harm than good? My experience is that both camps have hold of half a truth.
Do you belong to those who believe that feedback is healthy and necessary to create development? Or are you of the view that feedback does more harm than good, because it undermines self-worth? I experience that the debate about feedback at present ends in a split between these two camps. My experience is that they each have hold of half a truth.
I have myself participated in 360-degree feedback, and found enormous value in some of the selected input I received. The key word here is "selected". I experienced, namely, also during the same 360-degree process, that colleagues who took everything in simply could not handle the feedback they received, and the result was clearly more harmful than developmental, which must be the purpose.
Therefore, I think that the debate about feedback would be much more valuable if it dealt with: For whom and how is feedback beneficial, and for whom and how does feedback become harmful?
As human beings we grow through different stages in life in the way we see ourselves and the world. The way we give and receive feedback depends on these stages.
My colleague Bjørn Uldall has written an excellent article series about these stages, so in this piece I will only address two of the most prominent ways in which people in Danish workplaces see themselves and the world, namely the 'socialised' and the 'self-authored' way. Very roughly put, the socialised way of seeing oneself depends to a large extent on how others perceive you. A socialised way of receiving feedback from 'authorities or one's peers' is to let it determine one's own sense of self-worth about whether one is good enough, and doing the right thing. In many adults, a more self-authored way of relating to feedback develops over time. Here there is an inner authority that itself judges whether one is good enough and doing the right thing in relation to values, norms and criteria of judgement that one is oneself the author of. Feedback from others is used here as useful data, to assess whether one is living up to one's own goals or not—but does not become defining for self-worth.
I experienced in a 360-degree feedback session being told that I was very selfish at times. Ouch… But instead of letting it define my own self-perception, I used it to be curious about why these people perceived me as selfish, when I did not have that experience myself. This exploration made me conscious of my own tendency to take on greater responsibility and shut others out, in order to maintain a sense of control and thus succeed when projects became critical. This was perceived as selfish with good reason, but it was not the whole truth for me. Rather, it was about my own fear of failure, and by becoming conscious of this, I could change my behaviour.
A great deal of feedback, which mostly concerns professional competencies and technical solutions, is probably unproblematic, because it is obvious that it should not be taken personally. So in the following I focus on the type of feedback that more readily, for better and worse, is taken personally, because it concerns personal qualities and behaviour.
It is rarely obvious in advance whether a person receives feedback in a socialised or self-authored way. So how do we give feedback in a way that gives the best possible chance of it being received developmentally, and having a beneficial effect?
The way we traditionally give feedback is problematic. It is because it is often given as praise/criticism, and as a judgement/verdict that only concerns the recipient, and not about the person who is giving the feedback. Examples:
As exemplified here, even praise can be problematic. Partly because there, as here, is very little learning to extract from it. But the thorns on the roses are that they merely reinforce the socialised pressure to live up to externally determined norms—and can therefore come to hold back the development of the inner self-authored compass.
If we instead of distributing criticism and praise, give feedback in a different way, we increase the chance that it creates learning and development. It could, for example, sound like this:
In these examples, the person giving feedback tells at least as much about themselves as about the recipient. In that way it becomes clear that there is no universal truth, or predicates, that define the person the feedback concerns. When we talk non-judgementally, or developmentally together, we make it clear that responsibility rests with the sender, and we invite dialogue about the topic.
Most of us have not been trained in giving this form of developmental personal feedback, which is exemplified in the section above. It requires training. So if we set out to give this form of developmental feedback, we will need to train it. Otherwise there is a great risk that we simply give up and withhold it.
A complementary or alternative strategy could be to take inspiration from the company 'Next Jump'. Here the philosophy is to create a culture where feedback is given often, and spontaneously, without too much thought about how it is formulated. In return, they make a great effort to create a psychologically safe culture, where people feel secure that they belong, and have structures and tools that help employees sort and create meaning (patterns), in the feedback they receive. At Next Jump, employees are paired with a 'buddy' and connected to another more experienced buddy-pair, who as mentors continuously help them digest the quite large amount of feedback they receive.
It is good that we are having a debate about feedback—there is a need for it. So I hope we can take the debate further from a divided argument about the pros and cons of feedback—to the more decisive question of how we each, and together, culturally become better at giving and receiving feedback, in a way that develops and strengthens self-worth and self-esteem, our relationships and communities, and our organisations and society. There is a significant need for this.