Giving and Receiving Feedback--not for the faint of heart!

Welcome to (un)leaderly, the podcast that looks at the world through a leadership perspective. In this episode, host Barbara Iverson shares two types of feedback structure: non-violent communication and SAI feedback. She also shows you how to receive feedback in a way that honors the person giving it to you, while allowing you the space to think about what you want to do with it.

Barbara tells stories from her life and what encouraged her to start a podcast that looks at the world through an atypical leadership perspective. Every week she offers a challenge or task for listeners, to prompt reflection or growth. This podcast is the perfect listen for someone who feels like they don't quite fit to the typical leadership profile. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Tell him something nice first and tell him something nice at the end, like give him the old sandwich. Hello and welcome to Unleaderly, the podcast that looks at the world through a leadership perspective. My name is Barbara Iverson and I'm your host. Today we're talking about giving and receiving feedback, specifically structures and tips for how to do it well. But first, a quick note. Giving and receiving feedback is hard. It's it's really hard. And most people are not trained on how to do it, how to do it well. It's usually something that we've picked up from whatever our culture or the people around us, maybe our school, maybe our company. There's a lot of companies that say that their feedback culture, that they have a feedback culture, but they actually don't. They don't have a clear structure on how to give and receive feedback. For people who are managers, who are leading teams, who are leading companies, actually understanding feedback and how to give and receive it in a meaningful way. And even when to ask for feedback and perhaps when not to, these are things that usually people find out through trial and error. Doing it, finding out that it didn't go very well, or ignoring it, truly. I think there are so many places, even those that say they have a feedback culture. There are so many organizations that are led by people who have really no idea how to give or receive feedback. They've never learned it, they've never really done it. They help do an occasional add a boy, add a girl, if that. And I'd like to change it. It's one of the reasons that I'm covering this today on the episode because I think the more we talk about tools, and listen, the tools that I'm going to offer you are not what you have to use. I think they're both, I think the two of them are good. As time goes on, there may be something better. It's it's really a valuable tool to have to be able to give and receive feedback and to actually talk about giving and receiving feedback. Because as we'll discover through the course of the show, it's really important to have a common language, a common vocabulary around feedback and a common understanding of what to do with it, how to receive it, what that should look like. Because I don't think it's intuitive, really. I think that our natural response is to become defensive and to try to justify our words or actions. And feedback, receiving feedback well actually requires not doing that. We'll get into that. But before we get started, it was important for me to say that this is something, a tool that I think all leaders and managers can learn from and practice with and iterate and learn to do well and always improve because it's what also teaches then their team members who are tomorrow's leaders and managers. It teaches them how to do it. I think for many of us, we have not been taught very well how to give feedback, and our cultures may have a lot to do with that. Feedback is one of those hard things because we tend to think of it only negatively. And honestly, today I'm really only going to be talking about constructive or essentially what you could think of as negative feedback. Positive feedback, I think there's also plenty of ways that we can grow in offering that to people, but it's much more difficult to give and receive and talk about constructive or negative feedback. So that's what I want to do today. I remember there was someone I worked with quite a number of years ago who was talking about the fact that he had to give feedback to somebody that was on his team. And he talked about how he offered some constructive thoughts or or reported to the team member something that he had done wrong. And then he said, Yeah, but you know, I tried to tell him something nice first and tell him something nice then, like, give him the old sandwich. And I remember thinking, oh, I can't believe that that went well. Because this sandwich or Oreo or whatever you want to call it, hamburger method of feedback, many of us have experienced this, where you say something nice, you say something maybe not so nice, or you know, you did something wrong, you let us down something negative or constructive, like we'd like you to do this in the future. And then you end up with something nice. The thinking behind it is well, if I say nice things on either side, that's what they'll remember. But of course, that's not what we remember. There's been plenty of psychological studies done that people replay negative thoughts and negative words way more in their heads than they do positive. So we know that this hamburger way does not work. And things like unsolicited advice, if I were you, I would that doesn't really work either because unsolicited advice rarely is accepted because it's unsolicited. If I wanted to know what you would think or what you would do, I would simply ask you. But I haven't. So I don't want to know. Because there are people who ask us for advice when they respect us and when they really are at a place that they need assistance or advice or help or support or whatever, then they're asking those questions. Some cultures really approach direct negative feedback in a much more straightforward manner. Aaron Meyer's book, The Culture Map, has a whole section on direct and indirect negative feedback. And as an American, we are much more conditioned to expect indirect negative feedback. We want it to be couched in a lot of pillows and softness because that hamburger mentality, that sandwich of like good, bad, good, is cultural for us. It's just, it's, I don't know where it started, but it's been around long enough that it's even though it doesn't work, it's what people expect. Whereas you have other cultures, I live in Germany. Germany is much more along the spectrum toward direct negative feedback. I had a few friends who lived in Bavaria, which is a very frank, straightforward, you're doing it wrong part of the country. Sorry, Bavarians, you know it's true. And one of them was an avid baker, and she was a wonderful cook. She made really, really delicious food, and she was one of the softest, kindest, gentlest people I've ever known. And a friend, a third friend of ours told us a story about how this friend who was so kind and gentle made a cake for a German friend of hers for her birthday. Decorated it nicely, brought it over, they enjoyed a piece. And after they ate it, the German friend turned to her and said, That was pretty good, but it was a bit dry. I think next time you make it, you might want to add milk or an extra egg yolk or something. My American kind gentle friend was crushed. She couldn't imagine that someone would actually say that directly to her about a gift, essentially, a cake that she had made for her friend's birthday. She was crushed, she was absolutely devastated. She did not know if they were still friends. But for the German, the mentality, I am sure, was this was really good. I'm gonna tell you how it could be better in the future, because I'm sure you'd want to know that, right? And and maybe that's true. I mean it could be true, but there's a way to say it, and the way a German might say it to another German is not the way an American would hear it well. So it just it just didn't land. Another friend who lived in Munich said that when she had a baby, she said what she hated the most was when she took her baby out for a walk, you know, when her child was tiny, because she said she could barely get around the block without 10 women stopping her and telling her how improperly she had dressed her child. And she said it made her crazy. As an American, people might sort of talk behind your back if they think you've dressed your child inappropriately for an occasion, but they probably wouldn't say anything to you directly. So that's a difference, indirect and direct negative feedback. But that it but that definitely influences us. What our culture tells us is acceptable. But let's talk about the point of feedback. Feedback is so again, constructive, and let's think of it as constructive. The point of telling it is you are telling someone something that they probably didn't know. Because if they did know it, you assume that they would change. Just the way that my friend's German friend told her, this cake was not very moist. This is how you could improve it in the future. It's telling them if you obviously didn't know, I'm gonna give you the information. It's a ways to improve. It's also a way to be aware of the impact of your words or actions. That's often true in a work situation. It's also true in a relational situation where you have to learn to tell your partner that their words were hurtful to you. I find it really helpful to think of feedback as a gift that someone is trying to give you. That may be hard to hear, but it's it's meant usually in the best way. It can also be kind of messed up the way people approach it. But in most cases, I think feedback is given to give you information that you didn't have before so that you can change, or so that you can decide if you want to change. You might decide that you don't want to make any changes, regardless of the feedback. That's okay too, and that is your prerogative once you've gotten the feedback. You decide what to do with it from there. What are some ways to give feedback? So there's two that I want to talk about today. One is called nonviolent communication, and it there's a book by Marshall Rosenberg, and it's very detailed in what nonviolent communication is, what it's trying to do, and how to use it. So the the most basic thing are that we make observations about what's happening around us, what we see, what we hear. We observe our feelings, how do we feel about what we see and hear? We then communicate or we decide what our needs are, what do we value or require from the situation, and then requests. How do we ask for what will fulfill that need in that moment? So I went through this book with a group of people a number of years ago, and it was people of all ages, all different backgrounds, nationalities. And the thing that really everyone had in common was it was really difficult to name feelings. Now, in the book, they actually include a list of like names of emotions, and even still, it was hard because the tendency was for people to jump to evaluations or judgments. I feel judged, I feel like they, I feel like you did this. I feel like I was fill in the blank. And those are not feelings. We're using the word feel in place of I think or it seems to me, but it's become in English certainly acceptable to say I feel when truly it it's I think. We're not expressing an emotion, we're not expressing a feeling in those moments, we're expressing a judgment or an evaluation. So recognizing that and moving away from it to I feel angry, I feel embarrassed, I feel hurt, I feel exasperated, I feel hungry, I feel lightheaded, I feel sweaty and flushed. I've like these are adjectives of ways that we feel in our body and emotions. And I think it's very, very, very difficult in this culture, and I'm speaking as a native English speaker, that we have really gotten away from being able to name feelings. There was one woman, and she wasn't a native English speaker. Her English was amazing, but she was from a different culture and a different mother tongue. But we sat with her and must have asked the question 10 times, but how do you feel about that? And she would respond with, I feel that they, and we'd say, No, no, no, come back to how do you feel? And she she literally could not name her emotion. I don't think she knew. So we had the list, like, look at this list. And and at that point, when we had her like take the time, look at the list, and like highlight, then she was able to say, I feel angry, I feel embarrassed, and and got to the emotions. But it was hard. It was very, very difficult. Okay, so that's one way. I don't have a ton of experience with this, even though I went through it with that group, because I wasn't in a place to practice it, except on my own. The second form of feedback I'm gonna talk about is one that I have actually practiced. It's called SAI feedback. The SAI stands for Situation, Action, Impact. So this was introduced at the university that I worked at by someone else who was working in interpersonal skills. And it's a really great structure. It's not difficult to use, but it's easy to misuse. So an example, and we would give students a structure for how to formulate this kind of feedback. It's it's simple, but it's also complicated. So situation would be, for example, in the meeting, and then the action would be when you started talking over Mary, our colleague. That would be the action. And here's the impact. We all stopped listening to your points, and I felt embarrassed that you would talk over her. So, again, the sentence in the meeting when you started talking over Mary, our colleague, we all stopped listening to your points, and I felt embarrassed that you would talk over her. So, in that sentence, I'm not making a judgment about the value of the person who did the talking over. I'm not saying that they were unprofessional. I'm not saying that they were mean. I'm not saying that I don't like them. I'm not saying that they were a bad person. I'm stating that the impact of their action, the action being talking over a colleague, the impact was everyone stopped listening because that was observable to the person giving the feedback. And then they can talk about their own emotional state. I felt embarrassed that you would talk over her. So there were physically observable impacts and then there were felt impacts. So neither of those is putting a value on what was said or done or saying that the person who did it was good, bad, ugly, whatever. But it was just here's what you did, and here was the impact of it. I don't think you're aware of the impact of what your words had. And again, here it's really difficult to name an action. So when we did this with students in their onboarding semester, so their first semester at this university, we wanted to give them this structure as a common vocabulary and a common expectation about what they could use for constructive feedback because these students were going to be working on project teams. Many of them had never worked in teams before, didn't know how to communicate, and we said, okay, we need to give them a structure. So we did. It had its good and bad points. So one good point, and again, we we offered this structure among workshops where they were, we were giving them a lot of different tools. This was not a standalone. We talked about growth and fixed mindsets, we talked about cultural differences, we we tried to give them ways to understand each other. And then this feedback structure was a way to actually talk to each other when things went wrong. But there was a lot of other context happening. But when we did these workshops, one of us who was facilitating would often go through a like a role-play scenario of what you might do if you were feeling impatient. So tapping a toe, looking around, looking at your watch, looking out the window, looking like you were maybe nervous or getting angry or something like that. That was what we wanted to communicate with the actions. But then what we did is we asked the students, okay, what did you observe? And they jumped straight to she was angry, she was uh waiting for someone, she was impatient. We're like, no, like what actions did you observe? Yes, she was impatient, she was looking at her watch. And then when they said looking at your watch, yes. Looking at her watch. Okay, that's an action. So we could write that on the board. What else did you observe? And then they got the hint that, like, oh, we're looking for what was done, not our judgment or valuation of what was done, not our assumptions about what it meant, but instead what was the action itself. And the idea, of course, behind that was to be able to, as with nonviolent communication, place ourselves in the role of the observer, what is happening, what action is taking place, and then what is the observable impact, either that I can see physically people doing around me, or that I myself am feeling. So to be able to communicate impact and actually action without judging or evaluating is very, very difficult because we tend to read actions and interpret words and assign meaning to them, assign intention, assign the will behind it. What's actually what's the person actually trying to say? We we we want to figure that out. That's part of our socialization, this reading between the lines and understanding. But when we're giving feedback, that evaluation and judgment isn't helpful. It stops being helpful because my judgment or my interpretation of your actions is not always correct. And if that's what I'm offering you, we might get lost in this discussion of what you intended and what you didn't. Speaking of what you intended and what you didn't, let's talk about that. Let's talk about that in the context of receiving feedback. How to receive feedback. And the first thing I want to say is when we hear feedback, it is very, very normal to respond with that was not my intention. I had a boss who would use that all the time. Whenever somebody talked about the negative impact of his words or actions, his response was, that wasn't my intention. So, okay, what did that do? In those situations, it shut down any possibility for further discussion because it basically said, I'm right, you're wrong. The impact it had on you, your feelings based on what I said or did, don't mean anything to me. The only thing that matters is my intention. And if I didn't intend to hurt you, the fact that you feel hurt is not a fact to me. It's unimportant to me. It doesn't matter. Your feelings are far less important. All that really matters is I didn't intend. So if you were hurt, that is your problem. And I think most of us don't actually think that way. So I've taken it to the sort of logical end of what that means when you say it wasn't my intention. And it maybe as you were listening to it, it made you a little bit uncomfortable and good because I think for most of us, that's not what we want to communicate, but it is what's communicated if that's what we say. So we need to remove the discussion of intention from the topic of giving and receiving feedback because it's just not helpful. I'm happy to assume that you did not intend to hurt me. I am happy to assume that you do and say everything from good intentions. I'm happy to assume that. And that's why feedback is a gift. It's saying, I don't think you know this happened. And I'm going to tell you because I assume you intended for something else and you probably want to make changes. So I'm going to tell you what happened so that you're aware and the next time it happens, the next time you're tempted to go there, you might think twice and not do it. That's what feedback is. And that's why we have to figure out how to receive it so that we can actually receive that gift. So if the impact of our words and actions is more important than the attention, that affects how we receive it. So I used to say for all of the students when I was teaching them how to receive feedback, I used to say, when you receive feedback, be quiet. Make your response a smile, a nod, a thank you for the feedback, and say no more. Because what was happening at this university is students were coming to me and my colleagues saying, I hate SAI feedback. It just doesn't work. I hate it. And so I would ask them a few questions, like, okay, tell me about when you were using it with your team. Who was the one giving it? Okay, this person was giving the feedback. Great. What happened when the other person was given feedback? What did they say? Oh, they started explaining why they did it. Uh-huh. And then what happened? Well, then everybody started arguing. Yep. That's what will happen because it's a defense mechanism. Maybe they said it wasn't my intention, or maybe they gave an excuse it was because of this. Not helpful, never helpful. And it turns the whole thing into an argument because now the person giving the feedback is trying to justify their perspective. And the person who was receiving the feedback, instead of looking at it as a gift, they look at it simply as a criticism that must be answered. So their ego is getting in the way and their desire to feel better about this and not have to look at their words or actions is getting in the way. So what I used to tell students is always receive feedback with a smile, a nod, and walk away. Walk away for two minutes, two hours, two days, but walk away because there's something magic in that time. I remember one of the project teams had this huge conflict one time, and I was their team coach. So we would meet regularly and we'd I'd facilitate discussions of what was going well and what wasn't going well and some of the hard conversations that needed to happen. Super fun job. And one team told me about how one of the team leaders had, he was telling me the story. He said that someone on the team had given him feedback that was very painful for him to hear, and he was very upset about hearing it. And he remembered what I had said about not responding, and he decided to walk away and not discuss it anymore. So this was on a Friday. And he said over the course of the weekend, his perspective changed completely, 180 degrees. He was super mad on Friday, but by the time he came back in Monday morning to work with his team, he realized that the woman who gave him feedback was absolutely correct and that he needed to hear it, that they'd been going in the wrong direction, and he was the one who was going to have to turn the boat around. And if he hadn't listened to her, they would still be going in the wrong direction and it would be much worse, much more expensive, and much harder to change. And so he was so grateful. But he also was saying to me, like, this is incredible because it was that time that allowed me to think about it. So at the time when I was when I was explaining this to students, I really would talk about it as like this sort of mysterious magic time of space between receiving the feedback and actually addressing the feedback. And not all feedback has to be addressed, by the way. Some feedback you can just take on and say thank you, and you never have to do anything with it. Maybe internally you'll decide to make a change, maybe you won't. But there's other feedback that you get that you do really have to act on. You need to find a way forward with your team, or you need to find your way forward with your partner because SAI is something I've also used in my private life. And I encouraged students to do it as well. The more I used it also in my private life, the more I realized I don't always have to have that magic space. What's the difference? And I've realized what the difference is. The difference is what my body tells me. So if I receive feedback and I immediately feel this heat in my body like rising from my chest, up my neck, into my face, up to my head. Maybe my heart starts beating faster. Maybe I suddenly my hands feel cold or like clammy. Maybe my pits start sweating. Whatever my body is reacting, if I'm getting that kind of reaction out of my body, that is the signal that you need to not say a word after getting this feedback. Let them say what they're gonna say. Listen as best as you can with all this other physical woo-woo-woo, all these sirens that are going off in your body, but listen as best as you can. If this is the response of my body, hot, cold, sweaty, clammy, heart-racing. I need to find a way to regulate myself first before I respond. What that means to regulate might mean you need to go outside and touch grass. You might need to have a snack. You might need to lift some weights. You might need to take a walk. You might need to take a nap. You might need to read a book. You might need to eat a piece of cake or have a coffee. Whatever you need to do to calm yourself, once you're calm, now you can start to let that feedback sink in and reflect and say, what's true about this? What's not true about this? What do I need to take from this? What do I not need to take from this? Is this something that demands a new process, a new way of working together? Or is this something that I simply need to shift my mentality or my mindset or my focus about this and approach it a different way? That's something you have to decide. And you either make that choice within yourself, or then you can go to the person who gave you the feedback, or maybe your whole team, depending on what the feedback was, and talk about it and find a way forward together. But until you are calm and regulated, do not even try it. Because you will start arguing, you will get defensive, because something in your body is telling you, hey, this sweaty, cold, clammy, racing heart means your body is trying to tell you something. Those are alarm bells. And what your body's probably trying to tell you is there is some truth to this that you haven't worked out yet. Because if you're given feedback and you don't have that physical reaction, it means that you can talk calmly about it pretty much right away. You can say, you're absolutely right. Yeah, when I did that, when I talked over her, I was embarrassed too after doing that. I realized I shouldn't have. I absolutely should not have talked over our colleague. Are there any things that you've seen in me that you see happen before I start talking over people? Like, is this common? You know, you can actually have a conversation about it because you're calm and you're not feeling this trigger of emotional and physical response. So if you don't feel it, go ahead and talk about it. Talk about it right away. I doubt you need that magic moment. If you want that magic moment, take it too. But if you are feeling alarm bells in your body, that's your body telling you you've got something you need to look at here because it's an uncomfortable truth and you either deal with it or not, but don't keep going down this road. I have a suggestion for people who are leading because of course feedback is something that anyone can give to anyone in any part of their life. I mean, you can try. I think what's true for leaders is that if we as people leading teams, as people leading other people, it is up to us to ask for feedback. To go to the people on our team and say, can I get your opinion? What did you think about this? What did you think about how I ran that meeting today? Was there anything that you think I should know or change? That's pretty low stakes. And it opens the door and allows for that person on your team to give you the gift of some information that you didn't have before in the form of feedback. It allows them to say something to you that they might not have felt comfortable saying to you had you not invited them to. It opens the door for that information and it also is a moment that you can build trust on because if you respond in a way of thank you, and if you haven't had an emotional or physical response, you can also say, I really appreciate that perspective. How might we improve this, or how might I improve this going forward? What are your ideas? This is magical. This is a way to show your team members how much you care about their opinion and their observations and what they have to say. And you don't believe yourself to be beyond the feedback of someone under you. No, you see them as valuable. And there's also the every chance that if you do that, they might also ask you or later start asking you for your feedback as their team lead. Hey, what did you think about this that I did? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Is there anything that I can improve? But I'll bet you they're not gonna ask you for that if you haven't already asked them for feedback. You are placing them in the role of the observer and the teacher when you ask them for feedback. If they're always just receiving it from you, then you are the authority, you are the manager, you are the leader, you are the person with all the power. Opening up that door for them to give you their thoughts and opinions is magical on a team. I would love to offer you as a challenge this week to consider the two types of feedback that I've given today: nonviolent communication and situation action impact feedback. Have you heard of either of these two before? Is this completely new to you? Have you used either one before? How has it gone? And if this is all new to you, I encourage you to you can rewind and go back to listen to the formulation with the SAI feedback. I mean, I'll give it to you right again. It's the situation or when we were in this place or situation and then action. When you did this and make sure it's an action, then this happened, and that's the impact. So I felt this, I did this, the team did this. It has to be observable. Don't take on their emotional state for yourself. You can only report on your own emotions, but you can report on observable actions and see what happens. See what happens. And it's an exciting thing to give teams. It was really great when we did this with students because it was not only offering them just as a structure, but it was giving them a vocabulary, a common vocabulary of how to talk about feedback that was less intimidating than trying to have to figure out feedback on their own and not be sure if the person would even know, oh, I'm getting feedback at this moment. With your teams, like giving giving a common vocabulary is, in my opinion, incredibly important. So I'm curious for you, and I encourage you, if you are, if you've if you've seen this before, if you've experimented with either one, let us know. If you want to try it out, you can of course buy the book Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg, or I've given you the structure for SAI, you can give it a whirl. The tricky thing is, though, without having taught someone how to receive feedback like SAI, it is a little tricky to just give it to somebody who has never heard of the concept. Because if they feel a physical negative response, the rising heat and flush in their bodies and hot, cold, heart racing, all of that, they're gonna have a hard time answering you because they probably won't know that the best thing for them to do in that moment is just to be quiet. That's a little bit tricky. How do we tell the world about SAI feedback so that everyone knows? Well, things like this podcast. So if you have someone you want to give feedback to, you can direct them to this podcast and say, hey, give this a listen. There's some interesting things about feedback, and I'd like to try something out on you. I don't know. Maybe that would be helpful. I hope so. But I hope that this for you can be a tool that you use in your work life, in your personal life, or maybe even when you receive feedback, whether it's well given or poorly given, if you have a physical response, you know what's happening and you take the time to calm and regulate yourself before you respond. Because that is gold. Knowing that and taking that time is gold. I hope this episode has been helpful. It's always helpful for me to process through it again because feedback is a huge thing, and the better we get at receiving it and giving it, the more likely we are to grow and develop and become the best or at least the better version of ourselves. That's it for today. Thanks so much for joining me. I hope you have a great day. Thank you again to Lilia Keys for her beautiful cello work at the beginning and end.