Continuous Feedback

Last updated February 27, 2023

Feedback is an important part of both personal and professional growth. This document contains my thoughts around the goals of feedback and a process that I’ve found to be effective to encourage a culture of continuous feedback.

Healthy Feedback

We share feedback because we want to help each other grow. Positive and reinforcing feedback is good, but it is through challenging feedback or feedback about growth opportunities that we grow most. Therefore we want to do everything we can to make everyone feel comfortable both sharing and receiving challenging feedback.

Two things are necessary to encourage healthy feedback discussion:

A healthy, trusting relationship within the team.
- I like to build trust and camaraderie within the team by making some space every week or two for the team to hang out without talking about work for a little while, either through a team lunch or outing, or taking some time to play board games or an online game like Skribbl.io or Gartic Phone.
A culture that encourages continuous feedback.
- This page documents a process so everyone on the team can give and receive feedback regularly. Eventually, the process would ideally become unnecessary and continuous feedback would happen naturally.

Feedback Philosophy

The goal of feedback is to help each other grow. If we never give challenging feedback or feedback that helps another team member grow, we are not achieving our goal. When giving feedback to another person, please try to always include something they could change to help them grow.

There are many feedback philosophies and proceesses, like various types of group feedback, but I have found 1:1 feedback to be most effective for a few reasons:

Not everyone is comfortable with giving (or receiving) feedback in a group setting
Experience has suggested that group settings promote lots of positive feedback but may inhibit the sharing of challenging feedback
Getting team members to meet and interact 1:1 helps the team to build deeper, more trusting connections

Process

The following is a process I have employed on teams that I’ve led. It creates space for everyone to give and receive quality feedback regularly.

Each person will give 1:1 feedback to one other person on the squad every two weeks, according to a predetermined rotation. Each person will have exactly one person to think about feedback for, which should enable them to give quality feedback. This also means that each person will receive feedback from exactly one other person every two weeks, and has time to reflect on it and think carefully about it. In this way, each member of the team will give (and receive) feedback from each other member once over the course of one full rotation.

Feedback process cheat sheet

Always assume positive intent!

Step	Giver	Receiver
1	Ask if now is a good time for feedback.	It’s okay to say no! Check in with yourself to see if you’re in the right mental state to recieve feedback before saying yes.
2	Explain the specific behavior you’re giving feedback about and the impact it has on you. Avoid assumptions - just stick to facts. Eg. “When you were late to my meeting this week, it made me feel like you don’t value my time.”	Listen and try to understand, without interrupting. Put aside any feelings or defensiveness you may have try to understand the giver’s perspective.
3	Check that the receiver understood your feedback and leave space for them to ask questions and discuss.	Repeat back what you heard and ask questions to clarify.
4	Listen as the receiver acknowledges the feedback and clarify if necessary.	Acknowledge how your actions made the giver feel, put yourself in their shoes and demonstrate that you understand why they felt as they did.
5	Have suggestions for how to help or what to do differently, but don’t share unless they’re open to hearing it.	Suggest how you might change behavior, or ask for suggestions, then decide what to do differently in the future, if anything. It’s okay to ask for time to consider.