Many people are challenged with giving feedback, particularly when it isn’t wholly positive. Generally speaking, people don’t enjoy getting or giving negative feedback and may even avoid it completely.
A few decades ago, people were trained to “sandwich” difficult feedback in between two complementary pieces. Communication experts no longer recommend this for a number of reasons:
- The two positive comments often outweigh the negative. Even if the main point of the feedback was to ask someone to do things differently, the receiver’s natural tendency to put more weight on the two positives may mean the constructive feedback is not taken as seriously
- Often, those giving the feedback are not able to think of positive comments that are meaningful and make sense in the context of the constructive criticism – this leads to the feedback seeming less authentic and can show that the positives were just a thinly veiled attempt to distract from the less positive information
A more skillful approach is to look for a positive way to validate the person getting the feedback as part of the discussion. What validation means is to do one (or more) of the following prior to presenting the constructive feedback:
- Find something relevant to the constructive feedback that affirms that you see the person’s positive intention
- Show you understand some aspect of their perspective
- Indicate something you believe is true
Marry this validating statement with the constructive feedback. Avoid using the word “but.” Instead, use “and” so that the person can see both the positive and the negative as part of the same information.
For example, if Barbara is giving Benji feedback on talking too much in a client meeting, she might do the following:
“Benji, it’s really obvious that you have such passion for what we do. I think you just needed to leave more airtime for the client to express his needs because we didn’t really have a chance to hear enough from him.
I know we had really limited time in that meeting and there was a lot of pressure to get the information out; and I felt you could have done a better job of letting the client say what they had to say.
All of the information you gave the client was accurate and well said, you just needed to create more time for him to talk.”
Finish the feedback session by collaboratively talking through what the person can do differently next time.
This post comes from guest writer Christy Pettit, Owner & Founder ODSCORE inc.
