Giving and receiving feedback is a critical skill for all leaders. Good feedback is the kind that makes you want to go back to work. It’s not the kind that feels brutal for three days or the kind that says you are the greatest thing in the world. It is specific and particular.
I, like many others, have had difficulty with both giving and receiving feedback in the past. But a conversation with Liz Lerman, choreographer and author of the Critical Response Process, helped me think differently.
She asks, “What puts us in the place to take the things we need to hear? A part of it is respecting the other person. And we also have to be in a place to get it. Feedback is all positive and all opinion. It’s the authentic truth of what is my experience of what you just did.”
I felt relieved from this perspective. Feedback felt much more productive for me when we take ownership to create conditions to be ready to hear it and interpret it as helping us be ‘right’ rather than proving we were ‘wrong.’
In your next feedback session, two tools you can use to improve feedback conversations are:
1) Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process, a four step facilitated dialogue originally designed to assist artists at the early stage of creation, now used widely. I have found it to transform these conversations!
2) FeedForward designed by Marshall GoldSmith, where participants choose one behavior they would like to change and ask for feedforward, two specific suggestions for the future that might help them achieve a positive change in their selected behavior.
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