Overcoming fear of feedback
By: Anne-Laure Chadeyras
Tags: Self Compassion, Feedback, Feedback Culture, Self-awareness, Team

Delivering feedback in a remote world

Laxmi Kerai covered this section. She has worked in the digital industry for over 12 years, has delivered lots of feedback and it has not always landed well. On top of these feedback horror stories, Laxmi gave us keys to not only learn from the bad feedback experiences instead of burying them and never mentioning them again but also to help us get better at delivering feedback.

Just like many other things there is never one way of delivering feedback. It is all about talking and behaviours. The first tip when working on feedback delivery is to do a self retrospective after delivering feedback: what worked well . What could be improved? What have I learned from it? These three questions are not fixed, there are many toolkits around feedback delivery, and this self retrospective is just one of them.

When it comes to feedback, there are many tools at our disposal to try and make the experience positive and constructive. The Johari window is one of them. It is a psychological tool created in 1955 that’s like a self awareness window.

This window of yourself evolves over time. The larger the open self part is, the more effective you are in delivering feedback. However, when remote, your open self is less visible to others. To fix that, we need to proactively help make the unknowns know. Using the Johari window is a way of making progress in feedback delivery. The Johari window can be done individually or as a team.

After delivering feedback, it is important to, in turn, ask for feedback. There are many ways of doing this, including:

On a scale of 1 to 5, 1 = terrible and 5 = it totally rocked my world, how was the session for you?

How can this catch-up be more useful for you?

What was good and what could improve about this catch-up?

Before everyone leaves, can I get a thumbs up or down on how you found this catch-up?

Visual cards — pick an image which represents how you feel this meeting went

When using this type of language, the feedback becomes a partnership. Quite a lot of tools can help achieve this language of partnership:

Me manuals — https://www.manualof.me

Icebreakers — https://icebreaker.range.co

Check ins — https://academy.nobl.io/why-a-quick-check-in-makes-meetings-more-effective

1–2–1s — You can build a co-designed agenda using Notion like https://www.notion.so/Day-Date-53d4ef44bbce411faaf5f9c6fcb6a7d9

Team fun time

There are a few things to think about before delivering feedback, like how can the feedback help bridge the gap, what is a concrete example to work through, what is it like for the other person… Having a concrete example is very important. Telling someone you felt frustrated because they interrupted you twice during a meeting is way more efficient than telling them you were annoyed with them at the meeting. This is valid for any feedback delivery but there are a few extra tips when delivering that feedback remotely. These include looking into the camera if possible to have eye contact, using a clean open-ended language. But at the end of the day, giving feedback, like many other things in life is about practice. There is never one way of delivering feedback and knowing the person will help figuring out what time of feedback works best and when.

In conclusion, alway remember to be kind to yourself in the process of giving feedback.