Boost your Company Feedback Culture in 4 Weeks
By: Iván Martínez
Tags: Management And Leadership, Company Culture, Feedback, Mentoring

Boost your Company Feedback Culture in 4 Weeks

One of our core values at Ontruck is “Always learning, always improving”. That’s the reason why we actively work on creating and maintaining a healthy Feedback Culture.

In this article, we share a simple yet effective tool — a 4 sessions Feedback Mentoring Programme — that you can use in your company to boost your Feedback Culture.

The tool: a Feedback Mentoring Programme

Why a Mentoring Programme?

A company Feedback Culture is directly related to how skilled the people in that company are in giving and receiving feedback.

Giving and receiving feedback effectively is not as easy as it may seem; it is actually a quite complex skill to master. A set of techniques help build that skill, and a mentoring programme is the most suitable tool to learn and practice them.

Who should be the Mentor and the Mentoree?

The mentor must be somebody with a validated experience in giving and receiving feedback. Usually, the best-rated managers are very good at it — and that’s no coincidence. At Ontruck we have some feedback champions, some in People team, some at the Engineering Management level; you should look for your champions.

The mentoree can be potentially anybody interested in improving. At Ontruck, we explicitly work on Feedback skills as part of our Career Development Plans.

How does the Programme work?

We’ve been using and refining our Feedback Mentoring Programme for more than a year now. The setup that works the best for us is 4 sessions of 45 min each with a week between sessions, plus a monthly follow up during a couple of months.

Session 1: Giving Positive Feedback

Session 2: Giving Negative Feedback

Session 3: Receiving Feedback

Session 4: Wrap-up

Where does the content come from?

We’ve not reinvented the wheel. On the contrary, we’ve cherry-picked from several validated and widely used sources — from Dale Carnegie to Kim Scott — the techniques we think work best in most cases.

The content: 4 sessions in detail

Session 1 —Giving Positive Feedback

Positive feedback is the most effective type of feedback. Positive reinforcement has a much greater impact on people and increases self-confidence, motivation, and commitment.

Your natural tendency will be to talk to people when they’re doing something wrong — correcting seems more urgent than reinforcing — but you should make an effort to detect situations where you can share positive feedback with your teammates.

There is a huge difference on the impact of effective positive feedback compared to weak positive feedback: effective positive feedback about a certain behaviour will make the receiver focus on maintaining or even reinforcing that behaviour; an ineffective or weak positive feedback will just serve as praise, but the receiver won’t be able to improve.

Rules for effective positive feedback:

Give praise immediately . If you let time go by, the recognition will have less impact.

. If you let time go by, the recognition will have less impact. Be sincere . Never pretend, because people can tell. You have to really mean it.

. Never pretend, because people can tell. You have to really mean it. Describe exactly what the person did well. Specify the act, behaviour, or concrete achievement.

what the person did well. Specify the act, behaviour, or concrete achievement. Explicitly describe the impact of the behaviour you are trying to reinforce.

of the behaviour you are trying to reinforce. Never invalidate the praise: Avoid expressions like “better late than never,” “but,” “although,” “for the first time“, “finally”…

the praise: Avoid expressions like “better late than never,” “but,” “although,” “for the first time“, “finally”… Do it publicly if possible.

Some examples:

Wrong: “Your past month presentation was amazing, way better than the previous one, congratulations!”

Right: “Your presentation yesterday was amazing, as you managed to explain that complex technical concept with simple words and examples that the audience was able to understand. Congratulations!”

Sync or async?

While async is ok, face to face positive feedback has some beneficial side effects, such as building a stronger positive relationship with the receiver.

Exercises during the session:

Mentor gives positive feedback to the mentoree — mentor should have prepared it in advance. Discuss:

- how it felt from both perspectives.

- did it follow the rules?

- how could have it been more effective? Mentoree gives positive feedback to mentor — let mentoree prepare it for 5 min. Discuss:

- how it felt from both perspectives.

- did it follow the rules?

- how could have it been more effective?

Exercises to complete during the week, before the next session: