Karen: 0:08

Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Paul: 0:15

I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 0:16

And I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 0:18

Each episode, we start with a question. And we see where it takes us. This week's question is, are their feedback training wheels?

Karen: 0:29

So if you have followed the show at all, you have heard us talk about feedback, and how important it is to give feedback, and how to give feedback, and ways to do that well, and all of those things. And these are all things that I talk to my clients about. But a question that I keep getting back is, “But how do we start? You’re telling us this is really vulnerable, you're telling us it's really important, and we believe you. But also, if we do it badly, it could make a really big mess. So if we want to get better at this, how do we start? What's the shallow end of this pool?” And so that's what we're wanting to explore today. I will just mention that there are other episodes to go looking for that will talk more about how to do it and how to do it well. But this one's about how do we begin– either as individuals or as a group – if we don't know how to do it well? We just know that we ought to be doing it and we're not.

Paul: 1:36

One of the things that I recommend, for anything that we're trying to do for the first time, or we're really trying to get better at is to actually create a space for explicit practice. To say, “This is a space where we are practicing this thing. We know we are not good at it. We do not expect to be good at it. We expect to make mistakes.” And it's funny how just setting that expectation in that space does so much. You need to do more than just that; you need to then back that up. But I think one of the things that's useful – and feedback is no exception around this – is acknowledging that we are wanting to get better at it and making an explicit practice space about it. And so that can be that we're just going to build into our normal ways of working that we're going to spend five minutes in a group meeting, every day, someone's going to practice giving feedback to somebody else, and the rest of us are gonna are gonna watch. Then we can notice what we observe, we can talk about it, we can debrief it. It will feel super artificial at first, because it is. And as you start to do it a few times, it'll start to get realer and realer. So I think creating a space for explicit practice is a way to get better at anything, particularly if you're doing it as a group. If you're all saying, “The 12 of us have decided we all really need to get better at giving feedback,” then that explicit practice also creates accountability around doing it. It doesn't have to be big and heavyweight, but we're now also holding each other accountable for actually practicing the skill that we're going to do. And a part of that explicit practice is doing the debrief on it. To say, “How was that? As the person receiving the feedback, how was that? What was that like for you?” Not “Did I do a good job?” But “What was the impact of that on you? What did you notice in you as I was giving you that feedback?” Because that's really the piece that we need to start to become aware of. Need to start to become aware of what is the impact the way that we're trying to give feedback having on other people? What can we do differently that has a better impact? And so we need to get curious about the impact. And so that's a very clear thing that we can do to explicitly put training wheels on. We recognize that this is not the live thing. And our nervous systems will calm down a lot when we're in that space and allow us to actually practice the thing that we want to get better at.

Karen: 4:36

100%. Practice and naming that we're practicing, giving ourselves permission to do it badly. And then I think within that practice… When I was teaching my kids to ride bikes, I didn't put the training wheels on and then send them down the steepest hill I could find. In one case, one of my children sent himself down the steepest hill he could find, and I only remembered later that there was a big speed bump at the bottom of it. I think we want to look for types of feedback – some some parameters around feedback– that keep us away from the biggest hills, the biggest bumps, and let us have practice that's a little lower key. Some groups may need this and some not. You'll have to use your discernment about what your group is ready for. But very often the groups that are asking this question already have enough relationship strain that it just really naturally does not feel safe to start giving feedback. So in that kind of situation, I think we want to think about what are the things– What are the characteristics of feedback? What are the types of feedback? What are the conditions around feedback? – that make it more or less safe. And if we're gonna do the feedback with training-wheels-feedback-practice stuff, we want to do that in the safest end have those gradients. So I'll start with one, and then I'll pass it to Paul. I think one is how public or exposed the feedback is. And so if you're a group that struggles with safety around this kind of stuff, maybe you don't start with feedback in front of the group even in a practice setting. Maybe our first step is, “Everybody write it down. Think of feedback you'd like to give to somebody and just write it down. And now look back at it and think, ‘How would I feel if I received this feedback?’” You can do that internally. So you're getting some practice putting feedback into thoughtful words – which is a thing a lot of us haven't done much of – without that exposure of public. A next step might be to write it down, and then take that written thing and share it with someone who's not the person it's for. Share it with a third party, “How would this land if I said this to you? How would it land even though it doesn't apply to you?” So that's another step of distancing. And then even writing it down beforehand and then think about how you want to give it. If you give it to them in writing that will feel safer than if you take it and read it to them. And then the sort of graduate level on this one would be doing it publicly, spoken, without having written out in advance. That's going to be the most vulnerable. And so thinking about graduated exercises for practice that a group could do.

Paul: 7:53

Yeah, I love the idea of being aware of the things that affect the degree of difficulty of giving this feedback. And practicing at the edge where it is most useful. One of the things that – I’ve probably talked about this on the show before – there's a sweet spot, in terms of where our practice difficulty is. If we feel like we are failing 100% of the time, we're at the wrong spot. We're not actually learning from that, we're just making ourselves more anxious. But if it's no problem, if it's super easy, if we're not anxious at all about it, that means also we're not learning anything. And so it's about dialing, for you, where that degree of difficulty is. That's where you need to be practicing. And so it may be that right off the bat you're super comfortable writing the thing down. And you're super comfortable saying it to somebody who isn't the person, but putting it into words with the person? That may be your edge. And so finding that right spot where it's useful to you, it will help you grow, I think is super important. I think there are a couple of other things we can look at in terms of those gradients, or that degree of difficulty, like what influences it. One of the things that I often think about is, am I able to give you feedback about a thing that is meaningful to me? Oftentimes, if you've done a thing, and you're like “okay, whatever,” but it pushes one of my buttons. It's something that's super important to me, that I super care about. That may be a thing where I could give you perfectly articulate feedback about a thing that I noticed that's kind of important to the group, but it isn't so important to me, but I may not even be able to write what it is that I want to tell you with regards to things super important to me. So I think that's another place where you can look in terms of degree of difficulty. If I can't yet be able to give you feedback around a thing that really matters to me – like, I know I have a hot button around collaboration, people who don't seem to be interested in collaborating, and I have some issues with authority. It can be super hard for me to give people feedback articulately around those things. So maybe I don't start there. Maybe I start with being able to give you feedback about a thing that isn't as charged to me, that I want to practice with that, that I want to start there. So I think that's another dial that we can play with when we're finding a thing to work on.

Karen: 10:46

Yeah. I want to add at least one more, which is the generality. It's relatively easy to give feedback about how our organization is doing this or that or whatever. It's not very personal, because it's really broad. It's a little bit harder to talk about the group that I'm in. And then it's really much more than I said, when you're talking about a person. And even, a person and the job that they did, that's one step. And then, a thing that you do that bugs me – like a mannerism or a habit – that's probably the most. That’s not just how they do their job, but how they present themselves as a person. So that how personal it is is another gradient that we can track. And then I'll do one more, which we actually have a lot of control over if we're facilitating or if we're working with our groups, which is how much structure there is. And I would argue that your most structured feedback environment would be a skilled facilitator facilitates the interaction where the feedback is given. And then next to that would be using some structure that you know. NVC is one, Imago Dialogue is one. There are lots. You can probably Google “feedback” on the internet and come up with five more in about a minute. But a structure that both parties agree, “We'll use this structure,” that's going to increase safety. And the kind of freeform approach is going to be the least safe. And that's not to say that's not a place to get to. But you probably don't want to match freeform with the hardest end of all the other gradients. The more that you're in the more difficult feedback, the more you want to add structure. Or the more you're a beginner and you're in a practice space, use a structure to get started.

Paul: 12:56

And I think that the piece around structure and practice… I think it's important for us to be clear about what it is that we are wanting to get out of the practice. For example, one of my favorite formats for for giving feedback is very commonly known Situation-Behavior-Impact (SBI) feedback. “In this situation, you exhibited this behavior, it had this impact.” Drawing a very clear line there. It might be that what I need to practice is just making that sound like me. Just getting the the words familiar enough, getting it so that that doesn't sound stilted, so that it sounds natural, it flows easily. I might be trying to become familiar and fluid with that structure. It might also be that I'm trying to get familiar with unpacking my thoughts and fitting them into that structure. It might also be that I'm wanting to practice with different types of things going into that structure. So going back to our degrees of difficulty or a gradient sort of thing, I'm super good at using this this structure and it seems super effective when I'm talking about general policies in the workplace. I have real hard problems when it's a particular behavior that you do. And so I think it's important – particularly when we're practicing with a structure, but when we’re practicing generally– for you to be aware, what is it about that that you are practicing? Because that also gives you an opportunity to figure out what help you're going to ask for from the other person or from the group. Whoever your practice partners are, if you can let them know this is the thing that I'm working on – this is asking for feedback on how you give feedback, so it's getting a little meta here – but it's actually being explicit about“Here's what I'm trying to get better at, here's how you can help me.” Or “Please help me with this thing.” And I think that's the valuable part of identifying what is hard for you about giving feedback. It then allows you to ask the group to support you in getting better at that thing.

Karen: 15:15

Yeah. I think just the final piece to say here is, as you're practicing, make sure you're also thinking about what those good practices are. And I think one that's worth just

mentioning here: 15:29

Even within practice, even at the very beginning training wheels, at the very easiest of every gradient, even if you're writing it out for yourself, I think it's worth getting really solidly in the habit of getting permission for feedback first. Just make that part of your ritual, “Are you open to some feedback?” “Are you available for feedback?” Something like that, so that that essential piece doesn't get missed. And then all the others, which we're not going to go into in this episode. But it's not just about, “Well, I was supposed to give feedback, so you can't be offended because I said it badly.” As you build practice, you also have to be accountable for how I deliver the feedback, what my practices are, the way I go about it. So there's the piece of get your courage up, which we hope gets easier because we created some easier spaces. But it's also about bringing some skills, which we talked about in other episodes.

Paul: 16:25

Absolutely. And then the idea is that as you do this, it then starts to blend into the outside practice space. It starts to become more natural, it starts to become more fluid. And you can start to pull off some of the training wheels in spots. Like you realize you're in a moment where you want to give somebody some feedback, you still gonna ask permission. And you may say, “I'm still working on this,” and they go, “Okay, great.” And then you don't have all of your rituals that you have around that to create that space, and you just kind of do it. And the idea is that those kinds of relax over time, so that starts to come out of the explicit practice space, into the general practice space. Into the “how we are working together.” Starting to take the training wheels off, for limited runs on flat ground, on the easy stuff, and maybe having them on in the slightly harder things. But then being able to slowly relax some of those constraints as it becomes more natural, as our courage gets up, as we discover that we are able to do this more skillfully. Then we can start to to relax some of those things and start to take them off a little.

Karen: 17:34

So just to summarize, we still think feedback is important. This is not new news. We still think it's hard. Also not new news. But we wanted to talk today about knowing that it's important and that it's hard, how do we get better at it? What are the beginning steps? What's the training wheels version of feedback? And how can we work on that? And we talked about first naming a practice space, so that you have that safety of this is a space where we're going to make mistakes, where we're going to do it badly. In that practice space, do the meta thing where you get feedback about how well you gave feedback, and you can learn about kind of what's the impact and how it lands. And then think about gradients that make it easier or harder, and pick the easier ones. So picking less public, possibly even to the point of writing it down so it's not shared with anyone as a starting point. And then gradually in front of more people. Less heated in whatever way or less important to both the feedback giver and the feedback recipient. Things that are less charged and things that are less personal. More organizational level or activity level type things as opposed to person or personality type things. And then more structured. Using structures for feedback. Those are all places to start. We're not hoping you'll finish there. But if you're looking for the training wheels – what are those beginning places? – start with those in a regular practice, getting feedback, and continuing to build skills in that zone of practice where you're a little anxious but not terrified.

Paul: 19:20

That's where learning happens: where you're a little anxious and not terrified. Well, that's gonna do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 19:29

And I'm Karen Gimnig. And this has been Employing Differences.