How to Give & Receive Feedback
Welcome to the Leadership Vision Podcast, our show helping you build a positive team culture. Our consulting firm has been doing this work for the past 25 years, ensuring that leaders are mentally engaged and emotionally healthy.
Giving and receiving feedback can often be the catalyst to create long-lasting, sustainable change in attitude and disposition within an organization or culture. In this episode, we discuss how leaders can prepare to give and receive feedback, as well as the five norms of giving and receiving feedback to others. Enjoy!
How to Prepare to Recieve Feedback
A leader’s preparation to give feedback is the most overlooked part of the feedback process. We use the following steps to prepare leaders to give and receive feedback.
Step 1: Reflect
All leaders have defining moments in their life when either a blind spot or a way of interacting was acknowledged and a sustained change was made. The first way that we help leaders prepare to give and receive feedback is to help them remember the moments when they themselves received feedback that caused a lasting change.
We believe your lived experience is your best teacher. One of the things that we seek to do is to put people back into their lived experience to help them remember what happened, what was said, how they felt, and to learn from those things and bring them forward into their future. We want to remind leaders what it was like to receive feedback.
Step 2: Share
Next, we ask leaders to consider the following questions when preparing to give and receive feedback. As you’re listening to this episode, pretend you’re going to get feedback and respond to the questions. This type of exercise will be really helpful for you to show up, be engaged and really participate in a constructive conversational way of giving and receiving feedback.
When have you received feedback that you heard and then acted on? What changed? What adaptations were made? Spend a few moments thinking about a time when you heard feedback that caused an immediate and instantaneous change. Think about the emotions you felt when this happened.
When have you given feedback that was heard and acted on? Think of a time when you gave feedback to another team member. What happened? How did it make you feel when the feedback was received and acted upon?
Step 3: Set Guidelines
The third thing we ask leaders to do in preparation for giving feedback is to have a discussion and name some of the ground rules for giving and receiving feedback. We have found that teams and environments that adhere to actual norms or guidelines actually respond better to feedback.
5 Guidelines for feedback
In our research and work, we have found there are generally four common norms or guidelines to giving and receiving feedback. We utilize five guidelines because we want leaders to make up the fifth rule on their own that suits their unique culture or organization.
1. Have a humble posture. Show up in a way where you’re extending curiosity and compassion towards the other person.
2. Really listen. When you’re giving feedback, we want you to really embrace this idea of showing up openness. Imagine showing up for feedback and really listening to how someone is feeling when you’re giving the feedback and how someone is responding to the feedback.
3. Engage. Really plug into the conversation. Be engaged in this conversational process of giving feedback. Show up be present.
4. Participate. Ask the person what you can do to help support them in their process, ask them if they need to have more information or what’s going to help them with their understanding.
5. Make up the final rule for your organization. What do you need to put into place? What will be helpful for your team culture?
Your Feedback Process
We really want to invite you to step into this process of giving and receiving feedback because it will build up your confidence. If you’re confident going into the feedback process, you’re going to be calm. If you’re calm, the person receiving the feedback will be calm, and it will also create the chance for you to have a conversational tone to the feedback process.
We’d love to hear from you! If you have questions about anything you heard in the podcast, please send an email connect@leadershipvisionconsulting.com.
About The Leadership Vision Podcast
The Leadership Vision Podcast is a weekly show sharing our expertise in the discovery, practice, and implementation of a strengths-based approach to people, teams, and culture. We believe that knowing your Strengths is only the beginning. Our highest potential exists in the ongoing exploration of our talents.
Please contact us if you have ANY questions about anything you heard in this episode or if you’d like to talk to us about helping your team understand the power of Strengths.
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