Vox

Leitura de 13 min

How to Give Better Feedback - My Single Biggest Piece of Advice to Increase the Effectiveness of Your Feedback

Summary

Feedback is a critical and increasingly important skill as one advances in their career, from senior individual contributor to leadership roles like manager, director, or CTO. The ability to deliver and receive feedback effectively is paramount for inciting positive change without creating conflict.

The core advice for improving feedback is a fundamental mindset shift: stop thinking about what is bothering you personally and instead identify a concrete problem that both you and the recipient care about solving. This means moving away from sharing grievances, emotional responses, or mere opinions. Instead, visualize sitting next to the person, aligning with them to address an observable issue their behavior is causing in the world—a problem they themselves would agree needs fixing.

This approach works because it engages the recipient’s thinking brain rather than triggering their defensive emotional brain. When people feel a spotlight on their identity or personal failings, they become defensive. By framing feedback as a collaborative problem-solving session, you circumvent this natural defensiveness. The goal is to help the person recognize that their actions are creating an outcome they themselves do not want, making them a willing partner in change.

The strategy is particularly suited for professional environments. It doesn’t require a deep personal commitment but does require attentiveness to the other person’s emotional state to ensure the feedback lands effectively. The functional commitment is to work together well, with kindness and friendship being valuable additions on top of that foundation. Ultimately, effective feedback is an exercise in paying attention to the other person, not an act of catharsis for the giver.

Topic Timeline

  • 00:00:00 — The critical importance of feedback as a career skill — The episode opens by establishing feedback as a vital part of any job, whose importance grows with career advancement into senior, managerial, and leadership roles. It’s framed as a skill that must be developed intentionally to incite change and achieve desired outcomes without creating animosity.
  • 00:02:09 — The single biggest piece of advice for better feedback — The host presents the core advice: stop thinking about what’s bothering you and instead figure out a problem you both care about. This is a shift from sharing grievances or emotional opinions to finding a shared, observable issue caused by the behavior. The key is to get on the same side as the other person to fix it.
  • 00:04:11 — Why the recipient must agree the problem is real — For feedback to be acted upon, the recipient needs to understand and agree that a change is necessary. The most effective way to achieve this is not through threats or incentives, but by helping them see that their behavior is causing a result they themselves do not want. The focus is on finding shared common ground on a specific problem.
  • 00:06:04 — The psychological trick of collaborative problem-solving — Sitting next to someone to solve a problem ‘short-circuits’ their feeling brain with their thinking brain, moving them from a defensive posture to a calculative one. Research suggests that when engaged in problem-solving, people think less about being offended. This reframes the conversation away from personal judgment.
  • 00:07:22 — Navigating the sensitivity and defensiveness of feedback — Feedback naturally triggers defensive mechanisms because people often feel their identity or personhood is under attack. The feedback giver must recognize this sensitivity. If feedback is given merely to ‘get it off your chest,’ it’s a cathartic act for the giver, not constructive feedback, and will not be effective.
  • 00:08:12 — Applying this feedback model in professional relationships — This feedback strategy is designed for professional environments where a deep personal commitment isn’t imperative for a functional work relationship. The nuance is that you, as the feedback giver, must pay close attention to the other person’s feelings to ensure the feedback lands, but you don’t need to force them to care about your personal feelings.
  • 00:10:20 — The one piece to capture: share a problem, not feelings — The host reiterates the central takeaway: in a professional environment, your feedback should be delivered not by sharing your personal feelings, but by presenting a problem you want to solve with the person. This final summary encapsulates the entire episode’s thesis on effective, change-inducing feedback.

Episode Info

  • Podcast: Developer Tea
  • Author: Jonathan Cutrell
  • Category: Technology Business Careers Society & Culture
  • Published: 2023-05-05T07:00:00Z
  • Duration: 00:11:35

References

Podcast Info

Transcript

[00:00:00] Feedback is a critical part of your job and it comes even more critical as you grow in

[00:00:16] your career.

[00:00:17] As you become a second level or a senior or a manager or a director or a VP or a CTO.

[00:00:26] At each of those layers, your need for delivering feedback and for receiving feedback and teaching

[00:00:36] others to do that increases.

[00:00:40] And it can’t be overstated how important it is to develop this skill.

[00:00:48] Yes, feedback is a skill.

[00:00:52] Even though we produce feedback, no matter what we do, in other words, whether I am

[00:01:00] trying to or not, I am providing some kind of signal to the people around me.

[00:01:07] But if we are intentional and we shape our feedback correctly, we can actually get more

[00:01:12] of what we care about.

[00:01:14] We can actually incite change where we need to incite change without making enemies left

[00:01:21] and right.

[00:01:22] So I want to tell you the simplest advice, the one piece of advice that I have for you

[00:01:31] in correcting your feedback.

[00:01:33] You almost certainly have a problem with your feedback if you’re like most people.

[00:01:37] In fact, even if you know this advice, you may still have a problem with it.

[00:01:41] And I hope that you will listen to the advice again.

[00:01:45] Good advice usually is worth listening to more than once.

[00:01:49] Most of the time, good advice is applicable more than once because we take it, we try

[00:01:55] to apply it, we fail, and then we cycle back again.

[00:02:00] So this is a reminder for those of you who already know.

[00:02:04] And hopefully this is a new insight for those of you who don’t.

[00:02:09] The simplest way to improve your feedback is to stop thinking about what’s bothering

[00:02:18] you and instead figure out a problem that you both care about.

[00:02:26] Let me state this a different way.

[00:02:30] Stop sharing grievances as feedback.

[00:02:34] Stop sharing your emotional response as feedback.

[00:02:40] Stop sharing your, even your opinion as feedback.

[00:02:45] And instead, find a problem that is being created and get on the side of the other person

[00:02:56] to fix it.

[00:02:59] This is a simple shift, a simple change in the way you’re thinking about the problem.

[00:03:05] If you had to visualize this, imagine that you, in the first picture where you’re sharing

[00:03:10] your grievances or standing over somebody while they’re sitting in a chair listening

[00:03:14] to you kind of preach at them, giving them a sermon of everything they’re doing wrong.

[00:03:21] And the shift is to instead sit next to them.

[00:03:27] Sit next to the person.

[00:03:28] You don’t have to literally do this, but it may actually be a physically representative

[00:03:35] way to think about this problem.

[00:03:38] Sit next to the person and find the problem that this behavior is generating.

[00:03:45] The problem is not just your emotional response.

[00:03:49] The problem is not that it’s a grievance.

[00:03:51] It’s what is this actually causing in the world?

[00:03:55] What is the observation that I can make with that person that they too will agree is a

[00:04:04] problem?

[00:04:07] This is the critical piece that you can’t miss.

[00:04:11] The other person for them to act on your feedback, they need to understand and essentially agree.

[00:04:20] They need to agree that this change needs to happen.

[00:04:24] You can get somebody to agree to making a change with incentives.

[00:04:30] You could get them to agree by threatening them.

[00:04:34] These are all potential pathways, but one of the best ways that you can get somebody

[00:04:40] to agree to act on your feedback is if they actually think the feedback is true.

[00:04:47] If they believe that some activity they’re partaking in, some behavior, some action they

[00:04:53] are taking or have taken has caused something that they don’t want, that’s the key, right?

[00:05:03] Their behavior has caused something that they don’t want to cause and you’re pointing

[00:05:08] it out.

[00:05:09] You’re helping them recognize something that maybe they are not recognizing on their own.

[00:05:15] Their behavior is doing something in the world that they don’t want to be done.

[00:05:22] Here’s an important point here.

[00:05:24] I’m not saying that they have to agree with you on every point.

[00:05:27] I’m also not saying that they have to agree with every single problem that you have with

[00:05:32] their behavior.

[00:05:33] In other words, maybe it is a problem that what they do gets under your skin because

[00:05:39] it causes you to be distracted, but that may not be a problem for them.

[00:05:47] The critical factor here is that you’re trying to find shared common ground.

[00:05:53] You’re trying to find a problem that that person will also agree is a problem.

[00:05:59] Part of this shift is a kind of a psychological trick.

[00:06:04] What you’ve done by sitting next to them and asking them to solve the problem with you

[00:06:10] is you’ve kind of short circuited their feeling brain with their thinking brain.

[00:06:16] Instead of being on the defense and trying to decode all of the social signals that you’re

[00:06:23] sending, you’ve asked them to calculate something.

[00:06:26] This means that they have to think a little bit harder.

[00:06:30] They have to think on a different wavelength.

[00:06:32] And there is some good research around this that when you’re trying to solve a problem,

[00:06:38] you’re not thinking as much about how offended you are.

[00:06:44] That’s the layman’s way of describing this research.

[00:06:47] And it’s incredibly effective as a feedback strategy because you’re trying to actually

[00:06:54] focus on a problem.

[00:06:57] So often feedback goes wrong because people feel like the spotlight is put on them.

[00:07:03] On them as a person.

[00:07:04] On their identity.

[00:07:06] On some mistake that they made that they didn’t mean to make.

[00:07:11] Some kind of personal judgment against their abilities or against their existence.

[00:07:17] This is the way that people naturally parse negative feedback.

[00:07:22] And so it’s your job as the feedback giver to recognize that feedback is a very sensitive

[00:07:29] arena to play in.

[00:07:32] Feedback triggers so many defensive mechanisms.

[00:07:36] And the problem is if you’re just giving feedback to give it, if you’re just sending feedback

[00:07:43] because you needed to get it off your chest, you’re not giving feedback at all.

[00:07:49] Instead, you’re doing something for yourself.

[00:07:53] You’re engaging in some kind of cathartic response to another person’s behavior.

[00:07:59] That’s not feedback and it’s never going to do you any good.

[00:08:04] Now it’s important to recognize that this kind of feedback is not necessarily universal.

[00:08:12] This isn’t necessarily how you would go about sharing feedback in a relationship that is

[00:08:21] not strictly a professional relationship.

[00:08:25] This works in a professional environment because you don’t need to have any personal commitment

[00:08:30] to each other for this to be useful.

[00:08:33] In other words, no matter how much you like your coworkers, at the end of the day, your

[00:08:39] responsibility to your coworkers sort of ends at the boundary of your work environment.

[00:08:46] You may choose to extend that relationship, but it’s not imperative.

[00:08:51] And so you can functionally, even though this may not necessarily be the way that you operate,

[00:08:58] you can functionally not really care too much about each other’s feelings.

[00:09:04] It’s not necessarily a requirement to have a successful work relationship.

[00:09:10] This seems crazy to say that you don’t need to think about other people’s feelings as

[00:09:15] a part of a discussion on feedback.

[00:09:19] But it’s not so much you’re not thinking about other people’s feelings, but rather that you

[00:09:24] don’t need to force other people to think about yours.

[00:09:28] There’s a subtle difference here.

[00:09:32] You as the feedback giver are paying a lot of attention to other people’s feelings.

[00:09:38] Not because you’ve committed to fostering an emotional relationship with that person,

[00:09:45] but instead because you understand that the high functioning relationships that you have

[00:09:50] with the people at work require you to pay attention to their feelings.

[00:09:55] Because if you walk into a session where you’re about to share some difficult feedback with

[00:09:59] a coworker and you do so with no regard to their feelings, that feedback is going to

[00:10:06] fall entirely flat, as we’ve already mentioned.

[00:10:10] You sharing your feedback with another person is an exercise in paying attention to their

[00:10:17] emotional state.

[00:10:20] If you can capture this one piece from this episode, let it be this, that your feedback

[00:10:28] should be delivered instead of you sharing your personal feelings in a professional environment.

[00:10:36] Instead, you share a problem that you want to solve with the person.

[00:10:44] Thanks so much for listening to today’s episode of Developer Tea.

[00:10:48] Hopefully that last little portion where I say that you don’t have to care about each

[00:10:51] other’s feelings, you understand that I’m not saying that that is the right way to think

[00:10:55] about relationships at work, but instead that it is a functional commitment that you

[00:11:01] are making.

[00:11:02] You are making a commitment to work together well.

[00:11:06] And then on top of that, you can become friends and treat each other kindly, then I certainly

[00:11:12] hope that you will do that as well.

[00:11:15] Thanks so much for listening to this episode.

[00:11:16] If you enjoyed this discussion and you’d like to carry it forward, please join the Developer

[00:11:21] Tea Discord community at developertea.com slash Discord.

[00:11:25] Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, enjoy your tea.

Visão de gráfico