Feedback is the new black - Building Trust to Scale
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It’s no secret that feedback is an important tool for continuous improvement and building trust within your team. So why is feedback still so darn difficult? And why do we still rely on managers to do the heavy lifting here? Presented at Atlassian Summit 2019 in Las Vegas.
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Feedback is the new black - Building Trust to Scale
- 1. Feedback is the new black Building trust so you can scale @dominikkatz
- 3. One request: Please take notes on how to make this talk more engaging
- 4. Maybe even 1. What 2. Why 3. Now what
- 5. Coach.
- 6. Coach. Me?
- 7. Coach. Us!
- 8. Feedback makes things explicit helps us learn about ourselves helps us learn about others
- 9. makes things explicit helps us learn about ourselves helps us learn about others Caveat Care-factor is important Feedback
- 10. creates tension makes us uncomfortable forces us to think Feedback also
- 11. Feedback accelerates relationships, because we are forced to make decisions
- 12. Feedback accelerates team building, because we are forced to make decisions
- 14. Yesterday was about efficiency Tomorrow will be about innovation
- 15. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done. Agile Manifesto
- 16. ResultsAutonomy
- 17. By John Cutler
- 18. “I need to give my team autonomy” Photo by Allen Taylor
- 21. “Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes.” Amy Edmundson
- 23. Everyone knew the issues collectively Photo by Paul Gilmore
- 25. “A trust leap occurs when we take a risk and do something new or different from the way we’ve always done it” Rachel Botsman
- 32. Autonomy Results the right way Trust to be safe
- 34. Feedback is anything we learn about ourselves
- 35. Do you have 5 minutes? Photo by Charles
- 36. You just killed my favourite song
- 37. “[Feedback] can often feel less like a ‘gift of learning’, and more like a colonoscopy” Sheila Heen
- 38. We already know how to deliver good feedback
- 39. We already know how to deliver good feedback (through Dan North) 1. Situation Behaviour Impact (Suggestion) 2. Sandwich with something positive
- 40. Simon Us You just destroyed my favourite song. Positive start Situation Behaviour Impact Suggestion
- 41. By focussing only on giving feedback, we miss the bigger picture
- 43. 1. Mindset 2. Ask 3. Receive 4. Give
- 44. 1. Mindset: Make it safe, keep it safe 2. Ask 3. Receive 4. Give
- 45. “We judge ourselves by our intentions, but judge others based on their actions.” Stephen M.R. Covey
- 46. Understanding requires empathy (by Dave Gray)
- 47. Mindset: Make it safe; keep it safe Right mindset? Judging others
- 48. Mindset: Make it safe; keep it safe Right mindset? Judging others Assume positive intent
- 49. Mindset: Make it safe; keep it safe Right mindset? Judging others Assume positive intent Seek to understand
- 50. 1. Mindset 2. Ask: Give permission 3. Receive 4. Give
- 51. All about me!?
- 52. Ask: Give permission Hesitating to ask Be specific in what you want
- 53. Ask: Give permission Hesitating to ask Be specific in what you want Make it a habit
- 54. 1. Mindset 2. Ask 3. Receive: Embrace your resistance 4. Give
- 55. Feedback feels like an attack - we are triggered to fight it (by Sheila Heen) TruthIdentity Relationship
- 56. What if a child stopped learning how to walk because it was afraid of falling? Photo by Alexander Dummer
- 57. Receive: Embrace your resistance Dismissing feedback outright Take a breath
- 58. Receive: Embrace your resistance Dismissing feedback outright Take a breath Look for data points and themes
- 59. Receive: Embrace your resistance Dismissing feedback outright Take a breath Look for data points and themes Separate the Who from the What
- 60. 1. Mindset 2. Ask 3. Receive 4. Give: Be candid
- 61. Be radically candid (by Kim Scott)
- 62. Give: Be candid Take responsibility Go the easy way
- 63. Give: Be candid Take responsibility Go the easy way Care and Dare
- 64. Give: Be candid Take responsibility Go the easy way Care and Dare Encourage direct communication
- 65. 1. Mindset: Make it safe; keep it safe 2. Ask: Give permission 3. Receive: Embrace your resistance 4. Give: Be candid
- 68. We need to teach our team members how to fish
- 69. The best feedback is no feedback
- 70. The best feedback is no feedback (by Michael Bungay Stanier) What’s on your mind? What are your biggest challenges? What is the goal you want to achieve? How could you get there? How can I help you?
- 72. Thank you And I’m looking forward to your feedback in the lobby @dominikkatz
Editor's Notes
- The talk is called Feedback is the new black, feedback is always fashionable [new articles every day] Main point today: only look at giving feedback, missing the bigger picture, missing massive opportunities to learn and grow.
- To get to that point, we’ll touch on 3 big topics Autonomy Trust Feedback And how they fit together
- Given the topic, fitting to ask you for feedback today. Could be awkward, we don’t know each other Praise? Evaluation? Improving? Make it easy
- And if you feel like it, I’ll Be really specific What Why Now What Over lunch, I would love for you to come and let me know what you noted down. Thank you!
- Played many roles over the last few years, from agile coach to product and delivery roles But one thing that always stayed with me is being a coach: helping others and teams become the best version of themselves.
- Actually an unlikely coach Through uni and early years at work Not my place Must be intentional Don’t want to embarrass [Story spinach: believe person opposite happier to find out themselves in bathroom, rather than me embarrass]
- Until wife LOVED: Confident, no second guessing Let me know Why so grumpy – brining my mood down No question about where that necklace is for Christmas: Told me: Thanks, I can see you tried, but don’t like it. Receipt? Lovely, not mean, just Dutch, blunt Learned how I show up
- What feedback does Takes the guesswork out of interactions Learn preferences of others Learn things we didn’t know about ourselves - and others
- Caveat: works better, more receptive - if the other person actually cares
- What I also noticed Feedback creates tension Stings and makes us uncomfortable for a moment Don’t enjoy, makes us vulnerable forces us to think about us and relationship with others and make decisions how we will show up next time
- Tension and forced consideration accelerate building relationships, because we are forced to make decisions. Forced to understand how we come across who we have across from us, and decide how we continue to deal with each other.
- Tension and forced consideration accelerate team building, building resilience Cheery teams great, but not resilient Regular feedback creates little tension often and makes us resilient Why is quick team building important?
- Don’t live in the yesterday anymore where companies are structured in hierarchy goal of efficiency and compliance, think factories and banks. Senior leaders know: that’s not good enough anymore Customers expectations increase, need for responsiveness to market needs Different structure required Product teams, are becoming the norm
- Tomorrow, change will accelerate organisations will operate a network of highly autonomous teams that tackle problem- where they arise to ensure high responsiveness to the market and ability to drive innovation. That is changing: I notice: the smaller, or newer, the organisations I work with are, the more fluid are their teams.
- Big question is how to get there, and how to stay there Agile Manifesto left us a hint Motivated individuals Create the environment Trust teams to get the job done
- Organisations need willingness to give autonomy to a team, empower Team needs to prove it can delivery and earn trust The more the team delivers autonomously, the more the organization will trust the team with autonomy
- If trust is there, do it, thanks. If cycle is broken, endless loop of meetings, approvals, documentation and justification to something not done Trust goes down, governance goes up Ever had a senior leader suddenly “just curious”? Or organise the meeting for the pre-meeting On the flipside, ever had Respond to an escalated problem with “I understand, how can I help?” Or pop in to check on the team, because they are actually interested in the team members, not results?
- [Story Inga] A few years ago I was working with a senior leader in a fast growing company. Paint the picture Start up, growing quickly, new people every week Flat organisation, engaged leadership team, forming new teams to grow Basically chaos, but exciting He said I would love, and need, to give teams more autonomy, but I don’t trust them to have the right conversations Repeat Means: How to talk about issues, escalate blockers on Unsplash
- Not only results that matter, but delivering results in the right way. Otherwise you can still deliver, but you won’t ever receive the amount of autonomy you want or need.
- Contributor to performance: Psychological safety I trust you are familiar with google’s massive study and had the benefit of hearing some of the amazing speakers talk about it much better than I ever could. In case you didn’t here’s the definition
- Just as a quick recap People in team too comfortable speaking up and dominant, ends up preventing others from speaking up. That’s not the type of safety I’m talking about. I mean feeling safe as a team to Take on risks Push the boundaries and try something new , experiment Incorporate more diverse viewpoints into our thinking And to continuously improve because we are not afraid of making mistakes
- Best way for most teams to create psychological safety is by running regular retrospectives Discuss what’s working, what’s not Goal to continuously improve how we work as a team
- [Story OneGov] Working in Gov with a team Only had a few days Goal: Make Retro valuable Went for coffee with everyone individually All open, clear on #1 issue: PM is too pushy PM: It’s my job, just waiting for them to push back Everyone was clear, so we ran a little experiment Normal retro - bit more analysis before starting to work Then: Write 1 positive feedback and 1 thing someone could improve, similar structure to my request at beginning 10min Result: Happy to give positive feedback, laughs and high fives Difficult to address real issue No one addressed it Realisation Team know individually what the issue was, but not collectively Didn’t see the forest for the trees if you will Didn’t feel safe enough to address No safety, no trust Checked in after: Done before, defensive, no change
- So what is it then? I believe starting with Psychological safety in a team setting doesn’t work Humans are complex, More humans = more complexity through social interactions I struggled with this until I came across the amazing work of Rachel Botsman and how she talks about trust. She says that when we put ourselves into a situation where we are doing something new, we need to take a trust leap.
- When we are vulnerable, we have to take a trust leap into uncertainty
- Rachel encourages us to think about it as an actual leap, where we assess the risks and uncertainty involved to get to the other side.
- More variables = more uncertainty Imagine: Retro, giving feedback = new Go first = risk -> not knowing how peers / manager react? Still need to Interact after – sit next to each other Awkward convo Performance reviews nternal calculation going on assessing how much risk we are putting ourselves in to, by being the first to do something new and being vulnerable.
- Taking analogy a little further: Tempting to outsource the uncomfortable task of being vulnerable by giving feedback to your manager So a team member could’ve gone to the project manager’s peer, or his boss and ask to deliver feedback on his behalf. But it’s dangerous Think of it as the wobbly bridge across the abyss - it may look like a safer idea, but it’ll probably come back to bite us Trying to get someone else to delivery something you have to say to your team members is never a good idea Formal feedback structures are important, but we can’t rely on them. And waiting for a formal review to happen robs us of 99% of the learning opportunities.
- So instead - start small. Make the leap feel smaller, and focus on one person instead. building trust in a team has to start as a human to human thing that will lead to psychologically safe teams when scaled. And it's immensely contextual. I might trust you to help me at work, but not look after my child. But let’s start small.
- So, we said that starting with psychological safety in a team straight up may not work.
- Instead, we should start building trust with the individuals in the team.
- Once we feel safe with one or more individuals, the number of uncertain variables is reduced drastically and we may feel less vulnerable, and much safer to try something new - like giving feedback.
- We talked about how autonomy requires a trust from the organisation towards the team, and how that trust doesn’t magically appear in a team setting, but starts with the individuals within that team. Unsurprisingly, I believe that one way to create that trust is to create a culture where people are comfortable to give feedback to each other. Recap: Autonomy requires trust from org to team Trust doesn’t magically appear in a team Believe: one way: creating culture where people comfortable providing and asking for feedback
- Feedback really is everything we learn about ourselves. That can be an aching knee, the eye-roll of your 14 year old daughter, a comment about your character that you may not entirely agree with. All feedback.
- ”Do you have 5min?” and that stern look on their face, right. And I guess it’s not surprising, because a lot of our feedback experience may come from the equivalent of this bloke here.
- Definitely known for his feedback, and telling people things they didn’t know about themselves. Surely different intentions to most of us, but he is one to tell people things that they most likely didn’t know about themselves.
- Not surprising then that we often fell like feedback is less like a gift of learning, and more like a colonoscopy
- Companies already spend millions of dollars in teaching us how to deliver feedback. There’s no shortage of articles and videos on the interwebs of how to give feedback. So most likely, we already have a pretty good idea about how to do that. Just as a very short primer, this is what you’ll most likely find:
- Situation: Where and when did this thing happen? Team meeting Behaviour: What happened? Objective, non judgemental that the other person agrees to Impact: How did that make me feel? What’s my internal reaction to that? People can’t argue with that Addition: A suggestion or request of what to try to improve or change behaviour next time Start all this with something positive, and end with something positive. Often known as shit sandwich, but only when done right. Dan North has a brilliant talk about his from a few years ago.
- Applied to our previous example: Instead of “Destroyed song” - Brave of you to stand here But you didn’t hit any of your notes Based on my experience, it’ll be incredibly hard for you to find a professional career I can’t let you proceed But don’t let that discourage you. Same idea, likely different outcome. And if someone doesn’t like that, they are just really poor at receiving feedback. Not true
- By focussing only on giving feedback, we miss the bigger picture
- [Story Sarah] I’m incredibly lucky Experienced psychological safety in a team no ego involved, everyone is just focussing on a problem and it’s solution liberating to be able to share a really early draft of somethinghave it ripped apart. Not amazing In for a treat, interrupted after 5min ”DO we need to listen to this until the end, or can we give feedback right away?” But that didn’t matter, because I trusted them fully TWhat, if anything, would need ot change to get you there. How would it be different to what you are experiencing now? Over the years working with teams, I’ve come to look at feedback through 4 lenses that I want to share, today, and I hope you find practical application of these for yourselves.
- I want to share all I’ve learned about giving and accepting feedback. And tried to boil it down to 4 concepts that look broader than just giving feedback. From my life and my work can be boiled down to these 4 points. Let me explain...
- As with so many things, I believe mindset is the most important thing. It’s important to be in the right mindset before we ask for, receive or give feedback. If we are not in the right mindset, if we don’t feel safe, or are emotional, angry, then we should not seek it out. As leaders, we have the responsibility to create an environment that makes it safe to give feedback, and maintain that safety. One thing that stands in the way of safety is judgement, especially judgement without context. Listen to this:
- There’s a stark imbalance when we judge ourselves and when we judge others. I absolutely love this quote. It’s totally unfair. And it seems to rob us of curiosity. We don’t seek to understand what happened. What a waste. What a massive lost opportunity to learn. ---
- To refrain from judgement, even just for a little bit, helps us build context and empathy for the things that led someone to do or say something. The concept of liminal thinking, or ladder of inference, helps us explain this. Bare with me: - There’s reality, everything that happens in this room I only directly experience a small part of that And then there’s this tiny slither of information that I actually pay attention to. But whatever comes through that bit, I assign all the meaning to , combine it with how I grew up, make my assumptions and from conclusions, which lead me to my actions. Say I see this gentleman over there looking at me and bending his head from side to side. I just paid attention to that for some reason, and now I’m led to believe he doesn’t really understand the point I’m making. So I’m repeating myself and tell the story four different ways. You only see that I’m going over the same point over and over again and wonder what has gotten into me – and may actually look the same way now – which is another input for me. The point being, we only ever see the actions of someone, so it’s easy to assume that that is all there is. But we never see the internal thought process that lead to a certain action. There are a couple of things we can do here. 1) So let’s cut ourselves some slack. We are flawed humans, not perfect. We don’t have perfect knowledge and insight. So let’s assume there’s more going on than we see. 2) Feedback is a way to learn about ourselves, and that increases our awareness and drives better internal thought processes.
- So practically, mindset is crucial Instead of JUDGING OTHER, try Mindset: Should I be giving or receiving feedback right now? Am I emotional, or calm and centered?
- Firmly believe no one is out to offend people and break things Assume positive intent
- [Story Alyce] Learned over time: People don’t want to be centre Assumption only ask if things went well Don’t want to put myself out there
- Asking effectively for feedback requires us to be specific and why we want feedback, and on what - Do we want praise Help to improve? What do we feedback on? Gave you structure in the beginning (engaging, format) Make it a habit -Don’t celebrate a one-off, the more we do it, the more it becomes second nature
- We all face resistance when we first hear about feedback, but that’s natural. Knowing that it’s happening helps us park it
- Brain functions Brain constructed in a way that the oldest part makes sure we survive, so any threat that comes in is meat with a response of fight flight or freeze. Not surprising, but also not helpful in our current lives where everything is a bit more ambiguous. Now, receiving feedback feels like an attack on our capabilities right. So naturally, without us knowing, we are triggered to respond. That response is typically one of three when we talk about feedback We are defensive and somewhat afraid or concerned when we are about to receive feedback, but consider this: Truth, Relationship, Identity By dismissing feedback outright, we are robbing ourselves of the opportunity to learn and grow
- I’ve came across this quote recently, but couldn’t find the author anymore, but my mind kept on coming back to it. It had this quote on it. And it sounds silly in our context, but it’s exactly what we are doing. If we want to get better at what we are doing and have any chance whatsoever to master it someday, we cannot be afraid of getting feedback, because it’s the only thing he have to learn and improve.
- Lastly, giving feedback. Apart from the structure we spoke about earlier – Situation, behaviour, impact, suggestion, sandwich – which I hope you realise is pretty similar to the structure I gave you to ask at the beginning of the talk, there’s one main concept I like to keep in mind before I give feedback – and it also helps me categorise any feedback I receive.
- I love this model by Kim Scott, from her book radical candor. What she is essentially saying is that there are two dimensions to giving feedback. Our care factor, and the degree to which we dare to challenge one another. If we care feedback has a better chance of landing. need to be willing to challenge one another, which means to actually step out of our comfort zone and give the feedback. If we don’t care, we’ll come across as aggressive. But if we do care and not challenge, we are not helpful either. That’s me in the top left there, caring soo much about the other person that I don’t dare to challenge, to give feedback. That doesn’t seem right. Have a think of where you sit mostly. And for whom you are in a different corner.
- People come to me all the time with feedback about others. It honours us, we want to. Help. Don’t. Encourage them to help themselves. BUT: provide an escalation route if nothing else helps
- Summary
- Talked about handing out opportunities to improve and how to consume that information best, with the hope to create some self-awareness. Self-awareness alone doesn’t drive change in behaviour. Feeling responsible for the outcome does.
- Instead of feeding information, we need to teach our team members and peers how to fish. Creating an environment where they can form their own opinions of how to improve. Because when they do it themselves, they will have to
- Best way: Give no feedback Trust that people have the answers themselves Instead, ask questions to help them uncover
- Questions help people uncover the answers by themselves When they do, they are more likely to take responsibilities for their outcomes
- Imagine a world Org are made of trusted autonomous teams Achieve extraordinary results Share culture of trust, curiosity and learning People unafraid to be vulnerable and share observations No egos, focussed on problems and solutions Everyone knows it’s for the better