Intro

I gave this lightning talk at the on-line, audio only conference called Spaces Con on the 12th of October 2022. On this page you can find both the recording, and the cleaned up transcript. The clean up was very minor and only removed filler words; it also ignores the verbal stumbles. At the bottom of this page you'll find the links to the resources I mention in this talk.

Recording

Transcript

Marino (the host)

You're going to be talking to us about "I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want". So let's go for it.

Ania (the speaker)

Indeed, so I will be talking to you about feedback.

What is feedback? It is telling someone what you think about something that they have or haven't done. It can be a praise or a criticism.

Where do we encounter feedback? In tech a very common place is pull requests. People leave feedback on your code. They make suggestions for improvements and help you catch buggy code before it makes it to production. And more generally at work 360s is probably where you do encounter feedback and that is the twice-a-year ask-your-colleagues-for-feedback thing. But also you can give feedback day-to-day if needed.

Why do we want to give feedback? To produce better work as a team, to help others grow and to get what you really, really want.

Who can give feedback? Anyone can give feedback. Generally feedback comes from peers or a line manager, but it can go up the hierarchy so to speak. My workplace does Peakon surveys, yours probably does something similar. Having said this, you may want to exercise caution on how you phrase things if you do feed up the chain.

When do we give feedback? It's important to give feedback in a timely fashion, and that means sometimes as soon as possible. And this applies especially to things that need urgent and immediate change. But sometimes you want to wait until you have enough evidence that something is, or isn't, happening.

Now, how can we give feedback in pull requests? I recommend the Conventional Comments framework. The idea is that you put a word or two in square brackets before your comment to convey the tone. "Observation", "question", "blocker", "typo" are examples of words that I've used in the past. And you'd be really surprised on how much difference this makes to set the frame of mind of the receiver.

And how do we give feedback on actions and behaviours? I've encountered two models, the first one is called AID model and that stands for Action, Impact, Desired behaviour. The second model is called the Nonviolent Communication model, and there you make an observation, you state your feelings, you state your needs and then make a request. Overall, the two are much of a muchness. They both rely on the same key points, it's just sort of described differently depending on which one you look at.

You start by giving specific examples of things that happened. You want to avoid words like "always" or "never". So if you're frustrated with a colleague because they "always" do something wrong, think to yourself, "well, this person does this task every week and they've done it wrong last week. But before then, what were the other two instances?" And if you discover that actually it was six months ago and a year ago, then it's not "always" they're doing something wrong. You're just a bit frustrated and it might be a good idea to relax and take it easy.

The next thing is the impact, and that might require introspection. And it can be really tricky to figure out. What exactly are your feelings? What exactly are your needs? What is the short and long-term impact on the team? It does require time and it is OK to just sit and try to ask yourself why, why, why? To get to the crux of what's the impact of the behaviour that you're seeing.

And the final step is to tell them either to continue doing what they are doing or what you want them to do in the future. You want to provide links to specific resources or approaches they could take. If they've got stuck on a particular conversation, you can provide examples of dialogue on how to handle things in the future.

I'm going to give you a successful example of when I gave feedback to somebody, it was taken in and you know, they started doing what I really, really wanted. So I had a colleague who when they asked for help via slack, they treated it as a real time conversation. They wrote "hello" and then waited for my reply, then "can you help me?" - waited for a reply. And that was a bit frustrating, a bit of a context switching for me. So I took opportunity of the 360 and sent the feedback to their manager that got passed on and the feedback read: what I would like to see as a single message. "Hello. I was wondering if you'd have a moment to help me with X. When I do A, I expect B to happen, but C happens instead. I tried O, P and Q to debug this but I'm not sure what I can try next."

This worked wonderfully, and the person who I gave this feedback to has been doing this consistently. And I'm pretty sure that's been getting them much better results to get to the quality help that they're after.

I guess I could have improved the feedback by adding the impact it had on me, but in this specific case I didn't feel it was particularly necessary.

You can also give bad feedback, so I strongly recommend that you draft feedback and double check it before sending off or delivering it.

Feedback can be strongly subjective. In the same round of 360 feedback, I got two pieces of feedback. One said, "oh I love how Ania always gives detailed information as to what she's working on. I know why it needs to be done and what problems he's encountering." And as you can imagine, the second piece of feedback was "she always talks too much at stand ups". Now the result of that is that I kind of ignored the second one because it didn't really come with desired behaviour.

That's why you need to make clear designed behaviour. And that's my next point. If you give feedback without clear desired behaviour, that's crap feedback. Because take for example, somebody wrote a PR, you tell them, oh, you should make some changes, but don't actually specify what you want. That can leave them quite confused and quite lost as to what they can try next and what it is actually that you want them to do.

Now we're getting into "bad feedback" territory of things that you should avoid. Feedback can be ableist. If you complain about the lack of eye contact, or camera being off, or fidgeting - ask yourself why is it bothering you so much and is it actually that big of a problem. Feedback, unfortunately, can also be sexist. I definitely heard of instances of women being called "bossy" when a man would be called "assertive". If you are asking a woman to "soften her tone" then you might want to figure out if there are better ways of trying to convey what you actually need. It's worth mentioning that feedback can unfortunately be racist as well. So if somebody makes a comment about "unprofessional hairstyle" and the receiver of said feedback has coily hair, well, it's not great. Don't do it.

That brings me onto my next point: don't be mean or nasty. Especially when giving negative feedback, the person receiving it can feel very vulnerable and you should definitely not be cruel and avoid punching down. Feedback is there to help others grow and not feel rubbish about themselves.

An important thing to remember is: do not be vague. It is common to deliver feedback in a soft and roundabout fashion, with vague comments like "oh, that's a bit unusual" or "if I was doing this, I would do it differently". And this puts the responsibility on the other person to try to read your mind and act on what they think you want. If you want something - tell them outright! Outline the consequences, if there are any, especially if it means them being put on a performance improvement plan or failing their probation.

In summary, when giving feedback: be kind use specific examples explain the impact describe the desired change in a clear and unambiguous way

Although I can't guarantee that giving feedback will always work for you, it is a good shot at getting what you really, really want. Thank you

Resources

Conventional Comments

Non-Violent Communication