Mark Needham

Something that I've noticed over the last few years is that when people give feedback to each other there is often an over emphasis on the individual and less attention paid to the environment in which they were working.

I covered this a bit in a blog post I wrote about a year ago titled 'Challenging projects and the Kubler Ross Grief Cycle' which I converted into a presentation that I gave at XP2010 in June. In the presentation I spoke more about the way the environment can impact the way we behave.

One of the points I made was that the environment has a very big impact on the way that people act.

After one particular project that I worked on Lindy, who was running our performance review process, pointed out that everyone who had worked on that project had the exact same feedback and that it said way more about the environment that project was operating in than it did about the individuals.

I'm not quite sure where we draw the line between what an individual can reasonably be said to have control over and what is difficult for them to influence because of the environment. Perhaps there doesn't need to be a line.

In Crucial Confrontations the authors talk about there being three sources of influence – self, others and things – or personal, social and structural as on the diagram on the right!

As I understand it the authors suggest that we start looking at the individual in terms of their own motivation and ability first and then work our way down through the others.

Although this model is intended for conversations where one person is confronting the other for not behaving how they expected in some way, it seems like a reasonable model to follow for general feedback as well.

As assumptions seem to drift into our perceptions of what other people are doing often in an unfavourable way the point of following the model is that it will help draw out these assumptions and help us to see exactly why someone acted the way they did.

A fairly common example is where a tech lead just give instructions to their team to do something without explaining why they want them to do that.

They assume that the team already know why – assuming that the team has the information, context and experience of making this type of decision that they do. The team assumes that the tech lead isn't telling them because he/she just wants them to follow orders.

Neither of these assumptions are particularly useful and it seems much more effective to talk through something with the other person based only on what we've observed so that we can see whether there is something for them to improve or if we need to try and improve the environment in some way.

Easier said than done.

On an internal mailing list my colleague David Pattinson recently described a feedback approach he'd used on a project where everyone on the team went into a room and they took turns giving direct feedback to each person.

Since we were finishing the project that we've been working on for the past few months, Christian, Dermot and I decided to give it a try last week.

One thing to note is that this feedback wasn't linked to any performance review, it was just between the 3 of us to allow us to find ways that we can be more effective on projects that we work on in the future.

Much like David I found this approach to feedback to be the most useful that I've seen in nearly 4 years working at ThoughtWorks.

We took it in turns to receive feedback from the other two guys and each person first explained what they wanted the feedback to focus on.

I've participated in face to face feedback before but what I liked better about this approach was that someone could make an observation about something that you'd done and then that became a discussion point between the three of us.

In general it seems to promote a more conversational style of feedback than often seems to happen when it's just one on one.

I think it was really good being able to get two opinions on each behaviour as people often have different takes on the same situation. Taking both viewpoints together along with your own seemed to make it easier to narrow in on the behaviour and see how it could be improved.

When giving feedback it was useful to have someone else doing so at the same time as it helped remind me about things that I'd forgotten about.

I still need to improve the way I give and receive feedback – Pat Kua details a series of tips for extracting behaviours from the actual feedback that people give and has several other posts on the topic. This is the best resource that I've come across but I'd be interested in knowing of any others.

The key thing that I've noticed when giving feedback is to only point out your observation and the impact it had on you rather than making assumptions about why the person might have done that – you're nearly always wrong!

Overall though I found the group feedback approach to be useful and it's something I'll look to encourage on projects I work on in the future although I'm unsure how well it would scale in a larger team.

Photo taken from AmyZZZ1′s Flickr stream under the Creative Commons licence.

One of the more interesting concepts used on the NLP course that I did last year was the idea of only giving positive feedback to people.

The thinking behind the theory (which I think comes from Robert Dilts, one of the early thinkers behind NLP) is that people know what they are doing wrong and already beat themselves up about it; therefore there is no point you mentioning it as well.

I was initially sceptical about this approach as it seemed a bit too idealistic for my cynical mind. I found it extremely difficult to start with and didn’t give any feedback to anyone for quite a few sessions. Eventually though something clicked for me and by the end of the 18 day course I feel I did gain a greater respect for and recognition of the talents that other people on the course had. The need to focus only on the positive actually seems to drive the mind to see more in this area than it otherwise would.

Although noone likes it when they are criticised, I think there are some occasions when someone criticising you can prove to be extremely motivational. This basically involves them completely writing you off and you then being determined to prove them wrong. For example at school I was told that I would definitely fail the Pure Maths modules of my A Level Maths course. Completely unimpressed with this verdict I persevered with it for months eventually scoring 85%. Job done.

I think sometimes when giving critical feedback it can say more about you than it does about the person you are giving it to, and this is where it’s vital to step back and think why you are giving the feedback.

I find at least for myself the tendency is to want to point out things people do that annoy me, which in effect is me trying to make the person more like myself. Steve Pavlina suggests that the things we hate the most in other people are the things we actually hate in ourselves. Therefore his suggestion was if you find something someone else does annoying, first look at yourself and try and improve yourself in this area.

I’m not sure if I totally subscribe to why this approach would work but I definitely agree that it is way easier to change yourself than it is to change someone else.

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• Giving effective feedback

One of the most interesting things I have discovered since starting at ThoughtWorks earlier this month is the emphasis that is placed on giving feedback.

The first lesson we were taught about giving feedback was that it could be one of two types. Either it should Strengthen Confidence or Increase Effectiveness.

In Layman's term that means that if you want to make a positive comment about somebody's contribution then you should make reference to something specific that you believe they have done well so that they can continue doing it. Equally if you believe there is an area that they could improve it, a specific example of this behaviour/fault should be noted along with a suggestion for how they can improve.

As a member of Toastmasters since January I was already used to this concept of feedback and there are certainly parallels in the feedback system encouraged at Toastmasters and that used at ThoughtWorks.

Although Toastmasters do not define types of feedback, there is an expectation that evaluators will apply themselves in a certain manner when carrying out their job.

One of the things which is frowned upon is known as 'whitewashing'. This is where an evaluator would say that a speaker was 'brilliant' or give a summary just using complementary adjectives. Although the speaker may well be flattered, it does not really tell them anything or leave room for improvement. The use of the word 'brilliant' or 'superb' is only the perception of the person using it, and the failure to make use of the word with regards to a specific behaviour or action means that it is rendered meaningless.

Equally when the evaluator believes there is an area that the speaker can improve in they should make a reference to the specific negative behaviour or action so that the speaker can recall their mistake and go about making the improvement. When giving feedback it is very poor practice to attribute your own feelings to the speaker – you are giving them control over something which they do not have control over! For example, if an evaluator were to say: 'I felt bored listening to your speech, you should make the next speech more interesting'. In this case the evaluator is giving the speaker the power to make them feel bored. It is ridiculous to let someone have that amount of control over you and if we consider that another person listening to the same speech may have felt really engaged, a property of the speech cannot be that it was 'boring'.

This is very similar to the way that ThoughtWorkers are expected to give feedback, although it is also emphasised that when giving feedback one should speak only for themselves, and not try and speak for a group of people. Doing this would assume that mind reading is possible and as far as I'm aware this feat has yet to be achieved. An example of committing this mistake would be to say something along the lines of: 'It would be better for us if you could do x'. In this case 'us' is not defined and it is unlikely that one person can speak precisely of the feelings of other people.

This concept is very similar to that of Generalisation in the NLP Meta Model, which states the following:

This is an area that I am actually working on myself, and I am finding it very difficult to speak only for myself because I'm so used to generalising! Of course there are still times when generalisation is vital, and we would find it very difficult to live our daily lives without generalising on some things. Giving feedback, however, is one area where this 'technique' is counter productive.