“No Offense, You Suck”, Ok But… Does Your Team Know How to give feedback?

The somewhat provocative quote from Ludovica Scarpa gives us the opportunity to tackle one of the most powerful and necessary tools for team self-regulation: your majesty the Feedback.

Feedback is such a ubiquitous topic in the science of teamwork that it is mentioned no less than sixty-four times in #ilteamgiusto, the book in which, with Stefano Susani, we have enclosed a selection of useful and interesting topics for the construction and functioning of working groups.

Let’s put things in order, to begin with what is feedback? 🔎 Organizational sciences and coaching understand feedback as a form of empathetic criticism with which we express a judgment on one aspect of each other’s behavior. Thanks to the feedback we can carry out as a team the adjustment and learning cycles necessary to progress towards the agreed objectives.

Let’s talk today about how to give feedback and start from the fundamental assumptions: 📌 concreteness and empathy. Fundamental for the change we intend to generate and the interest in the person receiving the feedback to be clear. Giving feedback is a VERY personal task, let’s spare ourselves the “Nothing personal”. Everything is personal and protecting the relationship between team members must be put first.

✅ Fact checking: we check the objective and measurable aspects well, as well as the condition in which our interlocutor is.

✅ Let’s outline the theme, distinguishing between behaviors and the person.

✅ Let’s listen! The mind like a blank sheet, we listen to the other’s point of view without making assumptions.

✅ We clearly describe the behaviors we want to achieve.

✅ We make the feedback personal by speaking in the first person (“I believe”, “I noticed”, “I feel”, “I prefer” not “We believe”, “It is noticeable” etc)

✅ We detail the action plan, clarifying concrete expectations and solutions, the timing and methods of the proposed corrective actions.

✅ WE RECOGNIZE (CAPS!) positive results, without taking them for granted. When the desired change is achieved, we propose to celebrate!

Feedback is a real gift and a learning tool, it helps us to better understand the current situation and to project ourselves, precisely through learning, into an ideal situation in the future.

To really benefit from it, we try to get help from our interlocutors to clearly identify the goal to be achieved and we build an action plan to get there.

Thanks to these tools, being a member of a team transforms us.