(Yeah, not a lot)
If you’re like most folks, you don’t love the feedback process, but you also know it’s an essential part of being on a team.
At its core, feedback is good for us: it helps us grow and be more effective. But unfortunately, it’s a prickly subject in many workplaces. It’s even a prickly subject in the English dictionary! Look up synonyms for feedback and you’ll get suggestions like, “criticism,” “rebuttal,” and “comeback.” Yikes. Since when did feedback become such a negative word?
My hunch says it has something to do with our experiences of feedback up until now. Nearly everyone has had a negative experience with giving or getting it, and these experiences become little chips on our shoulders we carry around into our professional (and personal) experiences. Human nature doesn’t help much either. Did you know humans are hardwired to remember negative experiences more vividly than positive ones? Turns out, it probably takes two or three spoonfuls of sugar to make the medicine go down.
During the course of her career in tech, Kim Scott became fascinated with feedback — how it’s done well, how it’s done poorly, and how we can get better at giving feedback. After many years of studying, she wrote a book called Radical Candor in which she gives the formula for healthy feedback in our workplaces. She boils it down to just two things:
“Care personally and challenge directly”
That is what Kim defines as radical candor: giving feedback to your coworkers in a way that shows you care about them while still being direct and forthright. This is a classic example of speaking the truth with love. If you go too far on either axis of caring personally or challenging directly, you’ll land in dangerous territory. It’s all about achieving that balance.
To help people get closer to caring personally and challenging directly, Kim has come up with a simple grid that maps out what healthy feedback looks like, and what it doesn’t look like. (I’m sure most of them will be familiar to you).