The magic of feedback

A while back one of our user researchers tweeted about the magic of getting feedback about good work that she was doing and the positive impact it had had on her.

For me there is something magical about telling people when they have done a good job. This is irrespective of experience and grade and irrespective of that grade in relation to your own (in fact my experience is that the higher the grade, the less feedback of any type you get — whatever you do, you still need to know if you are doing it well and where you can improve).

It is important to let people know when there are areas that they need to develop, but it is equally important to tell people they did something well. I don’t think anyone would disagree so why do we see a disproportionate amount of the former compared to the latter?

Are we all doing such a bad job? Do we all have a disproportionate amount of developmental needs? Or is it that people assume that we know we are good at what we do and only think they need to tell us if we are not — management by exception? Are people so uncomfortable with giving any type of feedback that they reserve it for when they have to i.e. end of year performance reviews or if there’s an issue with performance?

What I am also seeing is people doubting their abilities and whilst I can’t say I have anything more that anecdotal evidence that lack of feedback is to blame, for me there is a need to make sure we are telling people when they are getting it right. There are a number of ways that I have committed to doing this, most of which are good practice;

- I give people feedback and make sure that when I see people doing good stuff, I tell them about it

- I make sure that when someone has told me they were impressed with one of my colleagues, they did some great work etc. I encourage that person to tell them. I also tell my colleague about the feedback just in case they don’t

One of the other ways was a session that we ran at our recent user research profession meet up. It’s a very simple task (I think the idea may have come from having participated in something similar when I was at school). We asked everyone to write their name on a post it and stick it on a space on the wall. We then asked everyone to use post-its to write down positive things that they had observed about people in the room and stick them underneath their name — it could be help they had given, something they did well or something that made them smile or made them laugh at a time when they really needed it. Both myself and a colleague who were leading the session did it too. Here are mine:

We shouldn’t need to do these sessions. We shouldn’t need to provide space for people to be able to tell and be told about the good things they do.

The session did, however, mean that everyone left the meet up with a stack of positive feedback post-its. They’re a reminder of how good they are when they don’t feel it and need a confidence boost (including me).

So, although we shouldn’t need to do these sorts of sessions, it was valuable for everyone and a way to spread the magic. I know there are people who were in the room who were thinking of running the same exercise with their product team.

Maybe highlighting the need for more positive feedback will make people pass it on and do more. Maybe it might snowball to wider than our profession meet up. Maybe by reading this blog post you could commit to doing something similar too #spreadthemagic