Giving Feedback

Giving Feedback

A large part of your job as a professional will be to provide feedback to your managers and to peers on your team. You and your teammates will accomplish a lot together when solving complex business problems, and part of how you level up as a tech professional will be related to the feedback cycle.

The feedback that you give and receive will often come through formal performance evaluations, but that shouldn’t be the only time you're giving and getting feedback. Feedback is something that should be part of your regular interactions with your colleagues.

Tips: Giving Effective Feedback

Here are some tips on how to effectively give feedback to your peers:

• Keep it objective: You’re addressing a person’s behavior, not the person as a whole. We tend to be more receptive to feedback when someone says “Receiving your deliverable for our project two days after the deadline resulted in the rest of the group needing to push back the timeline by two weeks” versus “Your disorganization and poor time management pushed back our group’s timeline by two weeks.”

• Keep feedback balanced: While you don’t always need to highlight a strength and a growth area, if you can, share a strength with a growth area and do so in a genuine way. We often focus on what can be improved more than on what’s going well, so take the time to acknowledge your Labs teammates during this exercise for what they are doing great, along with what they can do to be ready for real-world work environments.

• Be specific: Use examples to highlight feedback. Saying “You should share more ideas in meetings” is vague compared with “In the past three brainstorming meetings for Project X, I’ve noticed you haven’t spoken up more than once or twice. The team would really benefit from hearing from you about your experience in Y.”

• Treat feedback like a conversation: It shouldn’t be one-sided. Since you’ll know who gave you what feedback, and that others will see the feedback you gave, be prepared to talk through it. If someone has further questions or needs clarification, be open and patient to setting up a time to engage, and make the feedback a dialogue.

• Consider the timing: Has someone not been delivering on your team, but you know they have some personal circumstances happening? Maybe you don’t even know something’s happening, but they’re acting different or they’re distracted. You can still give the feedback, but acknowledge their reality so they know you’re empathizing with them. Just because someone is going through something or is busy doesn’t mean you should put the feedback off! Timing also matters because the further away you get from the moment, task or example for which you’re trying to provide feedback, the less memorable or relevant it becomes.

• Make it a habit: Share feedback freely and often. Some of you are probably doing it this week because it's one of your Labs objectives—but do it without being prompted, too! Make it part of your regular team interactions.

Receiving Feedback

You should take a moment and reflect on a time in your life when you've received constructive feedback. Did you think of that feedback as an opportunity to grow? Was the feedback given in such a way that made you feel combative or unsupported? Do you feel that the feedback you received was warranted? It's important to remember that we're life-long learners, and as tech professionals, that adage will never go away.

There will be many opportunities for you to learn and grow as a tech professional, and a large part of that growth will stem from the way you interpret and accept the constructive feedback that comes your way.

🔑 It's crucial to understand that constructive feedback is your best opportunity to know what to do to grow as professional.

Tips: Receiving Feedback Well

Here are some tips on ways that you can appropriately respond to feedback when given:

• Listen to the feedback. Be sure not to interrupt or become combative when hearing and listening to feedback. Try and listen to what is actually being said, and not what you assume is being said.

• Be aware of how you respond. Someone who cares about you has gone out on a limb or been instructed to provide feedback to you. Being receptive to that feedback starts with body language and tone as you receive it. Being attentive to the person giving the feedback (sending them an async note or thanking them) will go a long way, and it will show the person that you care about their perspective.

• Be open. Nobody likes to hear when they're getting things wrong or not meeting the bar that has been set for them. It can feel harsh at first, and there may even be a misunderstanding where you have misrepresented yourself in some way that makes it difficult to understand how you went wrong.

• Understand the message. Be sure to communicate with your feedback giver that you understand the message being delivered. Ask follow-up questions about how they've observed this feedback specifically throughout your time working together. Furthermore, ask questions about how they think you can improve in this area.

• Follow up. You'll be given opportunities to respond to the feedback and grow from it. Be sure that you check in periodically with the person who gave you the feedback and ask for specific examples in which you've shown you've grown from it.

Watch Bernie and Ryan in the following video. How do you think Ryan does receiving Bernie's feedback?

Searchlight in Labs

Giving & Receiving Feedback With Searchlight

Searchlight.ai (Links to an external site.) is an intelligent referencing tool (think LinkedIn Recommendations, but smarter) built with the goal to help employers hire the best talent and build the best teams.

In Labs, we'll use Searchlight as a way to give and receive feedback. Project team members will complete surveys providing both qualitative and quantitative feedback for their colleagues.

Searchlight Overview

Take some time to watch the following overview of Searchlight:

Your Mission

In your Labs objectives, you'll find you've been tasked with reviewing some of your peers in Searchlight.

You should have already received an email invitation to Searchlight (sent to your primary email address). From here:

• Go ahead and create your account.

• Throughout Labs, work closely with your teammates. Make sure you're giving and receiving high-quality feedback to each other in real time, too!

• By the end of Labs, make sure you review at least the number of teammates specified in your objectives. You'll need to do this to pass Labs!

Not only will you help give your teammates recommendations and insights for themselves—you'll also get feedback to level up your own approach.