I will let you in on a secret: in all my years of leadership coaching, this little framework that I am about to share with you consistently gets the biggest positive reaction. These 4 steps hit a nerve because they simplify a workplace land mine: providing feedback to people.
Susan talked to me after she had given some hard feedback to a junior in her team. It hadn’t quite gone as she’d hoped: the guy “didn’t get it.” He questioned the validity of the feedback instead of taking it on board, leaving Susan baffled because she was genuinely just trying to help this person!
This is not uncommon. You never know how people will react to tough feedback: I have heard stories that range from tears to defensiveness to downright aggressiveness. In less dramatic—but still ineffective—cases, people listen to the feedback but nothing changes as a result.
Let’s keep in mind two fundamental principles about feedback:
1. “Clear is kind.” (Hear, hear Brene Brown! More here.) Sugarcoating or softening a tough message does not help. A person cannot improve if they do not know the extent and specifics of their problem. At the beginning of my career, my mentor sat me down to tell me I was not connecting to the participants in a workshop. It was tough. It was also the most useful feedback I have ever received, and I will be forever grateful for it.
2. Negative feedback is profoundly threatening. Difficult feedback activates the same threat responses in our brain that we rely on for physical survival. It is a primitive reaction, that used to be caused by real dangers such as, you know, a lion in the wild, and it is now triggered by social dangers: a threat to our status; an inability to predict the future; losing control over what is happening to us. Getting bad feedback can instantly send us into fight, flight, or freeze.
As a result, effective feedback is clear and straightforward, while also making people feel safe. I call this “being hard on the message, but soft on the person.”
Effective feedback is clear and straightforward, while also making people feel safe.
“Soft on the person” means that feedback should genuinely come from a desire to help. You need to make it clear that you are in the person’s corner, and you are not saying this to shame or humiliate them.
FOUR STEPS TO DELIVER TOUGH FEEDBACK
This four-step model to provide feedback was inspired by the Situation-Behavior-Impact model by The Center for Creative Leadership, with some coaching tagged on at the end. I call the framework OILS—not because I have found any clever way to justify this name, but simply because it helps me remember the first letter of every step:
1. Observation. This means starting with the FACTS, and withholding from our interpretation or assumptions about the facts. I find this to be the hardest step, by far. We humans are sense-making machines. We constantly take input from the environment and interpret it, to the point we sometimes cannot even tell anymore what’s fact and what’s our interpretation.
Example: “I noticed you were 10 minutes late to our meeting today” is a fact; “You seem to be distracted lately” is our interpretation of that fact, and it’s a pretty significant assumption, too. Maybe the person was not distracted at all; maybe their nanny was late, or they hit traffic.
Starting feedback with our interpretations or assumptions is dangerous because a) it will immediately put the other person on the defensive, especially if it attacks a character trait and b) it can just invalidate the feedback, if the assumption is not accurate. Always start with facts.
2. Impact. Next, speak about the impact of these facts/observations on what matters—the situation, business result, other people, yourself.
For instance: “When you sent me the report two days later than we agreed, we were not able to send it to the client by the deadline we had committed to.” Or “After you interrupted your colleague three times during the meeting, I noticed he shut down and did not say anything else for the rest of the hour.”
Speaking about the impact gives weight and context to the feedback: “This matters, and this is why”
3. Listening. This is the time to pause and have a dialogue. “Tell me about it.” or “Does this make sense?” Listen with an open mind to understand what is happening. This is your big coaching moment. The person might have some pretty justified reasons for what they did, or they do not fully get the consequences of their behavior, or they might lack confidence to change.
This is also the moment to make them feel safe. You can articulate clearly that you only aim to help. You can remind them of their strengths they can draw upon. If you are their manager, it also helps to express that you believe in them, and they can count on your support as they work to improve.
4. Suggestion (on how to overcome the issue). I once got the feedback that my voice was too high. That’s like telling someone they are too tall. Yes, and what can I do about it? Please don’t do “hit and run” feedback. The helpfulness of feedback raises exponentially if you also show people a way forward, or at least engage in a conversation to brainstorm about it.
This is it! Now you know my secret. I hope it gives you some food for thought and some strategies for your next conversation. You might ask: can I and should I use this same framework to give positive feedback? Absolutely. But more on this later.
