Well, of course she had asked me what I thought about her book cover draft, but what she was looking for was an acknowledgement of her own enthusiasm and happiness she felt about the awesome cover draft she had created. Also, there are moments in which we just need to be appreciated – and as her reaction shows, those are not the moments to give “developmental feedback”. I, intending to give feedback, had simply answered to a wish that wasn’t there at all. Afterwards, I thought I could have perceived what she had needed, because she was just gleaming with happiness when showing me her result. Fortunately, she had been honest with me instead of simply saying “Yeah, I’ll try to find another expression, thank you”, leave the room and be angry for the rest of the day.

Lesson learned: If  my feedback triggers some pain or anger in others, there might have been an unrevealed wish for appreciation I might say then (still being honest): “You seem really happy about your result. I like the design! You’ve spend a lot of time on it, haven’t you?”, and save my feedback for a later moment.

Anger Quiz

This quiz is from Steven Stosny, PhD, a renowned author and media consultant. You’ll find more quizzes about anger, emotional abuse and articles about communication issues on his web page Compassion Power.

Ways of getting/giving feedback:

1. the facts – raw information (“It is…”, “we saw…”)
2. emotional response (“I feel…”, “I think…”)
3. meta comment (“this means…”, “this could become…”)

For the second step (emotional response), let me add some great comments he made on it:

First, a note on feelings and objectivity: 
Prof. Dr. Birkenkrahe: “Oppressing feelings is dangerous”.
My interpretation: Many of us have learned that objectivity is important when working with others and that we should exclude feelings. Sounds good, because we don´t want to complicate things and being impartial has probably helped us from time to time a lot. But: When I am unhappy and I exclude my feelings to be impartial, I am actually disguising the real cause of my upcoming argument. What I am going to say is strongly influenced by my present feeling, but we´ve learned to oppress our own, naturally given feelings until we ourselves do not even know anymore why we act and speak as we do. (Not to talk about the health and aggression problems that can be caused by oppressing sadness, fear, pain, helplessness etc.).

Second, a note on objectivity itself: 
“I would say, objectivity doesn´t exist, because all we have is our personal perception. To me, objectivity means to dress up your personal opinion to make it acceptable by the majority.”

During his lectures, he also made two little comments on communication and logical reasoning that can be linked to feedback as well: 
“Business decisions are made from the heart, not from the head.” (friendly lecturer’s personal opinion)
A note on “why-questions”: When discussing something, substitute “why” questions by “how”, “what”, “when” etc, if possible. Many people are used to associate “why-questions” with criticism (“Why did you do finish other tasks first? Why didn´t you finish our job?”) and tend to get into a defensive mood or “close down” when we express our unhappiness with a “why-question”. An alternative could be “What kept you from finishing our job first?”.

Thank you for this inspiration!

Blog of my friendly lecturer

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.
If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”

The Dalai Lama

1. When I give my feedback, I try to “look at me” (I-messages: I feel, I saw/heard, I wish, I need, It’s important to me that…)
   
2. When I’ve given my feedback, I try to “look at you” (How do you feel after hearing my message? What’s important for you? What do you need?)
   
3. When you’ve heard me and I’ve heard you, I try to “look at us” (What could be done to improve the situation for both of us?)

To talk about ourselves, what we feel, need, wish or think, can help other people to understand us and to listen to what we have to say. In contrast, when we talk about other persons and judge them (“you are unorganised”), they will most likely hear that there was something wrong about them and defend themselves or attack back, and then it is often much more difficult to enable the other person to listen to what we wish to be done differently.

I would love to know what kind of feedback you would prefer to hear or give. Let me give you some examples, of which one sticks to “I-messages”. Imagine that you are one of my team members and our teamwork is highly frustrating for me at the moment:

1) “You know, to be honest, I can’t really work with you. When you are there, everything just seems messy and we get nothing done. I can’t see how you contribute to our process – you should learn to listen better, that’s important for teamwork.” (In this case, I am being honest, but I concentrate on telling you what I think about you and do not mention what is going on with me.)

2) “I am really frustrated at the moment because you mess up the whole working process – can’t you stick to the questions we are working on? I think you should be clearer and follow the agreed structure.” (In this case, I tell you how I feel but I mix this up with my judgments of your actions and an unspecific demand of what you should do. What I say still contains information about you, it’s not only about me.) 

3) “When I asked the group to discuss the two questions I wanted clarified, you talked about other things. I feel frustrated now because I need structure and focus to be efficient. Would you like me to write down the points to be discussed on the flipchart in order to help us to keep our focus on them?” (Here, I try to tell you first the specific action I observed, then I tell you how I feel about it and which need of mine hasn’t been met by your actions. I also give a suggestion about how to solve this problem in a way that fits me and hopefully you too.)

These are just some of my examples. I would like to learn from you, so tell me:  which feedback would you prefer to hear or give? Is this example helpful for you? Are you confused and need clarification on any points?

Sometimes, I’m so concerned about other people that I lose touch with who I am. This song reminds me of the importance of being connected to myself. Do you like it?

lyrics

Why do I try to feed the world with positive feedback?

It makes me happy – I can distribute these gifts for free! If I focus on “what made my life more wonderful today”, and then communicate it, my happiness doubles! It’s actually a selfish act. It’s a great motivator and it nurtures me at least as much as a banana shake.

A great side effect of giving positive feedback is that it often makes the people around me happier, too! Their needs for appreciation, awareness and contribution to a thriving life can be met when they receive positive feedback.

When it comes to work and management, positive and negative feedback has to be linked to quality and performance – this can be really difficult! If I have spent time reflecting on my feelings, needs, wishes and expectations, it is much easier for me to give feedback that does not judge other people but truly focuses on what I  am experiencing (e.g. “I like the way you structure your work, it makes it very clear to me” instead of “Your structure is good”). With practice, it becomes easier to differentiate between work requirements (e.g. deadlines, faultlessness, clear task definitions, cooperation, structure, clarity, that people keep to engagements etc.) and my own needs (for cooperation, structure, clarity, respect, appreciation, safety, understanding etc.). There are so many cases in which everything is mixed up and all the employees hear is “friendly criticism” or “well done”. Can you imagine how many managers out there simply forget to give positive feedback and how this affects motivation? It happens so easily that we forget it. To practice feedback, I want to emphasize on positive feedback first.

There are many instances where other peoples´ behavior does NOT contribute to our happiness. In these instances, you might want to give feedback which contributes to a more positive situation, personal growth and voluntary changes in behavior. To make this possible, I find it very useful to improve and practice my own skills in giving positive feedback: First of all, it gives me practice in finding out what I feel and need /wish, and secondly it might provide a positive base on which people are able to hear my negative feedback: if the people around me understand how they contributed to my well being or a company’s success, they might have more resources, and feel less afraid,  when hearing that some of their behavior did not meet my needs, wishes or expectations.