Boost your Company Feedback Culture in 4 Weeks

A Simple Feedback Mentoring Programme that Just Works

One of our core values at Ontruck is “Always learning, always improving”. That’s the reason why we actively work on creating and maintaining a healthy Feedback Culture.

In this article, we share a simple yet effective tool — a 4 sessions Feedback Mentoring Programme — that you can use in your company to boost your Feedback Culture.

The tool: a Feedback Mentoring Programme

Why a Mentoring Programme?

A company Feedback Culture is directly related to how skilled the people in that company are in giving and receiving feedback.

Giving and receiving feedback effectively is not as easy as it may seem; it is actually a quite complex skill to master. A set of techniques help build that skill, and a mentoring programme is the most suitable tool to learn and practice them.

Who should be the Mentor and the Mentoree?

The mentor must be somebody with a validated experience in giving and receiving feedback. Usually, the best-rated managers are very good at it — and that’s no coincidence. At Ontruck we have some feedback champions, some in People team, some at the Engineering Management level; you should look for your champions.

The mentoree can be potentially anybody interested in improving. At Ontruck, we explicitly work on Feedback skills as part of our Career Development Plans.

How does the Programme work?

We’ve been using and refining our Feedback Mentoring Programme for more than a year now. The setup that works the best for us is 4 sessions of 45 min each with a week between sessions, plus a monthly follow up during a couple of months.

• Session 1: Giving Positive Feedback
• Session 2: Giving Negative Feedback
• Session 3: Receiving Feedback
• Session 4: Wrap-up

Where does the content come from?

We’ve not reinvented the wheel. On the contrary, we’ve cherry-picked from several validated and widely used sources — from Dale Carnegie to Kim Scott — the techniques we think work best in most cases.

The content: 4 sessions in detail

Session 1 —Giving Positive Feedback

Positive feedback is the most effective type of feedback. Positive reinforcement has a much greater impact on people and increases self-confidence, motivation, and commitment.

Your natural tendency will be to talk to people when they’re doing something wrong — correcting seems more urgent than reinforcing — but you should make an effort to detect situations where you can share positive feedback with your teammates.

There is a huge difference on the impact of effective positive feedback compared to weak positive feedback: effective positive feedback about a certain behaviour will make the receiver focus on maintaining or even reinforcing that behaviour; an ineffective or weak positive feedback will just serve as praise, but the receiver won’t be able to improve.

Rules for effective positive feedback:

• Give praise immediately. If you let time go by, the recognition will have less impact.
• Be sincere. Never pretend, because people can tell. You have to really mean it.
• Describe exactly what the person did well. Specify the act, behaviour, or concrete achievement.
• Explicitly describe the impact of the behaviour you are trying to reinforce.
• Never invalidate the praise: Avoid expressions like “better late than never,” “but,” “although,” “for the first time“, “finally”…
• Do it publicly if possible.

Some examples:

Wrong: “Your past month presentation was amazing, way better than the previous one, congratulations!”

Right: “Your presentation yesterday was amazing, as you managed to explain that complex technical concept with simple words and examples that the audience was able to understand. Congratulations!”

Sync or async?

While async is ok, face to face positive feedback has some beneficial side effects, such as building a stronger positive relationship with the receiver.

Exercises during the session:

1. Mentor gives positive feedback to the mentoree — mentor should have prepared it in advance. Discuss:
   - how it felt from both perspectives.
   - did it follow the rules?
   - how could have it been more effective?
2. Mentoree gives positive feedback to mentor — let mentoree prepare it for 5 min. Discuss:
   - how it felt from both perspectives.
   - did it follow the rules?
   - how could have it been more effective?

Exercises to complete during the week, before the next session:

1. Mentoree gives positive feedback to at least 2 people during the week. Ideas: could be about a good presentation, well-facilitated meeting, clear async communication, original initiative… At the beginning of session 2, discuss:
   - how it felt from both perspectives.
   - did it follow the rules?
   - how could have it been more effective?

Session 2 — Giving Negative Feedback

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things — Winston Churchill

Knowing how to give negative/constructive feedback effectively is even more important than knowing how to give positive feedback. Ineffective negative feedback can harm the relationship between the giver and the receiver.

Rules for effective negative feedback:

• Give it immediately, but after reflecting (sleeping on it is usually a great idea).
• One feedback per behaviour or event, do not group.
• Prepare yourself before giving it.
• Always in private.
• Negative feedback serves to correct or improve behaviour. It should never be used for venting or blowing off some steam. Think twice and ask yourself about your real goal before giving it.
• Only use facts, indisputable facts. Never talk about the person (“you are lazy”), just the facts and behaviours (“you did not complete the task X you had committed to”).

Tip: Be direct when introducing the situation for negative feedback. “I’d like to share with you a little piece of feedback” should be enough.

The 3 + 2 steps method:

Situation (facts) → Behaviour (facts) → Impact (facts) → Proposal → Agree on actions and follow up.

• Situation: make sure both of you are on the same page and remember things as actually happened. For example: “Yesterday we had our weekly planning meeting with the rest of the team. I was attending remotely as I had stated beforehand. You were the meeting organiser and facilitator”.
• Behaviour: the specific behaviour you want to change. For example: “You forgot to connect to the remote meeting room during the first 10 minutes of the meeting”.
• Impact: how you felt because of that behaviour (your feelings are indisputable facts), or how it impacted you. Focus only on facts. For example “I felt I was not an important part of the team. Apart from that, I did not participate in the OKRs review that took place during that 10 minutes, so I had to go to Data team asking for that data, losing 10 minutes of my time and the Data person”.

Tip: It is quite common to struggle to clearly express the 3 initial steps without mixing them up, but doing so is critical. An easy trick is to explicitly separate the 3 steps by saying “The situation was … [silence]. The behaviour I want to give you feedback of was… [silence]. Its impact was…”. Works both in sync and async feedback.

• Proposal: you may present your constructive proposal or open the discussion on how to change that behaviour. For example: “I propose you to join the remote meeting room on every planning meeting by default, without checking if anybody is remote or not”. If the proposal is based on your own experience and presented telling your own success story, it will be better accepted.
• Agree on actions and follow up: the ideal outcome of a negative feedback session is a set of actions with specific follow-ups. For example: “Let’s do this starting next week. I will be checking if you connect to the remote meeting during the first 3 sessions, so we get things moving”.

Sync or async?

Async constructive feedback has some advantages related to reducing the emotional stress for both parts. The “fight or flight” reaction of the receiver is minimised, while the giver can work on better-structured feedback. On the other hand, face to face feedback when done properly have some positive side effects, such as building trust.

Exercises during the session:

1. Mentor gives negative feedback to the mentoree — mentor should have prepared it in advance. Discuss:
   - how it felt from both perspectives.
   - did it follow the rules?
   - how could have it been more effective?
2. Mentoree gives negative feedback to mentor — let mentoree prepare it for 5 min. Discuss:
   - how it felt from both perspectives.
   - did it follow the rules?
   - how could have it been more effective?

Exercises to complete during the week, before the next session:

1. Mentoree gives negative feedback to at least 2 people during the week. Ideas: could be something small such as a bad word, a meeting that went longer than expected and was not properly managed, bad tone during a discussion, a non-effective communication… At the beginning of session 3, discuss:
   - how it felt from both perspectives.
   - did it follow the rules?
   - how could have it been more effective?

Session 3 — Receiving Feedback

To make the feedback process effective, you have to know how to give it and how to receive it.

While it is natural to react to negative feedback with the “fight or flight” reaction — prepare your body to refute any criticism, or just try to avoid the conversation — it is important to just relax and be open to whatever the other person wants to share.

Rules for effectively receiving feedback:

• Recognise its value. Thank people for it.
• Never punish negative feedback.
• Listen actively. Do not interrupt. Ask questions to fully understand the feedback, but never to refute it.
• Don’t respond right away.
• Don’t refute the criticism or justify yourself (neither on positive nor negative feedback).
• Don’t take offence, don’t treat it as a personal attack.
• If the feedback resonates with you, set yourself actions to improve that behaviour. Ask for help if you don’t know how to improve on that behaviour.

Tip: Expose yourself. Ask for feedback regularly to your peers — ask your peers to be watchful and give you feedback whenever is possible. It is better to ask for specific feedback about concrete events than general feedback. Do not ask for feedback in a 1–1 without previous notice.

Exercises during the session:

1. Mentor gives negative feedback to the mentoree — mentor should have prepared it in advance. Discuss:
   - how it felt from both perspectives.
   - did the receiver follow the rules?
   - how could have it been more effective?
2. Mentoree gives negative feedback to mentor — let mentoree prepare it for 5 min. Discuss:
   - how it felt from both perspectives.
   - did the receiver follow the rules?
   - how could have it been more effective?

Exercises to complete during the week, before the next session:

1. Mentoree asks for constructive feedback to at least 2 people during the week. Focus on receiving it following the rules. At the beginning of session 4, discuss:
   - how it felt from both perspectives.
   - did the receiver follow the rules?
   - how could have it been more effective?

Session 4 — Wrap up

This is a wrap-up, and therefore it is more of an open session. Its goal is to review the different techniques discussed during sessions 1–3 and do a little retrospective about which served well and which were difficult to apply and why. Something useful is to share success cases of the usage of the different techniques.

The mentor will schedule at least two follow up sessions, usually in one and two months. During those, discuss positive and negative feedback given during that time. There should be at least one case of positive and negative feedback to discuss during each session to validate the Feedback Culture has improved!

Call to action!

At Ontruck, we’ve been investing in building a healthy Feedback Culture in many different ways: internal training, external talks, usage of platforms such as 15five… This Feedback Mentoring Programme has proven to be a low-cost high-impact tool to improve Feedback skills and culture among the team.

I encourage you to test this tool at your company: you’ll see your Feedback Culture improved in a matter of weeks.

If you have any feedback about this tool, we are willing to receive it! Just ping me directly. We promise to receive your feedback effectively ;)