Why You Should Give Feedback — And How to Deliver It Without the Awkward Crying
The why and how to write feedback for others.
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers, and specific leadership advice.
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Chances are that you’re bad at giving feedback to your co-workers. This isn’t necessarily your fault.
First, it’s unlikely you’ve received any type of training on the topic. There’s no college course on the topic. CS361— Peer feedback methodologies. So you’re probably winging it.
Second, only managers get much experience writing any type of feedback. With enough motivation and practice (and hopefully coaching by their manager), they can get halfway ok at it. Although (tbh — as the hip kids say) I think most managers still suck at it.
But most people rarely write feedback. They’re not motivated to put a lot of energy into it, and they don’t know what good feedback looks like. So the output is poor.
I’ve read hundreds of fantastic gems of peer feedback. I’m using a sarcastic voice if you can’t tell. Below are the types of things I’ve repeatedly read.
Useful prompt provided by HR — “Please provide areas of strengths, and areas of improvements for your peers.”
"Her code is high quality. Maybe she could go faster. But she might be ok."
"His documents are good. Can't think of an area of improvement."
"His memory usage in the primary function was good. He shouldn't have included the function call in the get method, it was not following conventions."
Excellent. I’m quite sure you can learn a lot from these gems of inspiration.
Now, let’s go back to how many of you lack motivation to write peer feedback in the first place. Many people view peer feedback as a stupid HR process their corporation forces on them at random times. Or maybe your company doesn’t ask for it at all.
Regardless, I think it’s worthwhile to suspend your cynicism for a moment. At least on this very specific topic. Because I think peer feedback can be great.
What can be so great?
Peer feedback, when a modest amount of effort has been invested in the process, can be incredibly valuable. Here are a few major reasons.
One — It's not from one person.
Most of us receive feedback from one person — our manager. That’s if we’re lucky enough to have a manager who provides feedback. But that’s one single voice. This might shock you — try not to gasp. But your manager might be wrong.
If your manager says, “Myra is sometimes rude when she gives her opinions” — it might be that your manager’s personality simply doesn’t match with yours. You and they may never see eye to eye.
However, let’s say you have seven co-workers, and they all mention some variation of “Myra is a jerk.” Yeah dude, it’s a suspicious pattern. And that pattern is that you’re probably a jerk.
Alternatively, your seven co-workers all say, “Myra is the nicest person I’ve ever worked with.” In which case, you likely can rest assured that you only have a manager problem, not a personality problem.
Two — It’s not from the person controlling your career.
When your manager gives you feedback, it is attached to the knowledge that it’s from someone with power over your job.
If your manager says, “I don’t like how Vernon writes his emails!” — You probably need to change how you write your emails. Because manager feedback is coming from the person with power over your career. Their opinion seriously matters.
But if a co-worker says the same thing, you can (and should) listen and think about it. But you get to decide if you’d like to act on it. It’s refreshing to receive feedback from a neutral party. You can take it or leave it.
Three — It can be more specific and different than from your manager.
Here’s an interesting one. If your manager gives you feedback about your work behavior, it’s in the context of things your manager has seen and witnessed.
This means their feedback is limited in scope and detail. As a software engineer (for example), your manager may see very little (if any) of your code, but will see you in a few meetings. They’ll be able to provide you feedback on your meeting behavior, but what about feedback on the other 6+ hours of the day?
With peers, you’ll have a view into an entirely different dimension of your work. They may have worked more hours with you in aggregate than your manager, so their feedback could be more specific. They will have worked with you on completely different tasks as well.