This week I had to write a reference for someone, a task I have never previously been asked to undertake.
I wrote with honesty, which was easy because this person is an excellent fit for the role, but I found it hard to think of anything that could be seen as a development area, something I had been specifically asked to include, so I thought about it long and hard because I knew it was important.
After I’d finished, I sent the reference off, and a while later received a reply thanking me for my “lovely reference”, a comment I shared with my friend even though I hadn’t shown them a copy of what I’d written.
This got me thinking about feedback and its usefulness.
“We value your feedback” is a statement that seems to have become ubiquitous. Everyone says they want it, hardly anyone gives it in a way that could be construed as helpful, and it frequently feels as if it’s ignored.
It was management expert Ken Blanchard who originally said, “Feedback is the breakfast of champions,” but, like a lot of feedback, this observation about feedback is too general to be of much use. Specifically which champions’s breakfast is feedback like?
Champion boxer George Foreman used to start the day with coffee, toast, and jelly (jam), and six egg whites beaten up with black pepper.
Hafthor Bjornsson (former World’s Strongest Man) tucked into 500g of beef, 500g of sweet potatoes, 8 eggs, oats, fruit, nuts, and leafy greens.
Neither of these is much good to me because I want feedback to be like toast with some good tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella and a drizzle of grassy olive oil, enjoyed whilst reading the paper.
It isn’t any old feedback (breakfast) that we want, it’s the breakfast (feedback) we need that helps us thrive.
Recently, I have been dealing with a lot of questions about feedback and the common theme is that an absence of anything specific is what makes it pointless.
“How do I tell my partner that I don’t feel loved without putting pressure on them?”
“Tell them specifically what makes you feel like that, whether it’s the way they talk to you, touch you, treat you. Don’t worry about putting pressure on because, in the long run, there’s more pressure in not saying what we feel.”
It reminded me of an editor I used to work with from whom I learned a great deal, not least how to be more emotionally resilient.
I’d send her a piece of 700 words that I was proud of and she’d send back her concise feedback,
“Boring”
Once, I wrote an experimental piece that I felt pushed the boundaries of what I’d usually do and looked forward eagerly to her assessment.
She wrote,
“No”
I can laugh about it now, but at the time it felt less like the breakfast of champions and more like finding a half-eaten sandwich down the side of the sofa.
My dad adopted a different approach to feedback in that all of it was unrelentingly positive.
As everything was an outstanding achievement, consequently nothing was.
The two pieces of feedback I remember most vividly from my father were him telling me, “You’ll be on the board one day,” shortly after I’d started in the post-room at my first job out of college, and describing my performance in an amateur production of “A Servant Of Two Masters” as “a tour de force” which wasn’t even his feedback but something he had clipped from the paper.
It’s lovely to be supported but left me often finding it hard to know the true value of anything I did or, more disturbingly, of myself.
It’s easy to draw a straight line between the harm done by demanding, never-satisfied parents and the problems their children have with self-confidence, but perhaps less obvious that exclusively positive feedback leaves the same hole where accurate self-assessment needs to reside.
It would have been helpful to be told sometimes that I’d made a hash of something, or that I was performing below my potential, or that it wasn’t what I did that made me valuable but who I was.
I realise now that he wasn’t able to do any of that because he’d not been shown how by his father, and it keeps me awake some nights hoping to God that I have broken the cycle.
Essentially, if we are to grow up feeling a sense of worth without being narcissistic arseholes someone at some point needs to offer us some honest guidance.
You know that friend you have who always, often annoyingly, tells you the truth even when you don’t want to hear it? They love you and they’re very valuable indeed.
Balancing the well-meaning desire to avoid hurting anyone’s feelings with the gift of someone telling us the truth is often hard, and I was reminded of it yesterday.
Watching a presentation that was supposed to be 20 minutes but clocked in at 35 left me wanting to offer spiteful feedback on the importance of boundaries, but I felt mean doing so and focused instead on the bits I enjoyed combined with a passive-aggressive observation about the part I didn’t understand because I was too annoyed to try.
That’s the other aspect of feedback which is so important, the place that it comes from within us and the agenda which might be fueling it.
Insipid feedback given to avoid the risk of damaging a relationship, or bitter feedback stemming from unspoken frustration or hurt is as much use as saying nothing at all, because to be of real use feedback ought to be about helping the recipient grow not making yourself feel better or safer.
We can’t ever be assured that our perspective will be received in the way we intend, but at least we will know that we offered a heartfelt gift, and that’s all that feedback requires.
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