We are all asked for feedback sometimes. What do you think of this text? How do you think these pants look on me? Or you have difficulty with someone’s behavior. Someone keeps arriving late and you finally want to tell him or her what you think about it. Then you also give feedback. Feedback is the message in which you respond to someone else’s behavior or performance. How do you give an appropriate response?
- Why feedback?
- Positive and negative feedback
- What is good feedback?
- How do you give good feedback?
- HEART under the…
- … BELT stitches
- Feedback and then?
Why feedback?
We give feedback or the Dutch word ‘feedback’ in response to someone else. We can give people solicited and unsolicited feedback. If people are unsure about themselves, their behavior or their product, they can ask you for feedback. They actually ask you: ,Am I doing it right?, The underlying question of people with little self-confidence may even be ,Am I good (enough)?,.
In training situations, giving feedback is part of learning. Feedback can speed up the learning process, because it allows you to specifically indicate what people still need to work on.
If someone bothers you or if you experience the relationship with the other person negatively, you may want to change this. By providing feedback on the other person’s specific behavior and saying specifically what you would like to see differently, you can try to ensure that the other person shows more of the behavior you want. Please note: this may involve behavior that is known to be changed by the other person (,Everyone always says I’m going to be late.,) or unknown behavior (,I didn’t know I suffered from bad breath.,).
Positive and negative feedback
You can react positively or negatively to someone’s behavior or performance. When you consciously use this to achieve the desired behavior/performance and therefore allow the other person to learn something from it, you call it positive or negative feedback. By giving back your observations, findings and comments in the form of feedback, you motivate and activate the other person to change his or her performance/result or behavior. That is something different than just giving your opinion, without further explanation or explanation. It is important that you formulate your feedback in such a way that the other person can benefit from it, because then you give feedback in a good way.
What is good feedback?
Giving feedback makes the other person vulnerable, but also yourself, because you want and dare to give your opinion while you also want to respect the other person. Good feedback is a response in which you give your opinion in such a way that the others can benefit from it and participate. After all, you want to change negative behavior into desirable behavior or you want to help someone improve themselves and their performance. This means that you want to get the other person to take action. This therefore concerns conscious feedback in the sense of feedback that promotes learning. The right feedback motivates and activates. You can be very directive in this and say what you think and experience. You can also ask so-called learning questions, in which you and the other person discover the cause of the problem you identify. For example, as a teacher you can discuss with a fifteen-year-old student that you are bothered by the observed busy behavior in the classroom and then look together at cause, effect and solution to tackle this. This is the more Socratic approach, in which you use questions and answers to have a meaningful conversation about the desired behavior or performance. You let the other person discover for themselves what still needs to be improved and this can ensure more responsibility and involvement in the approach to achieving the goal. You can also have this conversation using a G-scheme, in which you take apart the Event, the Behavior, the Thought, the Feeling and the Consequence to arrive at a solution alternative, from the unwanted behavior to the desired behavior.
Also give a compliment
To make someone receptive to feedback, it is important that you first consider whether someone can receive your feedback. In a stressful or argumentative situation, bringing up your friend’s constant lateness is unlikely to result in a good conversation. So choose your moment when you give feedback. You will first have to give someone who is very insecure some self-confidence before you come up with your points for improvement. Give a targeted compliment about someone’s behavior or about what you want to provide feedback on. Make this compliment as personal as possible. If someone is already very confident, you can join in (,You have written a good text! I only have a few small points that will hopefully make your text better.,) and immediately afterwards give your feedback. Some also speak of ‘sandwiches’: sandwiching a negative feedback between two positive messages to ensure that you achieve what you want to achieve.
What do you want to achieve?
Always realize your ultimate goal. Either you want the other person to change in your favor (and then you need the other person’s involvement), or the other person appreciates your feedback and therefore makes himself dependent on you. This means that when you give feedback you always want to encourage someone. After all, you want to encourage someone. The courage to change. This can be just by giving feedback, for example when someone has asked for it, or by giving someone unsolicited feedback about what someone’s behavior does to you, with which you also implicitly indicate that the other person matters and that it can do something for you. care about what happens in your relationship (in a broad sense).
How do you give good feedback?
Giving feedback is (also) always encouraging someone. In your feedback you focus on changeable behavior or on something you want to improve, such as a text by an author or the knowledge of a student. You can look at the way you give feedback and what you focus it on, given the other person’s behavior.
Use the following points of attention in your feedback if you want to encourage someone by giving feedback.
Ben:
ClearR ealisticT o-the-point
When you say something about:
R esultI ntention/goalEffectM otivation/Effort
Giving feedback is really putting a HEART to the other person.
HEART under the…
By being clear and friendly in your feedback, you make it easier for people to listen to you and understand you better. Be as specific and concrete as possible in your feedback. Which behavior has which effect on you and would you therefore like to see it differently? What areas for improvement exactly do you see? Always speak in the first person. If you package your feedback as an I-message, you say something about your experience and not about the other person. This makes the other person feel less addressed, because your message is less accusatory. This way the other person does not have to defend themselves. Formulating your feedback realistically ensures that the desired result is attainable for the other person. If anyone wants to comment on his text, do not read the text as if it were a text by Arnon Grunberg, Marjolein de Vos or Jacob Groot. And if a child is very busy in class, do not ask the child to always sit quietly in his chair from now on, but set realistic goals. Make your feedback short and sweet. By beating around the bush you unknowingly build up tension in the listener. This makes the other person less able to listen attentively. So rather say something like ,I found it very fascinating how you wrote different lines together and turned it into a story, but I still see areas for improvement when it comes to the length of the story and the introduction of the main characters., Then you can calmly elaborate on what exactly you mean, but then the tension is gone and the other person can start receiving your feedback. The same applies to behavior that you have difficulty with. If you want to encourage the other person to discover for themselves what the problem is by asking learning questions, then indicate what it is about and from there set off on a journey of discovery together. If you ask questions without the other person knowing where you want to go, it becomes guesswork, because then the person will try to guess what you mean, and that will not help you or the other person.
… BELT stitches
People’s behavior always consists of different parts. You have the intention, the purpose with which someone does something. You have the motivation with which someone does this and the effort someone makes for it, you have the result of his or her behavior and the effect. If all goes well, the circle will be complete again and the effect and intention will (more or less) correspond. Goal achieved, you might say. But that is not always the case and you can talk about that together. And sometimes, for example, the intended goal and effort go out of line. Someone has to do much more to achieve what he or she wants to achieve. You can also provide feedback on that. You can also use this when providing feedback on, for example, a text or a learning achievement. For what purpose was the text written? A promotional flyer reads differently than an extensive background story. If someone wants to get a ten for the ‘role-playing’ section, they may have to develop more empathy skills, otherwise they won’t succeed.
Feedback and then?
Once you have given someone feedback, wait patiently for the other person’s response. Give the other person the opportunity to respond in his or her own way. Does the person understand the point you made? If necessary, look for solutions or alternatives together. Is a text too long? What can you cut without the story losing meaning and content? Does your friend understand that it is annoying for you that he is always late, because it makes you worry and you get nowhere because you are waiting? Then look together at how he can ensure that he leaves earlier and you can ensure that you are less ‘on hold’. Giving feedback is like giving a gift if you do it with the right intention and in the right way. Hopefully you both learn from it.