Hello! My name is Evgenia Goleva, I made a report on feedback at TeamLeadConf and I want to share with you its free transcript. I managed, under the sauce of a completely different project, to teach engineers to give feedback much better than they did before. To do this, it was necessary not only to explain “why and how” for a long time and carefully, but also to organize many approaches to the projectile under vigilant control and with soft support. The path was not easy, littered with rakes and bicycles, and I hope that some non-obvious thoughts and methods will be useful to those who would like to instill a healthy feedback culture in their team.

Today I speak as someone who has been teaching adults for over 10 years. And I know very well that feedback is the main tool for learning and motivation. Why it is needed, how it happens, and how I managed to teach employees to give feedback correctly is the topic of my report today.

Our company employs 4.5 thousand full-time employees, of which 300 are IT specialists. Why do we need so many? The answer is simple: in Lamoda almost all development - internal. We automate the processes of a huge warehouse, delivery to 600 cities in Russia, three call centers and our own photo studio - they all work on systems that we develop internally for ourselves, because we did not find suitable solutions on the market.

And, of course, a classic problem often arises - many of these specialists either do not give feedback to their colleagues at all, or do not give it in the way we would like. Below I will try to tell you why it happens, why it is bad, and how it can be fixed.

Engineer Motivation

To begin with, I want to say a few words about why I pay so much attention to the feedback skills of our employees. What motivates engineers in their work? For our guys at Lamoda, it's important to do cool things, make decisions for yourself in the process and eventually get recognition from colleagues. Approximately the same describes the motivation of knowledge workers in his report Dan Pink is a well-known business consultant and author of books on the modern approach to motivation in business.

The quality of feedback from colleagues largely determines the third component of an engineer's motivation - getting recognition.

But, let's be honest, how does a person usually give feedback without any special training? He often criticizes, rarely praises and judges without understanding. It turns out that such feedback does not really motivate others and, moreover, often leads to conflicts.

Constantly receiving such feedback from his team lead, the engineer reacts predictably: if there is no positive feedback, he decides that he is not appreciated. If there is no developing feedback, he feels that he has nowhere to grow.

And what does he do in this situation? Says: "I went!".

The consequences are clear: while we are looking for a replacement for an engineer, projects are on fire, the load on the rest increases, and the company spends a lot of money looking for a new team member.

Hence the conclusion: it is very important what kind of feedback our engineers receive. This means that those who give these feedbacks (we are mainly talking about team leads) need to be able to do it correctly. Why does it turn out that very often team leads do not know how to give feedback correctly?

How do you become a team leader?

It is good when a company purposefully cultivates team leaders, giving them the opportunity to gain all the necessary skills to manage a team before taking a leadership position. But sometimes it happens that they choose the one who writes the code best and understands the system, and give him the system and the command.

As a result, you can lose an excellent engineer and get a demotivated team leader who cannot cope with his duties.

There is only one way to avoid this - to purposefully teach potential (and existing) team leaders how to work with a team. But even here everything is not so simple.

How are team leads prepared to work with people?

The standard solution for training team leads is training, and most often it happens once. It is important to understand that the ability to give the right feedback is a skill that can only be developed with practice. Unfortunately, a skill cannot be developed in one training session; at best, a person will receive theoretical knowledge, and he will have to learn how to apply it on his own, in real work. Questions that will inevitably arise in this case can be asked at the post-training, but such events are far from always held, and they rarely come to them.

In the case of learning feedback “immediately in combat”, the situation is further complicated by the fact that a person seems to be still learning, but we cannot check how he does it. Because in real work, the team leader most often gives feedback to the employee in private (one-to-one). And there is no way to correct, suggest, or give feedback on feedback, because it happens behind closed doors.

When I was thinking about how to get around this complexity, the thought came to my mind: why not try wrapping the feedback training in another project that would work in the club format?

Why is the club format better for teaching feedback?

1. Attendance at the club is voluntary, which means that those who come really have the motivation to learn.

2. The club, unlike the training, is not a one-time event. People visit the club regularly and for a long time, so they can not only gain theoretical knowledge, but also learn how to apply it.

3. In the club format, you can control the learning process. A person gives feedback to someone not one-on-one, but within the framework of the game situation, which is observed by the rest of the club members. Therefore, we can give him feedback on feedback and help improve his skill.

Speaker's Club. Learning to speak publicly and give feedback

How exactly did we implement feedback skills training in Lamoda? Feedback is always given for something, some work done is needed, for which feedback can be given. Therefore, feedback training can be combined with other activities.

At that moment, as DevRel, I was working on my main task: I needed our experts to start making regular presentations at well-known IT conferences. Many experts understood that in order to do this, they needed to improve their public speaking skills. And, largely at the suggestion of colleagues, I organized a speaker club in the company (Lamoda Speakers Club).

But as part of the speaker club, we also worked on feedback skills. I taught people to give each other feedback in a way that was useful to them. And she helped me see first hand why getting the right feedback is so important.

What is Lamoda Speakers Club?

The main goals of the club:
1. Safe to perform
2. Make mistakes
3. Experiment

How is it organised. Each participant prepares a short report on any topic (5 minutes for the report itself and another 5 for questions). After the participant delivers his report, the listeners give him feedback. Club meetings are held every two weeks, no more than 6 speakers per meeting (total hour for the reports themselves, another hour for feedback). Participation is voluntary.

Correct feedback: what is it, and how to “sell” it to others?

As I said at the beginning of the report, initially most people do not use feedback in the best way - so that from a powerful tool of motivation it turns into something extremely unpleasant for both the one who gives feedback and the one who receives it. This is due to insufficient knowledge about how motivation works, what exactly helps people start doing their job better.

Therefore, my main task was not only to tell my colleagues which feedback is the right one, but also to “sell” this idea to them, so that they would be convinced that such an unusual way for them to give feedback really works better than the one they are used to. .

So, what is the right feedback? What idea are we selling?

Let's figure it out, what is feedback like.

1. positive and negative
Positive feedback is the answer to the question “What was good?”. Negative feedback is the answer to the question “What was bad?”

It was here that I had to convey to the guys that positive feedback is absolutely necessary for motivation, but negative feedback does not work. Instead, it is better to give developing feedback, which answers the question: "What can be improved?".

2. Useful or, on the contrary, non-constructive
What kind of feedback can be called useful?
It is a constructive и specific remarks that answer the question: “What to do?”, and not “What was bad?”.

In order to give constructive feedback, we learned to distinguish our personal assessments and feelings from facts. We are all human, so even technical stories have feelings too.

3. absent
Yes, this is also a type of feedback, and the participants were perfectly able to realize its importance in public speaking. Imagine: a person spent half an hour of his time preparing, went on stage, gave a report - and received nothing in response. No questions, no comments, no objections. At this moment, the understanding simply descends on him that when there is no feedback, it hurts. It's horrible. This was probably my very first important discovery: at Speakers Club, it turned out to be much easier to convey the need for feedback than to explain it ten times in words.

A person who does not receive any feedback, for some reason, immediately thinks that he did something badly. There are few people who think that they are still great, even when there is deathly silence in the hall. Therefore, we should not allow the absence of feedback when we want to motivate our employees - and club members understand this well from their own experience.

So, feedback is a must. must be, it must include positive и developing components, and it should be useful, that is constructive.

Of course, this idea of ​​feedback is very different from what many are used to - if everything is good, then you can say nothing, and if something is bad, then you need to criticize it, not caring about constructive suggestions. Therefore, I encountered resistance from some colleagues, and I had to “sell” them the idea of ​​\uXNUMXb\uXNUMXbthe right feedback - that is, to show in practice that it works much better.

Next, I will talk about the main doubts that the members of the club had, and how I worked with them.

Problem: fear of offending
The first thing I had to deal with. People are afraid to give both positive and negative comments. The idea that feedback is not beaten, but developed, is not very common in our culture. Therefore, giving and receiving feedback is simply scary for most people.
Solution: personal example and time to get used to

Problem: Too aggressive
Often, when a person gives feedback, it seems that he is asserting himself at someone else's expense. It looks something like this: “Now I will tell you how not to do it!” And there is such a beautiful one, as if the smartest. And then he wonders why they do not listen to him and refuse to accept his ideas. When I came across such people, it was important for me to understand inside myself that the person is generally good, and he does not want to do bad things to everyone here, but only cares for the truth. His problem is that he simply does not yet know how to correctly convey his thoughts. My task is to teach him this.
Decision: the principle of “everyone is equal” and the rule “you didn’t give feedback, you don’t give”
I reminded the participants that everyone came to the club in order to study a topic that no one knows (public speaking). Therefore, anyone can make mistakes, and everyone's opinion is equally important. We use feedback in the club not to find out who is better, but to share experience and find ways to solve a problem together. To do this, it is not at all necessary to tell others that they are all not great.

In this regard, we have another rule: if you don’t speak, you don’t give feedback. Only when a person has been in the shoes of a speaker can he understand what it is like. His feedback will immediately sound different, much more constructive and helpful.

Problem: Reluctance to give positive feedback
Some people think that positive feedback is not needed at all. The team leader of one of the teams came to me with something like this: “I want to perform, but I don’t want to give feedback to others.”

Solution: Demonstrating the Effectiveness of Positive Feedback
Evaluating objectively (that is, talking not only about the minuses, but also about the pluses) is important, without this, the feedback simply does not work as a motivation tool.

In such a situation, I like to give the story of a person who was once a team leader, and then became a service station. When he did a code review, he left a lot of comments there about what needs to be fixed, and people got rejected. And he read somewhere about the power of positive feedback, where it was advised to tell people that they did well in their work. Then he began to add one or two positive comments to each code review. As a result, his comments were awaited with healthy curiosity, as people felt that their work had been seen and judged fairly.

Problem: Reluctance to receive positive feedback
It happens that a person who receives feedback does not want to hear about their strengths, considering it a waste of time. This is due to the culture of depreciation that exists in the post-Soviet space. When we are told that we did something well, we miss it, unfortunately. But as soon as we were pointed out to the flaw, we take a large magnifying glass and look there. That is, we focus only on our problems and do not notice our victories.

I tried to show the club members in practice how they can apply the received positive feedback in order to help them realize its importance.

Solution 1: Positive Feedback Helps Test Hypotheses

Positive feedback can be used to test hypotheses. For example, when preparing a report, it seems to you that this convincing fact that everyone will appreciate can come in well. But then on the feedback you hear that, listing the advantages of your work, no one has ever named him. Then you realize that this is not the most key argument, and next time you try to focus on something else.

Solution 2: Positive feedback helps you understand where to put effort and where not

An example from the work of our club. One department head has a very quiet voice, it was difficult for him to speak loudly. He worked on this for a long time, and now he finally succeeded. He achieved that he can speak to the whole hall without a microphone. For three meetings of the club, he has been told that the volume was sufficient, he can be heard everywhere. Everything, at this moment you can stop and move on to the development of the next skill, not forgetting to rely on your strengths.

Solution 3: Positive Feedback Helps Improve Skills

There are two approaches to development:

1. Pulling gaps. When a person identifies his weaknesses and tries to improve them somehow.
2. On the contrary, pumping strong skills. Even if there are some weaknesses, the strengths are so good that they will compensate for all the weaknesses.

Let's say you already know that you're not very good at planning your public speaking, but you're great at improvising when you're interactive with people. Okay, don't meticulously plan your performance, don't suffer. Prepare key moments, then improvise. Do not do what will demotivate you - do what you do best. But in order to do what you do best, you need to know about it.

Problem: biased feedback

I will not tire of repeating: the right feedback is the most powerful tool that helps us do our job better. But for it to work, it must be objective, that is, it must include references to both the positive aspects of the work done and what can (or should) be improved. As you can see, it was difficult for people to give positive feedback, so in general the feedback was not very objective.

Solution 1: the rule of "three pluses or be silent"

In order to use the full power of positive feedback, we have introduced another rule in the club: those who do not find 3 pluses in a person’s speech and cannot express them on feedback must be silent. This motivated the participants to find pluses in order to be able to speak out. So our feedback became more objective.

Solution 2: Don't make excuses

Positive feedback must be accepted. In our country, again because of the culture of devaluation, people often begin to make excuses after their work has been praised. Like, it all happened by chance, it's not me, guys, who did it all. And - look what I myself see the disadvantages in my work.

It's not constructive. You came out here and do what you do. You will be told what they saw in your work. These are entirely your merits, accept them. And if something didn’t work out very well for you, you don’t have to immediately talk about it, even if you didn’t notice something. No need to look at the shortcomings with a magnifying glass, it is much more useful to objectively evaluate the pros and cons.

As you can see, this whole part was basically about selling the idea of ​​positive feedback, because it is very hard for people to accept.

Section summary: what helps me to “sell” the right feedback ideas?

• Personal example
• The principle of "everyone is equal"
• Explanation and visual demonstration of how useful objective feedback (that is, necessarily talking about the pluses of the work) is useful both to the one who gives it and to the one who accepts it

So far, I've talked about what kind of feedback is the most useful, and how to convince others of this. Now I want to talk about how I built the learning process itself in order to teach people to give just such feedback.

How to teach to give more specific feedback

Very often feedback is not enough concreteness. For example, they tell you that you are great and did everything well. Okay, but what exactly did I do well? From such feedback it is not very clear what exactly I should continue to do in order to continue to succeed. If you can't specifically explain what was good about a person's work, then your feedback is not specific.

Examples of non-specific feedback

How did I solve this problem?

1. Designate tools and evaluation criteria. We agreed that in order to evaluate a public performance, we will have 3 large blocks, inside of which there are still sub-items.

Then we held a similar meeting with department heads and CTOs on the topic of what we generally evaluate engineers for. And you know, we spent an hour or two trying to align those evaluation criteria with our expectations. Until we set these criteria, it was quite difficult to say that different departments evaluate the same.

2. Specify details. I suggested taking notes while the participants listened to other people's reports. If you want to give specific feedback on someone's public speaking, then you need to write down the speaker's successful and unsuccessful phrases/arguments verbatim. For a specific feedback, details are needed, and it is impossible to remember them in a series of even 2-3 stories in a row. If you don’t take notes during the work of your team: testers, analysts, developers, then you won’t remember the details later, which means you won’t be able to give a specific feedback.

3. speak for yourself. Sometimes the feedback is blurred and covered up with a general assessment like “this argument was unconvincing.” Wait, why didn't that convince you specifically? Speak for yourself, do not hide behind the abstract "we". From this follows the need to check the feelings of others. For you, this fact was unconvincing, but others may have a different opinion if you ask them about it. Therefore, I taught people not to speak for everyone, and sometimes even to ask the feelings of others.

4. Don't accept an opinion, but consider it. It is not necessary to respond to every feedback. Like, this is true, this is the truth in the highest instance, and I will accept it right now and go to put it into practice! No, this is just one person's opinion. Perhaps he is an expert or your leader - then you should take into account his opinion, but you are not obliged to accept it completely. And this is also part of the safety culture that we have created inside the club - a person has the right to nod, but to decide for himself what he will change in his speech and what not.

5. Consider level. We have a tester who has been with the company for 6 years and has tested every internal system that has ever existed. He is an excellent tester, so he compiled a 28-point checklist for evaluating the performance and always followed it.

This turned out to be not very useful, since it is still worth considering the level of the person to whom we give feedback. We initially agreed that we have 3 blocks for evaluation. For beginners, the base on which they should be judged is the first block (concerning the structure of the performance). The person does not yet understand for whom he is speaking; what exactly did he want to say; ending smeared, etc. If a person has not yet managed to figure it out, then why should he talk about the fact that he has little interactive with the audience? Such feedback will not be useful to him, since he cannot yet realize it. In training, it is important to go consistently, in small steps. Therefore, I asked the tester to limit ourselves to our three blocks of evaluation and give feedback, focusing on the level of the one whose report he evaluates. As a result, he began to make deeper and more interesting suggestions about how things could be improved, and his feedback became more useful by focusing on the most important and easily achievable points.

6. Three bowl rule. When 5 people named you 3 pluses each, it turns out quite a lot. You try to take all this into account and put it into practice right away and turn into a juggler who has too many plates. When preparing for each speech, choose only 2-3 skills that you will hone, and speak with a focus on them. Focus on other skills next time. So you will improve the result in each iteration.

7. Develop competence. “Don’t look at the slides behind your back,” says the person giving the feedback. And he gets a logical answer: “What should I do instead?” The person who gives feedback genuinely wants to help when they say, "Don't do that!" But the second person does not have enough knowledge and experience to figure out how to replace the “forbidden” action.

How to develop competence?

1. Share own experience.
2. Engage experience participants.

I don't claim to be a public speaking guru myself. I have a little more experience than each of the participants, but the total experience of five participants will already be more than mine. And I ask: “How do you do it? What would you do in this situation? If you were to make this report, what would be your goal?” Here everyone has not only their own answers, but also the answers of other participants.

My role here is to validate ideas. Sometimes a person is specific, and what works for him, will not work for others. Or I know the offer could hurt. Then I say my opinion, but I leave the decision to the participants.

Thus, we have formed another rule in the club: don't know - ask for advice. And I really like it, because when someone, for example, does not know what topic to speak on, he can simply come to the general chat of the Speakers club and ask: “How do you deal with X? What do you do if Y? Due to the fact that we managed to build a safe atmosphere inside, people are not afraid to ask and ask questions, even if they seem stupid.

To summarize: what, as a result, helps to teach?

Very briefly, the scheme of working on feedback skills, which we came to, can be written as follows:

1. Feedback is given only by the one who spoke himself.
2. First, we say three pluses, which was good.
3. We name three points that could be improved.
4. We use the evaluation criteria that we agreed on and take into account the level of the speaker.
5. Work on three skills at a time, no more.
6. Share experience and use the experience of others.
7. And most importantly - we do not allow the absence of feedback.

The result of the speaker club for the participants and the company

Before coming to this conference, I asked the guys: “Do the skills acquired at Speakers Club help you in your work?” And here is what I received from the members of the club:

1. It became easier to communicate your ideas to the team.
2. Developing feedback instead of negative helps a lot with juniors and new employees.
3. Using positive feedback really helps motivate the team.
4. Feedback skills also help structure your response in other meetings and try to give what the person wants to hear from you.

I liked the feedback of our head of ERP-development most of all: “Now sometimes they come for feedback themselves.” It seems to me that all these reviews are a very important indicator that people have really learned something.

If you do not have enough feedback from your manager, colleagues, subordinates, then try to ask him directly. Sometimes you can do it in person. If it is important for you to get more specific feedback, then structure the request. Write a letter asking your manager/colleague/team lead to answer specific questions. Be sure to indicate what is important to you and what you would like to talk about with your manager. Perhaps not all leaders have the skill to give high-quality feedback - this is normal. But if you yourself have this skill, you can get the feedback of the quality that you need from any person.

Injection feedback culture. Yes, not everyone visits our club regularly. Some came to meet and did not appear again. But even those who left can now show others how to give better feedback. People learn by example, and if there are many examples of concrete and developmental feedback, then the culture of feedback will spread. Especially if these examples are given by people with recognized authority.

How to build feedback training in your team?

Of course, you can teach feedback not on the basis of a speaker club, but in some other way. Great if you already have ideas! Most importantly, the following criteria must be met:

1. The Right Environment. A safe space where there is room for error and room for experimentation.

2. New interesting topic for main discussion. It can be anything: new technology, new practice, methodology.

3. Easy entry. In order to be able to take on board new participants at any time, it is necessary to monitor the equality of rights, so that the opinion of the newcomer is heard and taken into account in the same way as the opinion of the old-timers.

4. duration and regularity. I repeat: giving the right feedback is a difficult skill. It cannot be taught quickly. I noticed that my guys learned to find pluses somewhere on the third feedback. Somewhere on the 6th feedback, they already more or less fell into concreteness, usefulness and constructiveness. People need to constantly practice to learn how to do it right.

5. Feedback on feedback. You definitely need a person who would correct the way people train feedback skills. At first, I gave feedback on public speaking. Then the club members began to do it themselves, and I only gave feedback on their feedback. That is, if you want to be the leader of this project, the club, then you will also have the role of a leader, you will have to help people acquire this skill.

As a result, in my opinion, in the struggle between the training and the club for training employees in feedback skills, the club definitely wins. What do you think, is it possible to organize such a club in your country?

Source: habr.com