feedback is a critical part of your job and it becomes even more critical as you grow in your career as you become a second level or a senior or a manager or a director or a vp or a cto at each of those layers your need for delivering feedback and for receiving feedback and teaching others to do that increases and it can't be overstated how important it is to develop this skill yes feedback is a skill even though we produce feedback feedback no matter what we do in other words whether i am trying to or not i'm providing some kind of signal to the people around me but if we are intentional and we shape our feedback correctly we can actually get more of what we care about we can actually incite change where we need to incite change without making enemies left and right so i want to tell you the simplest advice the one piece of advice that i have for you in correcting your feedback you almost certainly have a problem with your feedback if you're like most people in fact even if you know this advice you may still have a problem with it and i hope that you will listen to the advice again good advice usually is worth listening to more than once most of the time good advice is applicable uh more than once but if you're not sure what to do you can just go to the website and go to the website and go to the website and go to the website and go to the website and go to the website and go to the website take it we try to apply it we fail and then we cycle back again so this is a reminder for those of you who already know and hopefully this is a new insight for those of you who don't the simple the simplest way to improve your feedback is to stop thinking about what's bothering you and instead figure out a problem that you both care about let me state this a different way stop sharing grievances as feedback stop sharing your emotional response as feedback stop sharing your even your opinion as feedback and instead find a problem that is being created and get on the side of the problem and instead find a problem that is being created and get on the side of the problem and instead find a problem that is being created and get on the side of the problem to fix it this is a simple shift a simple change in the way you're thinking about the problem if you had to visualize this imagine that you in the first picture where you're sharing your grievances or standing over somebody while they're sitting in a chair listening to you kind of preach at them giving them a sermon of everything they're doing wrong and this shift is to instead stop thinking about the problem and instead figure out a problem that is being created and get on the side of the problem sit next to them sit next to the person you don't have to literally do this but it may actually be a physically representative way to think about this problem sit next to the person and find the problem that this behavior is generating the problem is not just your emotional response the problem is not that it's a grievance it's what is this actually causing in the world what is the observation that I can make with that person that they too will agree is a problem this is the critical piece that you can't miss the other person for them to act on your feedback they need to understand and essentially agree they need to agree that this change needs to happen and they need to agree that this change needs to happen now you can get somebody to agree to making a change with incentives you can get them to agree by threatening them these are all potential pathways but one of the best ways that you can get somebody to agree to act on your feedback is if they actually think the feedback is true if they believe that some activity they're partaking in some behavior some action they're taking is to make them agree to make a change or have taken has caused something that they don't want that's the key their behavior has caused something that they don't want to cause and you're pointing it out you're helping them recognize something and maybe they are not recognizing on their own their behavior is doing something in the world that they don't want to be done now here's an important point here I'm not saying that they have to agree with you on every point I'm also not saying that they have to agree with every single problem that you have with their behavior in other words maybe it is a problem that what they do gets under your skin because it causes you to be distracted but that may not be a problem for them the critical factor here is that you're trying to find shared common ground you're trying to find a problem problem that that person will also agree is a problem. Now part of this shift is a kind of a psychological trick. What you've done by sitting next to them and asking them to solve the problem with you is you've kind of short-circuited their feeling brain with their thinking brain. Instead of being on the defense and trying to decode all of the social signals that you're sending you've asked them to calculate something. This means that they have to think a little bit harder they have to think on a different wavelength and there is some good research around this that when you're trying to solve a problem you're not thinking as much about how offended you are. That's the layman's way of describing this research and it's incredibly effective as a feedback strategy because you're trying to actually focus on a problem. So often feedback goes wrong because people feel like the spotlight is put on them, on them as a person, on their identity, on some mistake that they made that they didn't mean to make. Some kind of personal judgment against their abilities or against their existence. This is the way that people naturally parse negative feedback. And so it's your job as the feedback giver to recognize that feedback is a very sensitive arena to play in. Feedback triggers so many defensive mechanisms. And the problem is if you're just giving feedback to give it, if you're just sending feedback because you needed to get it off your chest, you're not giving feedback at all. Instead, you're doing something for the sake of it. You're doing something for yourself. You're engaging in some kind of cathartic response to another person's behavior. That's not feedback and it's never going to do you any good. Now, it's important to recognize that this kind of feedback is not necessarily universal. This isn't necessarily how you would go about sharing feedback in a relationship that is not strictly a professional relationship. This works in a professional environment because you don't need to have any personal commitment to each other for this to be useful. In other words, no matter how much you like your coworkers, at the end of the day, your responsibility to your coworkers sort of ends at the boundary of your work environment. You may choose to extend that relationship, but it's not imperative. And so you can functionally, even though this may not necessarily be the way that you operate, you can functionally not really care too much about each other's feelings. That's not necessarily a requirement to have a successful work relationship. This seems crazy to say that you don't need to think about other people's feelings as a part of a discussion on feedback. But it's not so much. You're not thinking about other people's feelings, but rather that you don't need to force other people to think about yours. There's a subtle difference here. You as the feedback giver are paying a lot of attention to other people's feelings. Not because you've committed to fostering an emotional relationship with that person, but instead because you understand that the high functioning relationships that you have with the people at work require you to pay attention to their feelings. Because if you walk into a session where you're about to share some difficult feedback with a coworker and you do so with no regard to their feelings, that feedback is going to fall entirely flat, as we've already mentioned. You sharing your feedback with another person is an exercise in paying attention to their emotional state. If you can capture this one piece from this episode, let it be this. That your feedback should be delivered instead of you sharing your personal feelings in a professional environment. Instead, you share a problem that you want to solve with the person. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. Hopefully that last little portion where I say, you don't have to care about each other's feelings. You understand that I'm not saying that that is the right way to think about relationships at work, but instead that it is a functional commitment that you are making. You're making a commitment to work together well. And then on top of that, you can become friends and treat each other kindly. And I certainly hope that you will do that as well. Thanks so much for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed this discussion and you'd like to carry it forward, please join the Developer Tea Discord community at developertea.com slash discord. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.