A lot of what we're talking about on the show recently is durable skills, things that are going to last regardless of what the tech environment, what our tooling changes into. And in today's episode, I want to kind of take a step back away. We've been talking a lot about what's going to happen in the industry as a result of AI tooling. I want to talk about some of those durable skills in today's episode. My name is Jonathan Cottrell. You're listening to Developer Tea, and my goal on the show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. In this particular episode, we're talking about something that drives clarity. It drives clarity. Something that we all have experienced, either on the receiving or on the giving side, is feedback. Feedback. And sometimes the way we experience this is not very intentional, or it may be very intentional. You can probably recall, and maybe even count on one hand, the few times where somebody gave you feedback in a way that was impactful, that drove a good change for you, that you recognized that you walked out of the meeting wanting to do better without feeling torn down, without feeling demoralized. And so I want to talk about how to accomplish this kind of feedback in today's episode, both from the giving and from the receiving side, right? Both from the giving and the receiving side. But before we get into kind of the specifics of that skill set, I want to take a step back and encourage you to recognize the point of your feedback. this takes some self-reflection it takes some time it may take a little bit of setting your ego aside or or evaluating your own pride or ego in the situation because very often when our gut tells us that we need to give somebody feedback our underlying feeling in that moment is frustration, anger, you know, maybe we feel slighted in some way, maybe we feel untrusted, we feel disrespected. All of these things are kind of us being on the negative receiving end of some action that someone else took. And they tend to align with negative emotions, emotions, right? Those negative emotions may be charged or they may be kind of victim orientation, the charged ones being frustrated or impatient, for example, right? You're not being attacked in that way. You're wishing somebody else would do something in order for you to experience a positive outcome of some kind. So, for example, you know, you have a peer that isn't reviewing viewing your code or isn't responding to your messages quickly enough. And so you're going to have a negative outcome of, you know, your work is not going to go, is not going to ship on time, on schedule, right? And so your gut response, maybe your intuition and giving feedback in that moment is to make sure they know how you feel. And that actually is, you know, very often is the goal of what I would call kind of premature feedback, right? Our feelings in the moment are a signal that we should listen to because you may not necessarily be wrong that something has gone wrong. Your emotional state, your frustration, your urgency, all of those things are signals that something has happened that is not ideal, right? And your feelings, certainly what I'm not going to tell you in this episode is to set your feelings aside or act as if they don't exist or not listen to them in the first place. These are good signals to pay attention to, right? But what I'll challenge you to do is go beyond that as your reason for providing feedback. This requires self-reflection. It requires perhaps taking a step back away from the situation, recontextualizing, okay, what exactly is happening and why do I care? Why do I care to provide this feedback? Now, in personal relationships, you know, if you have, you know, for example, when I have conflict with my wife, then a feeling that I have may actually be a completely reasonable reasonable thing to talk with her about because we care for each other's feelings and she may actually care about that feeling outcome and she may want to, you know, adjust behavior so that I don't feel a particular way, right? But in most professional circumstances, your goal with giving feedback is very important to parse between ensuring that someone knows how you feel, right? This can sometimes actually be more akin to an attack on that person so that they can kind of feel the pain that you're feeling or they can share in the front, you know, the negative aspects of your emotions, right? So that's kind of the premature feedback I was talking about. up. The more mature feedback, the effective feedback is goal oriented, right? It's goal oriented. So what do you actually want to happen? Ask yourself this before you give feedback. What is your actual intended goal? The change that you wish would occur or some series of events that you hope will be triggered by this action, right? This is very important to understand because sometimes feedback can have adverse reactions that are exactly the opposite of what you want, right? You may feel emotionally better in the moment because you were able to kind of process through the emotions that this person has forced you into essentially, right? By some action that they took and you respond and you give them this kind of emotional response and there's some emotional release or there's catharsis involved there, you feel better, but then something bad happens as a result. Maybe the behavior changes in a negative way. Maybe it gets worse. Maybe they doubled down on a behavior that you wish they would have changed. Or maybe they withdraw or become reclusive. Maybe your relationship is just hurt, but the behavior doesn't really change at all anyway. And so the outcome ultimately ends up being net negative for you. All right, nothing improved as a result of this. So ask yourself, is my goal actually to improve this situation? Is the feedback that I'm about to give this person, something I'm talking to them about, is it actually going to change in a positive direction? Is there a path to a better future through this feedback? All right, and we'll talk a little more about how to deliver the feedback, but that is the framing that you want to approach feedback with. What is my actual intended goal? When I share this information, when I, you know, provide, you know, like we're going to talk about here in a moment, this feedback in this, you know, kind of controlled environment, controlled format, do I have an ideal outcome as a result of that? If you don't, it's important to start there. Start there. Because providing feedback without a goal is very often is going to trigger, you know, feedback is already kind of a, it makes us feel like we're in danger, right? If you ask somebody if they can meet for 10 minutes, you want to give them some feedback. If you've ever gotten a message like that, you know it's going to increase, quite literally, it's been studied, it will increase your heart rate. You're going to move into kind of a more defensive physiological state, even involuntarily. Even if you say that you are open to feedback, you will have this kind of involuntary response. And in fact, if you can establish a practice of asking for feedback rather than, you know, only, you know, within a within a company or team culture, only providing feedback when it's not asked for the the opposite direction, you can get the same feedback. back, but the physiological response is different because your mind and body have kind of the signal that you are in control, that you are asking for this, bring me this feedback, rather than it being thrust upon you and you're not in control of that situation. Okay, so you've established your goal. You know that your intent is for something to get better, right? You want something to improve in a particular way. You believe that this person has the capacity, right? This is kind of getting into what good feedback looks like, but you believe this person has the capacity to improve in a direction that is meaningful, right? That is kind of the baseline requirement for good feedback is that you have a goal in mind. So we're gonna talk a little bit more about what good feedback looks like, both from the giving perspective and from the receiving perspective perspective right after we talk about today's sponsor. No matter what you're building, SERP API is the web search API for your needs. If you're building an application that needs real-time search data, whether that's an agent system, an SEO tool, a price tracker, you know, there's, there's, or all of the above, I can imagine you kind of building all of those things all at once. Anything else that needs to know what's happening on the web right now? SERP API is the web search API that handles it for you. You make an API call, you get that clean JSON. They deal with the proxies, the captures, the parsing, all the scraping headaches that you don't want to think about when you're building. They support dozens of search engines and platforms. They're fast. They've been doing it long enough. The companies like NVIDIA, Adobe, and Shopify, they all rely on SERP API already. There's a free tier to get started, so you can build and test your application before you commit to anything. And by the way, if you are building with AI, SERP has an official MCP to make getting up and running a simple task. If your app needs to search the web in real time, check out serpapi.com. That's S-E-R-P-A-P-I dot com. Thanks again to SERP API for sponsoring today's episode of Developing Team. so we're going to talk about what good feedback looks like now and once you've kind of met the criteria that you have a goal you have a better future in mind right? That is kind of the basis for the, on the giving side, it kind of supports, gives you the backbone for what good feedback will look like, right? Good feedback does not look like complaints, purely complaints about some past behavior. I didn't like it when you did X, X or you annoyed me when you did X, right? I was frustrated with you for not reviewing my PR on time. Well, fine. If I'm on the receiving side of that, I'm going to say, well, you don't know anything about why I took that long. Maybe I had a family issue, right? I had a problem that you didn't even ask me about. You don't care about me, right? So there's lots of reasons why this This approach of just sharing your frustration or just sharing this backwards-looking judgment, what you did and what it did to me, this is not sufficient for good feedback. It's not sufficient. Because what it really does is it essentially says, you did something that was bad and that's where you draw the line. That's where you stop. That's not really feedback. It's not giving you any kind of information that is helpful or forward-looking at all, right? So this is the important thing. Good feedback has a few things in common, and this is across many different studies and different approaches, different models for what good feedback can look like. And there's kind of a cross-section of these things. There's a lot of different ways to do feedback. back. Everybody has kind of, you know, every management firm out there probably has their own model of this, right? There's a very popular format called SBI, which is Situation, Behavior, and Impact. We'll talk about that. I think there's a little bit of something missing on SBI that I want to talk to you about as well. So the first thing is for all of these, it's behavior-based. It's very specific to behavior, right? If you walk into a session and you make a judgment call on somebody's core identity, on their self, on a, you know, something about them that is not specific, in other words, you're not providing them direct examples of the feedback, then they're much more likely to not align with this perception for their self-perception, right? In other words, most people would not subscribe to the idea that they have some major problem that they are unaware of and that suddenly this feedback is making them aware of a flaw that they have as a human being, right? So, feedback, most good actionable feedback, right? Good behavior-based feedback is going to be focused on specifics. It's going to give you some specific idea of what happened. Like, what did you do, right? What did the person, the recipient of your feedback, what was their actual observable behavior, right? Right. At one at one job, we had the in our manager training, in our employee training, we had this idea of feedback as as a camera would have caught it. In other words, observable facts. Here's the actual thing that anyone around could look at this behavior and recognize it in the same way. Right. All right. So what was your observable behavior? behavior, we want to make sure this is in line, that our approach is in line with that person's self-concept. In other words, if I see myself as a competent engineer and your feedback paints me as incompetent, then I'm going to have a hard time accepting that, right? And regardless of what your belief is about my engineering ability, if you violate my my self-concept, right? In other words, if you're giving me feedback that doesn't align with what I believe about myself, it's going to be much harder for me to accept because in order to accept your feedback, I have to change what I think I am. I have to change something about my internal beliefs about who I am, right? And that's a much, much larger gap to bridge, right? This is not the kind thing that you're going to cover on a random 30-minute call with a coworker. Most of the time, our self-conception, what we believe about ourselves, our ego and our values and all these things, these are long established. They take a long time to evolve and they can change, but they certainly are not going to change in the average quick conversation about a meeting that we we just had or a presentation that you just flopped, right? Very unlikely. So that's what these models are intended to provide you. This SBI is one very popular model, situation, behavior, impact. And the way that looks is, you know, here's what was going on, right? The situation was, this was a presentation that the whole team was attending to learn about the feature that you You built your behavior. So during that presentation, you got sidetracked and started talking about another team's work. And you ended up not covering your own work very well. You didn't explain the feature that you built and the impact. So now as a result of that, the team doesn't really understand the thing that you built, right? Or there's probably better examples. This is kind of off the cuff. But as a result, you know, the what we wanted to understand, what we wanted to accomplish with the meeting, what we wanted to do, we weren't able to do it. So where I think the SBI model is limited is looking forward a little bit more. Right. So we've given the feedback. And if we just leave it at SBI approach, then we're not really partnering with that person to figure out now what. but right. Oh, well, thank you for the feedback. I guess I'll try something different in the future. That's actually not as effective or not as valuable to that person as if you were to say, you know what? I'm invested in a better, a better example of this in the future. This is especially true for managers, right? If trying to help your people grow, if you want to invest in their future, you want to coach them through these situations, then you need to focus on, okay, okay, how would you do this differently to avoid that negative outcome? What would you change about the behavior in that situation so that the impact was different? So you can think about this as situation, behavior, impact, intervention maybe, SBII. Fill in the blank. I'm not presenting a new model to you here. Instead, I want you to capture what is the real intent? The real intent is to recognize the behavior, recognize the impact, and move forward with something new. Try something new. What can you commit to trying in the future? This is just kind of attaching coaching with the feedback. And maybe you don't have a clear idea, but you should be clear about this. I'm not really sure what you should do in the future. I just wanted to give you this feedback and explain to you what the impact was. I trust that you have, you know, either resources that you can go and figure out a better way in the future or whatever, right? So the point being, don't only focus on the past. Turn your feedback to be forward-looking, future-looking. Okay, so another example of a model, since these are useful ways of kind of configuring your mindset. This comes from Netflix. It's the four A's, The four As. Aim to assist. Make it actionable. Show appreciation. And then accept or discard. All right. So aim to assist. Aim to assist means that your goal here, right? That's what we were talking about at the very top of this episode. You have a goal, right? You're trying to help somebody. You're not trying to make them feel bad. You're not trying to just go through some catharsis, right? Aiming to assist. Make it actionable. This is what we were talking about with in SBI, the behavior, being really specific. What is the thing to change here? It's not me as a person. It's this behavior, the thing that I engage in. Show appreciation, right? So this is recognizing that you, one, that you appreciate that this person is willing to take your feedback in the first place, right? They're willing to talk with you about, right? You want to show appreciation for what this person is doing well. Maybe show appreciation for their intent despite the outcome. And then finally, accept or discard. The idea here is that not everything in your feedback is going to be useful. Not everything that you provide is necessarily going to be actionable, useful, good information for this person. So they have the opportunity and you also have the opportunity to accept and discard, you know, the response that they have to you. So you're trying to glean and take the useful things out and discard the less than usual stuff. All right. So hopefully like you can kind of fill in some of the blanks of what does it look like to receive feedback? well. One really useful thing to do if you're somebody that's receiving feedback, because it's so easy to get into a defensive mode because you're very likely going to have those physiological changes. You're going to have some response to this person that's providing you the critical feedback, especially if they're not following one of these models. They don't listen to developer and so they don't know how important this is. Maybe they're just giving you this kind of feelings that they feel like are, you know, important to share or something. You can take on the mode of helping them walk through one of these models, right? So walk them through the SBI model. Help me understand, you know, what was the situation when this occurred so I can clearly understand why? Why are you bringing me this? Help me understand what the importance was. What was the thing that I did that you saw me do? Can you explain to me what behavior I engaged in? Or what would another person say that I did in this situation? And with the idea being to push someone to articulate these things because two things will likely happen. One, they'll respect that you're engaging them, right? They're going to show appreciation from the four A's model. They'll respect that you're engaging their feedback, right? They're more likely to get into some kind of problem solving mode and provide feedback that is more useful to you, right? That, that is more actionable to you. And so, uh, the, if you're, if you're able to move them through an SBI model, then you're more likely to have better feedback, right? That's, that's the basics of that. If you're watching the YouTube video, then you see there's a fly flying around me. Okay. So, uh, so, so we have, I only understand what the situation was. I can't give a fly feedback, unfortunately. So if you're asking them to help you understand more, then they're going to give you more useful feedback. You're going to be able to kind of iterate and actually see a path to the future and discuss ways that you might act in the future that would yield improvement. Again, this goes back to the idea that like, what is the goal here? What is the outcome that would be an improvement from whatever the outcome was? from your example from the feedback. This is a critical skill. It's a critical skill on both sides of the fence. Whether you're giving the feedback, whether you're receiving the feedback, it's critical because for most people, it's one of the hardest things that they will have to do in their career. And as it turns out, it is usually the pathway to learning more about yourself. Even though, even though we already mentioned, and feedback should not be attached to the identity. As you receive feedback over time, right? You start to build patterns and recognize, okay, I've gotten three or four different pieces of feedback that all kind of point to something I can introspect about myself, right? So paying attention, being open to that feedback, recognizing the patterns and the behavior. And then tactically speaking, if you're wanting better outcomes on your team, then being able to provide feedback in a way that drives improvement, real improvement from your team members. Imagine the opposite of this, that no feedback is ever given. Well, you're kind of in a static scenario. There's no growth possibility there, right? But if you can drive growth from the ground up, that feedback is a pathway to growth. growth. Career development and feedback are two sides of the same door, right? You walk through that door and you're going to improve in your career. You're going to improve in your job. This is a much better approach, much better approach to improvement than just doing it off the cuff, right? Or only relying on your management cycles or your performance improvement, performance plans, and your review cycles. All of those things are good. They are only one part of the puzzle. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer D. Hopefully this was enlightening for some people that fly still flying around. Hopefully this is enlightening for some of you who have struggled with either giving feedback or you don't really understand why is that so important. Hopefully this episode can kind of lay some groundwork for you that maybe you didn't have before and then give you some idea of what a science-based feedback actually look like. How do we actually accomplish change through this pathway that normally feels kind of like fighting? It feels contentious. It feels difficult. It feels like I'm getting kind of raked over the coals. This is the pathway to doing that. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you again to today's sponsor, SERP API. Go and check it out. S-E-R-P-A-P-I dot com. If you need a live web API, SERP API is the answer for you. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, enjoy your tea.