Delivering actionable feedback | Hacker News Reader

Delivering actionable feedback

posthog.com

97 pointscarlual21 comments

I recommend “Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well”.

It talks about the point of feedback and how there are different categories of feedback: appreciation, coaching, and evaluation. The frame bad feedback or poorly received feedback as “crossing the wires” where the receiver wants affirmation but gets coaching or evaluation. This throws them into a spiral. Recognizing this can make you better at receiving feedback and giving as well.

There’s a bunch of little things like “publicly praise, privately criticize” and that it’s way better to make time for feedback rather than waiting for the right time. Feedback is best fresh, where you can talk about concrete examples or incidents.

My additions:

You're telling them what they already know - For constructive feedback to actually be feedback, it has to have a little bit of novelty. Either the feedback itself, or the giver's perception and experience of the situation that led to the feedback, needs to contain new information for the recipient, otherwise it's a lecture.

You can't stop talking - Once you've given the feedback, anything beyond that is... not feedback, it's something else. Maybe it's your role to go further, maybe not. Be honest with yourself about what you're trying to get out of the interaction.

> You can't stop talking - Once you've given the feedback, anything beyond that is... not feedback, it's something else.

So, so true. Early on in my career I was so nervous giving feedback that I talked for an hour after providing the feedback. Absolutely terrible. I remember that conversation every time I'm giving feedback now.

"Why you're bad at giving feedback"

why you're bad at choosing titles.

EDIT: the title has changed to "Delivering actionable feedback". this is much better. someone listened.

> the title has changed

Only on HN

The original title is much better for most audiences.

It provides an immediate identification challenge and response in the reader’s mind: “Am I really bad at [X]?”

The edited title is in the language of committee reports. “Delivery” and “actionable” are formal and passive words, without an immediate connection to the reader.

I didn't realize the title was changed. Who did this?

Maybe have this with more than a grain or two of cultural anthropology, too, because giving and receiving feedback heavily depends on the culture you grew up in.

Even within cultures there’s stark variation.

Some people think highly of themselves and need direct feedback to cut through their self delusion. Other people are very insecure and will interpret helpful feedback as a direct insult.

Being able to red people and figure out the right approach is part of being a good manager. Process and team structure help, but ultimately it all comes down to individual relationships

The biggest issue with giving and receiving feedback I consistently find is that it's not just an individual issue. It's not even just an issue between the feedback giver and receiver. It's a huge cultural issue that every company I've ever seen consistently underestimates the difficulty and value of. The entire company needs to demonstrate that it's safe and valued to give and receive feedback and even criticism.

I've been on teams where this is done well on the team-level. I could give feedback to my teammates without worrying about offending them, and they would work on the issue. I could receive criticism from my teammates without worrying they hated me or that this would impact my job. This also meant there were almost never huge personal issues on the team, any issues were handled before they became a big deal. But even there, this didn't extend beyond the team. If we had an issue with another team or with management, suddenly any criticism or feedback we gave was interpreted as an attack and was impossible to solve.

To give actionable feedback you need to be in a culture that shows you it's safe to make mistakes, and that improving is noticed and appreciated. A high-functioning team can do this. But I think it's hard (borderline impossible) to do this on an organizational level because this requires a certain level of mutual respect and trust that is frankly just not there when there are huge asymmetrical power relationships at play.

Id also add that one way to make your team better at feedback is to invest in developing a rapport between team members. Especially if there are remote employees.

It feels very different getting feedback from somebody you talk with frequently. If two people never talk and one delivers some criticism, it WILL trigger defensiveness.

> At PostHog, our approach is to have feedback dinners with the entire team. It gives everyone a chance to share feedback with each other in front of the rest of the team.

Yeah, this can’t generally be sound advice. Feedback that can be interpreted as critical is best delivered in private. There may be the rare constellation of individuals who take it very well in a team setting, but that is not a norm. If you have intense amounts of history, trust, emotional intelligence, and communication skills and extremely low ego and office politics this might work — more likely the guy who pushes for this and thinks this works thinks of themselves as emotionally intelligent but actually aren’t and is extremely oblivious to how much damage they are causing to morale and team dynamics.

I have heard of similar approaches being used at e.g. Nvidia and elsewhere for top leadership to allow everyone to learn from each others mistakes but there are cultural requirements here, as well as factors including the degree of personal stakes in successful outcomes at the group level, and the nature of the hierarchy and selection/exclusion process for members.

What you often do want to encourage (typically through example) is people choosing to celebrate the sharing of individual learnings from failure in group settings. The ability to be vulnerable and take accountability for mistakes while sharing those mistakes in a way others can learn from them can be highly valuable and build trust.

Yeah that was my reaction as well. The post goes on to insist that, despite this intuition, it still generates good feedback, but … for the same reasons you give, I have to doubt that self report too.

All the other points seem solid, though.

I think this is also a property of relationships rather than just individuals, and for that reason, it's not something that will scale. It's especially fraught when you add someone new to a team that's already very high trust about feedback, particularly if that person is especially insecure and/or has had bad experiences where they felt humiliated by public feedback in the past.

That exact same person might have done fine with public feedback had they been there from the beginning, but you can't just toss someone into an established dynamic and expect them to have the same level of trust as the founding members.

Also -- and this is a thing that a lot of companies/teams who strive for ultra high emotional trust seem to neglect -- some people do act in bad faith. When you lean too hard into the "bring your authentic self" school of thought, you strip your team of crucial emotional protections that corporate environments are designed to provide, and all it takes is one high-functioning person with deep seated personality issues (and that describes a large portion of the general population) to cause serious emotional damage in that kind of environment. Even if you have leadership with the abnormally high emotional intelligence and agility to navigate and repair that damage when it happens, it's going to be an enormous drain on them.

My feedback:

This advice was contradictory and impersonal, condescending in part.

I can't be the only one who finds this kind of feedback technique odd. It's in vogue like the SBI model but never sits right with me.

Sigh, at this rate you might as well just ask GPT to write the feedback script.

It's worth investing in learning how to deliver feedback. If you are a manager or team lead, this is one of the most important skills you need to have. It's also useful if you are not leading.

For me, the best framework for learning how to deliver feedback was Refound's Accountability Dial. It breaks down stages of delivering feedback and allows you to comfortably escalate if the feedback does not lead to desired changes. You can read about it for free on the internet.

Posthog is giving me I wanna work there vibes with this ultra sensible approach.

Calling out real peoples names makes me feel like they are saying "these things are ok". I love the bit about they person who was allowed to work to their style.

Might add it to my hit list for later!

One of the best ways to get good at delivering actionable feedback is to practice a bunch of times!

It's slow and tough to get enough reps in real-life. Eventually, you'll get there.

But you can accelerate your learning by doing AI roleplays with a product like https://www.exec.com/ai-roleplays

My feedback for you is that this community expects a disclaimer when you're promoting your own product, and that the product is too tangential for this plug not to feel spammy.

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