Providing Feedback and Critique
- Critiques are team activities. - Everyone in the room should have an equal voice, but no one should have the authority to mandate specific decisions, including executives and the leader of the team. - Encourage everyone to provide candid feedback and to be open to ideas. - Never make criticism personal. - Be specific in your feedback.
- Identify the strengths of the work. - Identify its problems and try to get to the root of each problem rather than focusing on coming up with solutions. - Discuss suggestions regarding possible solutions. - Build on one another's ideas. - Make the person who is responsible for the work you're critiquing—that is, the person actually leading the work on the project, who knows it best—responsible for synthesizing all of the feedback, then coming up with solutions to the identified problems.
1. Your feedback must have the express purpose of helping a team member to improve personally and professionally. Your goal must never be just to criticize. Berating people and telling them they've screwed up does not help them to improve and makes them feel fearful and defensive. Fear does not motivate people, but having a trusting relationship with a boss who is looking out for their best interests does.
2. Always provide personal feedback in private, but praise publicly. It's shocking for everyone present when bosses vent their disapproval in public. Bosses who do this either lack emotional control or have a need to flaunt their power. Both destroy trust. There is no good reason to criticize publicly. No boss can justify such behavior. People can't absorb feedback when they're embarrassed by someone's making them look bad in public. Never humiliate people.
3. The best leaders are great at asking insightful questions that gently help guide their people through the process of learning where they need to improve. We gain our deepest insights through introspection, so your feedback should make people think. Improvement requires understanding and internalizing the need for change. When you can help people to do all of this, they are more likely to embrace change.
4. Show empathy and model the way forward by telling stories about similar mistakes you've made yourself—or that you've observed other unnamed individuals make—how you've dealt with such problems, and how handling them helped you to become a better person or a more effective professional. Doing this helps people to recognize that their mistakes are not unique to them and to embrace opportunities to aspire to better things.
Critiquing Creative Projects
Critiques are to improve results, not to prevent risks or failure. Utilize the following guidelines for critiquing creative project work:
Providing Personal Feedback
When providing personal feedback, you must keep four guidelines in mind to ensure that you deliver your feedback in a way that builds trust:
