3 Helpful Ways To Give Feedback and Help Others Get Better
Sandwich method, STARAR, or rather NVC? How can I give feedback properly and why? And what does feedback have to do with talent?
My colleague Martin sent me a message in the company chat. “Would you like to talk about feedback?” he asks. I’m very curious to see what’s in store for me. It is Thursday, 20 October and we are meeting in a Google Call.
I go into our conversation with different thoughts. I’ve felt a few times in the past when I’ve received feedback that I wasn’t meant at all. The next thing that immediately comes to mind is the well-intentioned advice about not commenting on feedback, but accepting it.
“Why should you give feedback at all?”, Martin and I ask ourselves right at the beginning of the conversation. We come up with four reasons that might be relevant.
Why Giving Feedback Is Important
Feedback conversations are often about evaluating one’s own performance. The boss sits across from you and tells you what you did well and what you need to work on. She may want improvements in a certain area. Performance is the result of competence. Does it perhaps need training to increase competence?
Performance evaluation is often aimed at achieving some kind of improvement. Often on the professional level, but not only. Because often some feedback is also related to personal growth and development. Looking at the human side also means looking at the blind spots. Each of us has blind spots in our personality that we cannot see ourselves. Feedback can help to identify these.
When giving feedback to evaluate performance, but also as a support for personal growth, a little caution is needed. As a feedback giver, you have to be aware that everyone has a very unique evaluation pattern. This is strongly linked to our own values, but we as evaluators are usually not aware of it.
For me, shared values form the foundation for a good connection. If the values diverge greatly, this often leads to conflicts. A comparison between one’s own self-image and the reality of others can be helpful to see where the two images diverge.
A particularly important fuel for our inner drive is appreciation. Feedback can be used to express appreciation. Another colleague once put it this way: “Praise and blame refer to the behaviour, and appreciation refers to the qualities of a person. Giving feedback therefore also means that I have to engage more intensively with the other person, his values, and his contribution.
So, at the beginning of our conversation, we identified four reasons why giving feedback can be useful: to evaluate another person’s performance, to achieve an improvement, to compare the self-image with the external image, and, of course, to express appreciation.
Now that the reasons have been examined in more detail, the question arises as to how feedback can be well delivered to the man or woman. There are various methods to do this. We have taken a closer look at three of them.
Giving Feedback With the Sandwich Method
An objective judgement, an objective evaluation focuses equally on negative and positive aspects and weights them appropriately. The sandwich method is well suited for this and, what’s more, it is very simple. Similar to placing the slice of cheese between two slices of white bread in a sandwich, you wrap the criticism you want to make in two positive observations or words of appreciation.
The observations made also become more objective because one does not only see the negative aspects. No one has done exclusively negative actions. There is often something positive as well. The question is whether one wants to look closely enough as a feedback giver. After all, the goal is to express a critical observation that is based on a balanced assessment.
If I have already received criticism several times using the sandwich method, then after a few times I already think to myself “Oh, now he’s saying something positive, only to come right back around the corner with nagging.” This happens when I, as the recipient of feedback, have the impression that the positive aspects are not taken seriously. Some people also use criticism as a means of apportioning blame. So you have to be careful because the sandwich method can also be manipulative.
If the criticism is appropriate and delivered using the sandwich method, it becomes easier to digest because the primacy-recency effect1 makes it easier for us to remember what was said first and what was said last.
An alternative to the sandwich method is STAR and STARAR. Here there is even more differentiation.
Giving Feedback With STAR and STARAR
The aim of these two approaches is to describe as concretely as possible which actions lead to which results. To give positive feedback, the STAR method is used. For negative feedback, an additional AR is added. The abbreviation stands for the following:
S for Situation
T for task or the task to which the feedback refers
A for action or act of the person
R for the result that occurred.
So first the situation is described and then the task that should be completed. This concrete distinction makes the feedback specific and thus easier to accept.
If negative feedback is to be expressed, another AR is described. That is, first the actual action that led to a negative result is described (first AR). Then another possible course of action is pointed out that would lead to an alternative result.
Giving Feedback With NVC
NVC is a communication model developed by psychologist Marshall B. Rosenberg and stands for “Nonviolent Communication”.2 In difficult or tense situations, four steps are used in this model, which serve as a railing and provide guidance. The four steps are: Observation, Feeling, Need, Ask.
In NVC it is said that feelings are our feedback system to show us how our needs are. They are caused mainly by our own values and not so much by other people.
The four steps can be used in the following structure:
“When I see … (observation), I am … (feeling) because I need … (need). Would you please do … (request)?”
Since the NVC needs quite a bit of practice, Martin is thinking about organising a knowledge exchange with interested people from the company to introduce it in detail.
While we are talking about the application of these three methods, Martin also asks an interesting question. “Is the difference between these three ways of giving feedback that the first two methods are more related to the thing and the third is more related to the person?” An intriguing observation, I think.
After our conversation is over, I do a little more research. In the process, I came across the author Marcus Buckingham, who makes some interesting statements on the subject of feedback in his book “Love & Work”3.
People don’t really want feedback, he writes, they want attention, he says. People don’t want to be ignored, so the opposite of feedback is ignorance. Very exciting.
My search for more information on the topic of feedback leads me to talents. What is it about talents and how do you bring talents and work together?
Critical Feedback Does Not Help to Discover One’s Talents
Feedback is important if you want to improve your skills and become a professional. A sparring partner gives you hints and suggestions on how I can change processes, procedures, and actions so that I get a better result.
Feedback, however, does not help to get to the bottom of one’s own talents, because talents are very strongly linked to one’s own feelings. You only know your own feelings yourself. No one else can tell you what you are feeling.
Talents are very much related to the activities you like. If you do an activity and afterward you feel drained and weak, that is a weakness. You do an activity that challenges you, but after which you feel very satisfied and good? Then that is a strength. A strength is something that strengthens you, a weakness is something that weakens you.
To find out about your talents, e.g. at work, you can ask yourself the following questions:
During which activities does time fly by for me?
In which activities do I notice, after I have finished, that I have made gigantic leaps in learning?
For which activities do I sign up instinctively?
Most of the time, the answers to these questions reveal different activities that you like and that feel good. So when it comes to one’s own talents, one’s own feelings are a good feedback mechanism.
The biggest lesson I learned from reading Love & Work is this: The right attitude with which I give feedback matters.
My job as a feedback giver is not to want to improve the other person. The attitude should not be that I am trying to fix someone. My attitude should be that I try to see my counterpart.
Summary
Getting back to the topic of feedback was inspired by an unexpected video call with Martin. In our conversation, we look at four reasons to give feedback. We talk about the sandwich method, where you sandwich your criticism between two positive statements. We talk about the STAR and STARAR methods, where you look more closely at which actions in a situation led to a certain result. Finally, we talk about the NVC, in which one pays particular attention to the feeling and the motivation behind an action.
Following the conversation, I came across the statements of Marcus Buckingham. I learned that feedback can help if you want to become a professional at something. But feedback is not suitable for discovering one’s own talents, because they are strongly connected to one’s own feelings. So if I want to help someone get to know their own talents better, I need the right attitude. The basic attitude should be: I am not trying to fix you, I am trying to see you.
Rosenberg, M. B. (2016). Gewaltfreie Kommunikation: Eine Sprache des Lebens (I. Holler, Übers.; 12. Edition). Junfermann Verlag.
Buckingham, M. (2022). Love + work: How to find what you love, love what you do, and do it for the rest of your life. Harvard Business Review Press.