Giving Constructive Criticism
This post is not about providing a standard formula for making feedback constructive. If you’re interested in that, you can find plenty of articles online about things like the feedback sandwich (a way to jam your criticism between two compliments in an attempt to make it more palatable to both parties). The only feedback sandwich you’ll find me discussing in detail is advocating for people to put chips on their sandwich. Instead, let’s discuss five simple pointers on approaching the conversation in a more productive manner.
Remember that people are allowed to be different from you. You might be like, of course, duh. But this can be harder than you think. I recently was talking to someone about typing commands and keyboard shortcuts vs. using a mouse and the graphical interface. They said typing was objectively the better way to work. While I do prefer typing and find this method to be more efficient for my own workflows, I had to disagree with this statement. I pointed out that differently-abled people, such as individuals with dyslexia, may find it more difficult to type in the correct commands. I also pointed out that some people can more quickly recall images over text, and it actually may be faster for these individuals to use the graphical interface. It’s not always your way or the highway, and before giving out criticism, it’s important for you to acknowledge it.
Pointing fingers is a real waste of time. Sometimes people can get caught up with whose fault they think it was. They keep wanting to bring up the fact that Roland f***ed up. Honestly, Roland may have totally f***ed up. But we’re part of a team, so in the end, we all f***ed up. What we need to focus on is how we can fix the issue. Maybe in the future the PM can work on improving communication, maybe the project engineer can go through some additional training, or maybe we need to beef up the QC controls. Whatever we do, it should increase our chances of getting it right the next time.
Provide suggested solutions. It’s obviously not super helpful to tell someone that their work low-key sucks and just walk away. It’s super important to propose an alternative. So the report didn’t turn out how you wanted it to, maybe next time you can plan to have a progress meeting to discuss the outline before it goes off the rails. If the work came out a little sloppy with discrepancies between documents. Maybe next time instead of doing a copy and paste exercise, we create data links between the documents. So that way if you change the source file, everything else changes appropriately. The idea is to bring some ideas to the table to help figure out a solution to the issue at hand, but these would just be suggested solutions. Ultimately it’s up to the other person to follow through, which is a great segway into my next point...
Have a conversation. Giving out constructive criticism doesn’t have to be a one-sided conversation. Getting feedback from the recipient of your criticism can be extremely informative. Maybe you’ll learn something. Like, what if you find out that they are getting their bad habits from one of your more incompetent coworkers? Or maybe this type of work isn’t in line with the person’s interests, education, or experience, and they would be better suited to help you on a different aspect of the project that you’ve been dreading? Or perhaps you weren’t successful in communicating your feedback and need to explain in a different way? Providing constructive criticism can become more helpful and productive for both parties if you approach it as a conversation.
Follow up. This one’s a no brainer. The only way to figure out if you’re giving helpful feedback is to collect the data. Follow up and find out how the feedback has helped (or maybe hasn’t helped). Then you can use this data to help inform your future conversations.