Whether you’re giving or receiving feedback, making it personal isn’t a bad thing—it can help you and your team grow.
Gina Fong would like to offer some feedback … on feedback.
Fong, a consumer anthropologist and clinical assistant professor of marketing at the Kellogg School, wants us to rethink the ways we give and receive evaluation in the workplace. And she starts by dispelling a common myth.
“We are told a lie with feedback—that you should not take it personally,” she says.
That familiar disclaimer sets up a dynamic where feedback is more likely to be phoned in by its giver—and filed away by its recipient as impersonal, generic talking points, rather than honest attempts to connect with team members and improve their performance.
“We should give and take feedback personally—and take personal responsibility—because this is about someone’s career growth,” Fong says.
And there are benefits for both sides of the evaluation equation, strengthening the bonds between a supervisor and their team.
“If we take feedback personally, then the sender of the feedback will be more conscientious and disciplined,” Fong says. “And then the person receiving the feedback can trust it and not dismiss it.”
Fong offers three ways to “take it personally” when giving and receiving feedback.
1. Learn how each member of your team responds
Being heard is the main task of anyone giving feedback. Because everyone responds differently to feedback depending on their personality type, their role, and the type of message being delivered, awareness of these factors is key to how that feedback lands.
“One of my core values is that I want to tell the truth,” she says, “in a way that doesn’t break someone’s spirit and makes them want to keep growing.”
Fong has learned through her consulting and teaching that people in different roles tend to have different relationships to feedback.
For example, as a consumer anthropologist, Fong often gets the call from companies to do postmortems when a project has failed or needs to be reiterated. So she regularly has to give feedback to various groups: from design and creative teams to engineers and scientists.
“With creative teams, the process can be very fraught because it’s nerve-wracking to put your artistic vision out there for people to give commentary on it while it’s in process,” Fong says. “You have to figure out how to deliver that news in a way that someone can hear it.”
Fong has found that scientists and engineers, on the other hand, tend to be conditioned to take feedback more pragmatically because iteration is central to the process of product improvement that includes tinkering and stress-testing hypotheses.
“They know that feedback is part of the process,” she says. “We can learn a lot from engineers and scientists in that way because they don’t assume that they’re right.”
But no matter the personality or role, part of making feedback personal is treating the recipient like a human being. When Fong is doing these postmortems, she is cognizant of how much the workers have committed to the process and what that feedback could mean for future projects.
“They probably missed children’s birthday parties and other personal events in order to get this thing launched,” Fong says. “If we trick ourselves into thinking nobody should take it personally, that indicates that we aren’t invested in their growth.”
2. Normalize frequent feedback
One common shortcoming to the feedback process Fong sees is that it isn’t done regularly enough. Increasing the frequency of feedback takes the pressure off of individual sessions and allows more opportunity for people both giving and receiving feedback to better learn about each other’s personalities and feedback styles.
“I see a lot of organizations do it once a year,” she says. “But you have to normalize feedback so things don’t get too big and gnarly.”
Regularizing the process reduces the potential for anxiety that can accompany an infrequent monolith of a meeting. It also gives everyone involved practice in how to better connect with their colleagues and personalize their feedback.
“You have to normalize feedback so things don’t get too big and gnarly.”
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Gina Fong
“For example, when I give my students a weekly survey,” Fong says, “they get better at feedback because every week it’s another opportunity for them to figure out how to say something to me about the work we’re doing.”
3. Find a feedback coach
Being proactive in asking for feedback, as well as giving it, shows that however you are positioned in an organization, you are interested in taking your own performance and that of your colleagues to the next level.
When seeking out feedback across the organization, Fong recommends finding someone you trust, whom you know you want to model, and asking if they can coach you in ongoing, substantial ways.
“That puts the person back in,” she says. “That’s taking it personally, to ask someone to please help. It communicates that you’re open to feedback that can feed your growth.”
Fong has found that, when asked, most leaders are very willing to help when the ask is framed as a request for coaching.
“It’s asking a colleague: please invest in my growth for the next three minutes as you give me feedback,” she says. “People are made aware that this is a bigger responsibility. They see they’re coaching you to do things in the positive, like what you should be doing next time versus what you shouldn’t be doing.”
