For me, and others I’ve polled on the subject, bad feedback feels confusing, frustrating, and like they don’t understand me. On the other hand, good criticism was described as inspiring, makes you want to do something about it and feeling understood. I know which kind of feedback I’d prefer to get. Alas, we rarely get to choose.

Bad feedback is like a sour lemon. We have a gut response to reject it, and we struggle to understand why we’ve been given it. Reacting negatively to it can have us labelled as defensive, ridgid or proud. But you’re not crazy for reacting like that. Most of us want to improve. We don’t seek to upset people or to do a bad job. To be told you have, without understanding how, can leave you feeling impotent and demotivated.

It can sound hopeless. But I promise it’s not. If you can learn to turn on your curiosity in these tough moments, there is so much more information you can get - Information that can help you understand how to change, or the other factors at play in the situation.

What I explain in this blog post is a tool I use to guide me in those tough moments. I’m going to show you how I define what makes feedback good, to make it easier to identify what’s wrong with bad feedback. I’ll use an example from my past to illustrate my points, and then look at ways we can take those lemons and turn them into lemonade. Taking the bad feedback and asking for the missing pieces.

Part 1: What is Good Feedback?

To me, good feedback is feedback which is Specific, Consistent, Actionable, Relevant and Timely.

If you’re recognising some similarities with SMART goals here, it’s not an accident. Goal setting is just another form of feedback mechanism we use to keep ourselves on track. Well defined goals have a lot in common with well articulated feedback.

Specific feedback provides context. It tells us about the situation where the problem arose and tells us the impact of our actions.

  • You didn’t complete any tasks for the last 2 months
  • You haven’t shown me you can gather requirements for a project alone
  • Your lack of Python/Photoshop/Excel knowledge is hampering your ability to meet deadlines and you’re putting a lot of pressure on the team to coach you.

Feedback should never be a surprise, which is why it is important the feedback you receive is Consistent.

This can look like you’re doing “just fine”, until it comes to performance review and then hearing you’re below expectations. Especially when your behaviour hasn’t changed between hearing you’re doing well and doing poorly.

Actionable feedback tells you what you can DO to improve, for example:

  • Complete your assigned tasks according to their estimates
  • You need to show me you are able to gather requirements by yourself
  • Consider reading this blog or book on the topic

The other pieces are the hows, but making our feedback Relevant is the why.
The feedback should come with a “This is why I’m telling you this”. At a very basic level this can mean…

  • You need to do this to keep your job.
  • This looks good when you’re going for promotion.
  • I think this will improve your written communication skill.

Timely feedback is delivered as close to the incident as possible.

This keeps the context fresh in everyone’s minds and makes it so you can correct the behavior before you have an opportunity to repeat it.
NB: DON’T WAIT for performance review. Especially if your company does yearly performance reviews.

Part 2: Storytime

Let me take a moment here to illustrate these points with an incident from my own past. I’m not proud of my behaviour here, but I think it’s a relatable scenario for those of us who have struggled with feedback and may not have understood why.

Setting the scene, I was in my performance review. It had been 1 year since my last constructive feedback (last performance review). I had submitted my part of the performance review 2 months prior. It was clear from my part of review, and from my conversations with my boss to date, that I wanted a promotion.

That promotion - I’d been working towards it for 2 years. I’d been asking throughout the year “Is there anything I can be doing better”, “Do you have any concerns right now?”. I had to this point heard only positive or non committal things. So I assumed it was coming, had my hopes very high.

My Manager gave me my rating.

“On target”.

Now. This really wasn’t bad considering I started the year planning my mom’s 3rd funeral (a story for another time) and in June I’d broken my humerus (which wasn’t funny, since it took a full 8 months to begin healing). But I’d worked as hard as I could, being both mentally and physically exhausted. I was just really hoping he’d seen that and it would be rewarded. I’d been encouraged to this belief by receiving positive feedback for the whole year.

I was devastated.

But I was also an engineer, so went immediately to RCA[1]ing the problem and asked him “Why?”.

He said, “Your communication skills aren’t up to par“.

I didn’t understand. If I had known then, what I know now. I might still be at that company. But even though my gut told me this was bad feedback. I didn’t know why. I didn’t see that it wasn’t actionable, nor specific, timely or consistent. About the only thing it managed to be was relevant, and that only because it was delivered at the same time as my rating. I didn’t know how to give the feedback that this is bad feedback. But it didn’t stop me trying!

I did this by reading my 360 feedback out loud to this manager at my next 1:1. This 360 feedback directly complimented my communication skills. I was trying to express my confusion. How was I supposed to know what to change about my behaviour when some people were telling me I was doing really well, and he was telling me it was so bad it was the sole reason I’d dropped from “exceeds expectations” to “on target” within in a year.

He said, “It doesn’t matter what other people said, I think this and my opinion is the only one that matters“

Which was at least consistent. Really what this told me was the conversation was dead in the water. We’d both dug our heels in. I should have asked to come back and talk about it later, with cooler heads. But I was really tired, and emotionally drained from the previous year. Instead, I just stopped trusting him, and I tried to continue to do my job without him.

But I still wanted the promotion and I was hung up on trying to understand the feedback. I was at a loss for how to do this and so were my friends and family.

I reached out to the only technical women in leadership at my company. I wanted to know how to get past this plateau. That was my goal this whole time. And since she was a director, I thought there was no better person. Indeed there was no better person in the long term. The books she recommended have shaped my career since.

They, and she, inspired me to apply for a lead role I was 90% sure I wouldn’t get. I did it anyways, to again, try to get feedback from the hiring committee to understand what areas I could work towards to land that role in the future.

Spoiler alert: I didn’t get the job, and I didn’t get any useful feedback either.

So rather than continue to do the same thing over and over again, expecting different results, I landed a new job. I cried telling my colleagues, most of whom had been my interns and all of whom were my friends, because it wasn’t them I was leaving. I was leaving a culture of poor feedback I didn’t know how to improve.

Part 3: How to turn Bad Feedback into Good

Simone de Beauvoir has some stuff to say about Subjectivity and Objectivity[2] I really resonate with. Paraphrasing heavily: There are some things you have control over, and some you do not. You must not become so complacent as to not change what you do have control over, nor drive yourself into the ground trying to change things you cannot.

While our initial feedback may not have all, or any, of these pieces. We should be able to get Specific, Actionable and either ask for or make Relevant. We have less control over Timely , but there are still some things we can do to influence it.

It’s very important to understand you have no control over consistent. That’s entirely on the other person.

How do we get these changes? How could I have responded to my manager in a way that had a better chance of understanding what he was trying to say to me? My answer is - turning up curiosity to 11.

Specific

Specific feedback is about understanding the context. So when and where questions can help us to understand the circumstances where this feedback came from.

To help me understand, can you describe a moment where you felt this way?

Using my case above as an example, we can also ask for context of how our behaviour impacted the person giving us the feedback.

Can you describe how my communication skills have made your job harder as my manager?

Actionable

The goal of actionable feedback is to understand what you can do to improve. You could ask a question to try to pull this out.

What was the behaviour change you had in mind when giving me this feedback?

Again, using my case above as an example. We know “communication skills” is a super broad area and it’s not actionable. The work required to improve interpersonal skills is very different to that required to improve presentation skills. So let’s ask where the problem is…

Which area of communication would you say is my biggest struggle?

  • Interpersonal skills
  • Listening skills
  • Written communication
  • Presentation skills
  • Technical communication

You don’t have to provide a list here, in most cases you would actually want to avoid “leading the witness”, but if the person you’re asking is having trouble with the question it can be helpful to provide them with a few examples.

Relevant

Did your feedback come with a “This is why I’m telling you this”. If not, ask! Try and tie it to your goals if you can.

Can you illustrate for me how you think improving this skill will impact my chances for promotion?

Is the problem so bad I’m at risk of losing my job?

Timely

Timely feedback is important to make sure the context fresh in everyone’s minds when we talk about it.

All you can do here is ask! Early, often, when you think you’ve done something different, etc. If all you’re getting is “fine“ - one way you can improve the quality of the feedback you receive when you ask is to get specific. For example I could have asked my manager:

What did you think of the content of the feedback presentation I gave on Monday?

or

Did I come across as arrogant when I corrected Tom in the meeting earlier?

NB: I'll repeat DON’T WAIT for performance review. Especially if your company does yearly performance reviews.

Consistent

Some things, you can’t change.

… Though, if this is a big problem for you, consider what you can do to give the person some good quality feedback, that’s Actionable, Specific, Timely and Relevant about how their lack of consistency is effecting you.

And that’s it! I hope, Reader, you will find SCART/SMART feedback useful either now or in the future. I gave the talk, and wrote it down, for the past Meghan’s of the world. If you know one, please don’t hesitate to share this with them.

Talk soon,
Meghan

This post is an improved version of a talk I gave at Creative Campfire 2024, which was a gaming industry event hosted at Vancouver Film School. If you’d like to listen and/or watch instead of reading this post. The recording can be found here. Please excuse the Portal 2 metaphor, nerves and the couple of technical difficulties. I have vowed to practice with the setup on the day in the future.

  1. 1.Root Cause Analysis↩
  2. 2.Philosophize This! does a much better job than I do explaining this.↩