Peer-to-Peer Feedback

This is an exercise I originally developed with students, and then used with clients. It’s proven to be powerful and transformative. Only you know the current climate of your team, and if this is too touchy-feely for your team, wait until you’ve built up the psychological safety and mutual trust to allow for it.

I recommend, as Allie did, that you hire an outside facilitator. This allows the leader to participate, further creating a sense of mutual accountability and interdependence. A trained facilitator will have the distance to not be caught up in any interpersonal conflicts, they have skills to mediate any emotionally difficult moments, and they free you up to participate.

This is how a typical peer-to-peer feedback session goes when I run it:

Begin with Empathy

First, I like to warm up with a Nonviolent Communication exercise called “Sometimes I . . .”

In this exercise, you place two chairs next to each other, facing the opposite way. It’s like sitting in a car together, except one person is facing backward. We all know the best conversations happen on road trips, right?

In the exercise, you take turns finishing a sentence that starts with “Sometimes I…” One person talks for three minutes, only finishing that sentence, and the other listens silently.

You can be silly—“Sometimes I pretend to be Supergirl” or serious—“Sometimes I pretend I know what I’m doing.”

Then you switch, but with a new sentence.

Sometimes I pretend . . .
Sometimes I wish . . .
Sometimes I’m afraid . . .

This is a powerful empathy building exercise.

It’s hard to describe how magical it is. Because you are not looking at each other’s eyes, you are free to confess. Because you are being listened to, you feel cared for. And hearing someone be silly, be brave, be vulnerable, be released from the pressure of having to respond, is intimate and precious.

Each person speaks to each member of their team, and listens to each.

Elissa’s blog post16 from my class captures the experience:

“We had sentence starters such as “I wish people . . .” “Sometimes I pretend . . .” “I worry about . . .” “I hope . . .” which got personal pretty quickly after we all ran out of general hopes and wishes. I felt uncomfortable and vulnerable talking about these things with people who aren’t my mom or best friend. I did feel closer after listening to my group’s responses, it made me know them deeper and feel more personally connected to them. I felt happy to be closer to the people that I work with so closely. We see each other for 6–9 hours a week or more, yet I realized I barely know anything about them.

It’s difficult to share who you are, yet it also connects you in a way ordinary communication, such as . . .”

“Hi, Bob.”
“Hi, Joe! How’s things?”
“Fine. How’s things with you?”
“Fine!”

. . . can never do.

Team Member Feedback

Next, we work on team member feedback. I have Allie in the story use this exercise with the team at her new company, and you can see how powerful the results are once you’ve got a healthy team, what I call an autonomous team.

When I first developed this exercise, I was working with Dave Gray’s Empathy Map17. He had designed it to help designers understand their customers. But I found it useful to have my students use it to think deeply about each other. Over time, I evolved it to better support creating empathy and turning that into constructive feedback. Finally, I was able to use it with clients as well as students.

Every person on the team has this chart in poster form on the wall, and you stand in front of it, and decorate your face and fill in the bottom. Then each person steps to the right, in front of a teammate’s poster. They answer the following questions on sticky notes for two minutes for each section, and place them on the poster.

Since there are four questions, each poster should take eight minutes, though I often let the first round go longer as people are warming up and the page is blank.

Next, you move to the next teammate’s posters and do the same. If you have a large team (more than four or five) you may want to do this in breakout groups of three, to avoid being at this all day.

Eventually you return to your own poster, which is now filled with reflections of how your team sees you.

This exercise is a pure act of empathy. Everyone feels seen, even if they are sometimes surprised by what is seen.

My student jherin miller’s sketchnote of his experience. https://medium.Com/the-creative-founder/sketchblog-midterm-feedback-537ce05ff413

Filling out the compassionate feedback canvas can bring up deep emotions and lead to important conversations. One year, my student Analisa wrote a poignant post on what it felt like to realize everyone on her team was conscious that she was the only woman.18 “I’ve never really thought about this but I’ve now started re-analyzing everything that has happened from the start of this team to where we have come to. I’m beginning to identify these smaller moments where there were differences in how I was being acknowledged, treated, and spoken to in comparison to others on the team. Even as I meet with my group now, or talk to other males in general my senses have enhanced to be aware of every detail of differences I am receiving.”

That’s the real value of the canvas. It’s bringing up difficult subjects and then spending time discussing them. Unspoken tensions fester. You have to make time for the conversations after, as things are unveiled.

What I like about the compassionate feedback map is that it’s observation based: It keeps people in the realm of behavior and out of the world of speculation. “I see you not showing up on time,” rather than “You don’t care about the team.”

At the end of a session, everyone is exhausted. It’s about a two-hour meeting, but it feels longer. Some people will fall into deep conversations, unpacking a Post-It note comment. Others may slink out quietly, their emotional reserve empty. Others may joke boisterously. Let people recover in their own way.

As Danielle Forward wrote in her wonderful essay on getting feedback,19

“There’s a big difference between who we want to be—who we imagine we are—and what we actually are.”

She goes on to say:

It’s easy to tell yourself a narrative of who you are. We probably do it all the time. “I’m a good person, a good leader, and a good teammate,” but am I? Are you? How would you know? It’s this same skepticism, this same curiosity, that I think makes me a designer. That last week in class, I was the “product” — and I got to view the data about myself.

This is the true “gift” of feedback. To see yourself how others see you, and decide what to do with that information.

That’s all feedback is: information about how someone sees you.

“I’m really glad I know that I’ve been coming across differently than I intend in group discussions. ”— Allesandro Battisti20

That is the secret of feedback. Before it, you know what you meant and what you said, but you don’t know how it’s received. Learning how you are perceived allows you to change what you choose.

It wasn’t all kumbaya. One person was wounded by the feedback he got, and I shared Chapter 10 from Thanks for the Feedback (marvelous book!) with the team. I now suggest assigning this chapter BEFORE the feedback sessions (perhaps even before your quarterly reviews) because it is so powerful in helping create psychological safety.

It’s vital to decide which feedback to accept and which to discard. Learning that not all feedback has to be acted on may be the most valuable information I have ever gotten, and I was happy to share it out. Here are two quotes, as Thanks for the Feedback quotes Anne Lamott:

In fact, being able to establish limits on the feedback you get is crucial to your well-being and the health of your relationships. Being able to say no is not a skill that runs parallel to the skill of receiving feedback well; it’s right at the heart of it. If you can’t say no, then your yeses are not freely chosen. Your decision may affect others and it will often have consequences for you, but the choice belongs to you. You need to make your own mistakes and find your own learning curve. Sometimes that means you need to shut out the critics for a while so you can discover who you are and how you are going to grow. Writer Anne Lamott puts it this way:

‘. . . Every single one of us at birth is given an emotional acre all our own. You get one, your awful Uncle Phil gets one, I get one. And as long as you don’t hurt anyone, you really get to do with your acre as you please. You can plant fruit trees or flowers or alphabetized rows of vegetables, or nothing at all. If you want your acre to look like a giant garage sale, or an auto-wrecking yard, that’s what you get to do with it. There’s a fence around your acre, though, with a gate, and if people keep coming onto your land and sliming it or trying to do what they think is right, you get to ask them to leave. And they have to go, because this is your acre.21’

Feedback is anecdata. Sometimes it tells you something about you, sometimes it tells you something about the other person, and sometimes it tells you something about the interpersonal dynamic. Listen thoughtfully and choose strategically what you do with that information.

16 Welsh, Elissa. “Teamwork, What Does That Mean? – The Creative Founder : NightCap Edition – Medium.” Medium.com. October 31, 2016. Accessed December 21, 2018. https://medium.com/the-creative-founder/teamwork-what-does-that-mean-42abab5554b8.

17 Gray, David, Sunni Brown, and James Macanufo. Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers. Beijing: OReilly, 2010.

18 Chaosanalicia. “A Woman Amongst Men.” Voxum Design: Analicia. October 18, 2015. Accessed December 21, 2018. https://chaosanalicia.tumblr.com/post/131374320964/a-woman-amongst-men.

19 Forward, Danielle. “Week 8 of Creative Founder: Midterm Feedback – The Creative Founder : NightCap Edition – Medium.” Medium.com. November 07, 2016. Accessed December 21, 2018. https://medium.com/the-creative-founder/week-8-of-creative-founder-midterm-feedback-7f32058f6705.

20 Battisti, Alessandro. “Team Feedback – The Creative Founder : NightCap Edition – Medium.” Medium.com. October 31, 2016. Accessed December 21, 2018. https://medium.com/the-creative-founder/team-feedback-f7d1457b6e73.

21 Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (Pantheon, 1994), 44. Buy it, read it, give to someone you love, buy a new copy and reread it.