Leaderful Organizing Tool: Giving and Receiving Feedback

Giving and Receiving feedback is a group exercise which supports authentic group relationships for long term collaboration.

Overview

This tool provides basic principles for giving and receiving feedback, and a suggested exercise for people to practice with each other. 

Feedback is not about self righteously making other people wrong, it’s about supporting one another to grow, supporting our groups and endeavours to flourish, in service to our bigger aims. We all probably know it’s good and necessary, and almost none of us like it! 

It is important to emphasize the qualities of kindness and constructiveness when framing the activity and model this in how you are communicating. 

How does this tool support leaderful movements?

In order to support leaderful organizations and movements, we need the information about what is and isn’t working, about the range of experiences and perspectives etc, that can enable our groups to grow and adapt constructively. Offering and receiving feedback is an invaluable mechanism to support this. And when done well, can be a powerful way to nurture authentic relationships within our groups – something we need if we are going to withstand the challenges of long term collaboration amidst the stress-provoking themes with which we work.

Creating a group culture in which people are comfortable and adept at offering and receiving feedback is therefore vital. It will allow the further development of different competencies related to leaderful organising. Being able to give and receive feedback is first and foremost of course an important communication skill. 

If we can create cultures of care, that means people feel safe enough and are invited/encouraged to offer feedback, we are creating both individual and collective opportunities for ongoing learning, as feedback allows us to identify areas of growth.

When these practices become the norm in our groups – supported by self awareness and emotional literacy practices – we do an awful lot to mitigate the inevitable tensions and conflicts that will present themselves over time. Doing so, we create the conditions required for more transformative collaboration.

More detail

Session Plan

You can find a session plan for “giving and receiving feedback” on pages 259 – 263 of the Psychosocial Resilience and Regenerative Activism Training Manual. This session plan is intended to support you facilitate the activity for a group.

Session Plan for Small Groups

Here’s a more structured exercise for small groups than the one given in the session plan above:

Divide the group into 3 with the following roles: 

• feedback receiver 
• feedback giver
• listener/observer

Everybody should have a similar amount of time to do each role once. This will also work well in groups of 4 with two observers, but it means you’ll need more time for the exercise so that everybody can do all roles.

The giver will share with the receiver: 

• 2 contributions/qualities I have appreciated you bringing to this group/campaign/week are:… 
• 2 things I wonder about/could be different are:…

Then the receiver responds by sharing: 

• 1 thing I found helpful was…
• 1 thing I will think about is…

Then the listener/observer shares any reflections from having witnessed the interaction. After having listened to the reflections of the observer(s), the cycle starts again with people switching roles before they start the process again. 

It is useful as a facilitator to split the activity time and remind them when they should be swapping roles so that there is time for everybody. Or make it clear to them to appoint a time keeper, as often enough participants get really focused on the activity and lose track of time.

The time you give will depend on the context and what you have available, but less than 30 minutes will make it harder to have meaningful exchanges. 

Explore Further

• More tools from the Leaderful Organising Collection
• Tips on How to Give and Receive Feedback
• Giving and Receiving Feedback
• Systems Thinking and Campaigning: An Interview with Nicky Ison
• 360 Review Questions: Peer to peer staff evaluations
• Working in Groups: Start Here