Feedback Works With GRACe

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Feedback

Inspect and Adapt is one of the fundamental values of anAgileMind. It manifests in many of the behaviours we find in agile cultures. The obvious example of the Scrum Sprint Review when we review our progress and priorities with our customer and ask for feedback from the customer. In reality all of the Scrum events are opportunities to inspect and adapt.

When we experiment, perhaps with the way we should build a new feature, we are gathering evidence to influence our decision making.  We are inspecting the situation that arises and adapting our future behaviour to take account of the evidence we have.

Inspect and Adapt is also a value that has utility at all levels in the organisation. When organisations look at the results of the work they are doing and strive to improve their budgeting, their assessment of product value delivered, or their way of working then the organisation is inspecting the situation and adapting to the problems and opportunities they identify. Who knows they may even use experimentation to help them design better ways of working?

The imperative to inspect and adapt should also extend downwards to the individuals who make up the team. Our human flaws mean that we are bound to make mistakes in our work and in the way we collaborate with the rest of the team. How do we build the value of inspecting and adapting into our own personal portfolio of values? How do we make the desire to improve part of our own mindset? How do we take this value from our culture and make it a keystone of our behaviour?

That’s Risky, Then!

Simple to state the goal. Harder to achieve it. How do we inspect and adapt ourselves? One of the most challenging capabilities to develop within a team is that of giving feedback to, and receiving feedback from, other team members. This is hardly surprising since we are talking about the way we behave and the impact of our behaviours on others. Doing this stuff is hugely risky and enormously challenging unless we are trained how to do it, we practice it, and we have built sufficient trust within the team to allow personal feedback to happen.

I have observed that many teams stay well away from this type of behaviour. They prefer to escalate matters, relying on management to resolve them. The personal risk is, perhaps, reduced - but that depends on how the manager handles the situation.

The risk to the team is actually increased because the manager is acting on “hearsay” - they haven’t actually experienced the behaviours that are the subject of the feedback. They lack detail and they lack proximity to the problem. Both of these factors mean that the person receiving the feedback may well feel it is inaccurate, at best, or, more probably, that it is just plain wrong. Now the perception has changed to be of an unjust accusation from the team they are a member of. That’s hardly conducive to trust and close collaborative working. The reliance on management damages team autonomy.

Building The Feedback Culture

But, it needn’t be like this. What if part of the team’s approach to inspecting and adapting was precisely to provide each other with well given feedback? What if everyone in the organisation was trained to provide and handle feedback? What if giving feedback was just something that happened routinely - just a part of the team’s culture? What if 6 monthly feedback sessions with some remote manager became a thing of the past?

Effective feedback can give a huge boost to the performance of the team. So let’s think about four factors that help to make good feedback a great learning experience. Let’s think about GRACe.

 
“Grace - Courteous good will”
— Oxford Languages

Defining GRACe

Giving Feedback

Receiving Feedback

Acting on Feedback

Changing Everyone

Giving Feedback

Superficially giving feedback is the most challenging part of the feedback culture and is certainly the thing that organisations focus on if they provide training. What is clear is that we must exercise great care when we give feedback to another team member. When given badly, feedback can greatly hurt the individual to whom it is directed, can mis-direct their attention towards a problem that does not exist or is less significant than our feedback indicates. Certainly, ill-presented feedback will damage the trustful nature of the relationship with our colleague.

The cost of badly given feedback means that we must plan what we are going to say and how we are going to say it very carefully - in fact we must plan the whole feedback activity very carefully. We must have evidence that backs up our feedback. Most importantly we must be in the right frame of mind to give the feedback in a cogent fashion. We must also be ready to help the recipient of the feedback to think through their response.

Receiving Feedback

Receiving feedback is as challenging as giving it. Redirective feedback challenges us to review our behaviour and its impact. It challenges us to direct our behaviour in a new way. Even reinforcing feedback can be a challenge as it is asking us to repeat behaviour that we might not usually display. This takes effort.

Another key aspect of receiving feedback is knowing when to accept it and when to refuse it. Our mood changes from day to day as our personal and work circumstances change. For example, we may have received some very bad news in our personal life. This means we are unlikely to have the resilience to handle feedback well.

Despite these huge challenges for the recipients of feedback, I have yet to encounter an organisation that offers advice and guidance or training on how to handle feedback when it is received.

Acting on Feedback

Feedback is pointless unless we act on it - unless we adapt after we inspect. Both the donor and recipient of feedback will get the most value if they agree how they can work together. Both parties will be changed through the performance of the action plan. 

  • The recipient of feedback deepens their understanding of the change they are making and can observe the incremental change in their own behaviours as time passes.

  • The donor of the feedback deepens their understanding of their own responses to similar circumstances. Their own ability to react more constructively is reinforced. 

I have often observed that a well executed feedback session, followed by collaboratively led change can be a very positive experience for both the donor and the recipient.

Changing Everyone

One act of feedback can have a positive impact on the wider team. Cumulatively, many acts of feedback can change the team radically.

The direct results of feedback are to redirect or reinforce behaviours that led to the feedback. The wider results may be to resolve some difficulties the team was encountering or to further improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the team. These changes are likely to increase the cohesion and performance of the team. 

Most importantly, through its effective use of feedback, the team has demonstrated a key aspect of its potential to self-manage. This potential will grow as the team becomes more familiar with GRACe - more GRACe-full. Self-management is a critical part of an effective agile culture. In other words, feedback makes a critical contribution to our agile culture.

The Role of Coaching

Two things should be clear. First the capability and culture of giving feedback does not arise spontaneously. Even with training, team members will not be ready to provide each other with effective feedback. Think shu-ha-ri. Training may get us to “shu” - to be apprentices. To give truly effective feedback we need to be “ha” - journeymen - or, better still, “ri” - masters.

Coaches can play a key role by supporting team members in giving each other feedback. Doing this, coaches do not act as conciliators, but rather as advisors to make the feedback process effective.

Second, even teams who have a strong collaborative culture and who are familiar with giving feedback will sometimes suffer breakdowns in their relationships. If the rest of the team is unable to resolve these problems, then they can request intervention by a coach. In these cases, the coach is acting as a conciliator. They bring the team members who are in conflict together and facilitate resolution of the conflict. Resolution activities may include the use of feedback between the team members, but will often include other activities too.

Neither of these coaching activities are suited to the involvement of management. Managers are too closely linked to the team and are in danger of being seen as partial in the way they engage. The need for impartiality is in conflict with the manager’s role of close engagement with, and control of, the team.

In any case, teams who have demonstrated the ability to give each other effective feedback will be moving in the direction of self management. Such teams become less reliant on management because they do not require the day-to-day intervention that more conventional teams need.

It is unfortunate that too many coaches are unwilling to face the challenges of giving, receiving and facilitating feedback. I have observed that even in groups of coaches, there is a huge unwillingness to give each other feedback. Until coaches recognise their critical role in building feedback within teams and the role of feedback in an agile culture we will remain less effective in helping organisations to transform.

GRACeful…

Too many organisations, teams and coaches do not recognise the importance of being able to handle feedback with GRACe. Feedback is a critical part of inspecting and adapting, self-management and self-organisation. Team autonomy is, in turn, a critical part of developing a great agile culture.

It turns out that an old-fashioned virtue called GRACe - courteous good will - is an important component of agile success. Who’d have thought it?

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