Recently we brought a mix of iOpener consultants and employees old and new together to take part in an internal development day focusing on our model for giving and receiving good feedback: feedforward.
We run internal development days like this because we want to:
Starting with an ice-breaker
Tom Battye kicked us off with a group juggling exercise similar to this one. A simple game of: catch, throw to someone roughly opposite, catch the next ball, throw it to the same person as before and repeat. After a minute you tot up how many balls have made the full circuit of the group and back to Tom. Seemingly straightforward, but soon enough balls were flying in all directions, being dropped and hitting each other in mid-air. Still, we managed to get 13 balls round on the first attempt.
Then we started to overthink it.
Perhaps inevitably in a room full of facilitators, different approaches, tricks and ruses were put forward, discussed and tried out.
What if we make sure the recipient’s hands are clear before we throw? No, let’s work on speed – give and receive at the same time. Shout everyone’s name clearly. Let’s remain silent. Can we just get on with it?
But with all these extra plans of attack running round our minds, we never hit our previous heights – our instinctive first attempt remained the best score.
Giving and receiving feedforward
Fun as the cricket practice was, that’s not the only reason we got together. The main purpose of the day was for iOpener facilitators to share their different experiences of using feedforward, hone their skills and work out how to give feedforward in tricky situations. Claire Andrews did a brilliant job of running the workshop, based around our model.
Using the iOpener feedforward model
Our research shows that feedback which is fair, clear, accurate and actionable raises performance. Here is the feedforward model we used on the day, the same as we use in all our Leadership Development workshops:
Keep
Describe what someone did that worked well
Start
Describe what they could do and what would work better
As a receiver of feedback remember to:
As a giver of feedback remember to:
Finding the domino
So that’s the theory. In practice, Claire helped us to focus on how to:
All these things led to what Claire introduced as finding the domino: working out the key piece of feedforward that helps the client make the most change. This became one of the key takeaways for everyone as they left for home, juggling their keeps and starts.