How to Give and Receive Better Feedback
The Praise Sandwich Reinvented
As  a facilitator, I highly prefer instant visual feedback during my workshops. But, of course, there’s also value in more extensive written feedback from the participants. The main advantage of a written evaluation after the event should be that it allows participants to put some more thought in their comments and give some real constructive feedback.
Although another great tool in theory, I find that most written feedback doesn’t quite live up to my expectations. The problem is that most of my workshop  attendees are managers who’ve learnt to give feedback by means of the Praise Sandwich, i.e. a positive comment, then a criticism, covered with another positive. Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this format but, in my experience, the positives and criticism expressed tend to be very ‘safe’ and generic, not that useful.
It got me wondering why written feedback from managers mostly consists of sweeping generalities. Then I read the chapter on Feedback Wraps in Jurgen Appelo’s (2016) book Managing for Happiness and realized what the issue might be: a lack of context and emotion! In the chapter, Appelo introduces the idea of feedback wraps as an alternative to praise sandwiches. Unlike the simple p-c-p approach of the sandwich, Appelo’s wrap consists of five distinct steps which will add the necessary context and emotion to the feedback and thus increase its value.
The first step (1) of putting together a feedback wrap is to describe the context in which you are providing the feedback. By outlining where you are, what your state of mind is and what expectations and assumptions you have which might influence your evaluation up front, you set yourself up for giving constructive feedback. Additionally, you will generate trust and understanding with the person receiving your feedback and knowing your context will help them understand it better.
After you’ve created the setting, the next step (2) is create a factual list of all your observations (both positive and negative) regarding the topic of the evaluation. These should just be facts, no opinions or judgements. By keeping your observations purely factual, they will be hard to deny or ignore and you’ll successfully steer away from unhelpful generalisations.
Next (3), you add emotion, how did these facts make you feel? Go back to your list of observations and add how they made you feel. By combining factual observations with personal feelings, you create specific feedback which no one can refute. You could do this with written statements but, if you’re worried you might be misunderstood, you could also embrace the modern age and opt for emojis. I used to very much dislike emojis but I’ve found that for feedback they can be really effective and take away some of the seriousness and formality.
Step four (4) is to sort your observations by value. What this means is that you should go over your list and identify which observations have had the most value to you. You should not simply divide your list into positives and negatives (it’s not a praise sandwich!). Instead you should review your list and decide which observations benefited you the most. You’ll be surprised to learn how often negative experiences turn out to be the most valuable ones in the long run. The value of this sorting  for the person reading your feedback is that they’ll learn how their work affected you.
To wrap things up (sorry couldn’t resist), the final step (5) is to end with suggestions. This speaks for itself, share how would you improve the negatives or how would you do things differently. The thing to keep in mind here is that your suggestions are just your ideas, not required next steps.
My own experience with Feedback Wraps
I don’t feel it’s my place to publicly share actual examples of feedback wraps we’ve either created or received, but I would like to reflect on them a bit. First of all, I find that, when giving feedback myself, describing the context in which I’m writing really helps to focus my mind and get my ideas for step-2 flowing. And, if I look at the feedback wraps written by others, the same seems to apply to them.
Another worthwhile step for me is the fourth one, again seen from both perspectives. Taking the time to sort through my observations and then order them by perceived value really helps me to digest my feelings about the topic at hand. In other words, it’s as useful to me as it will be to the person(s) receiving my feedback. And whenever I receive a feedback wrap, the order of the list of observations teaches me a lot about the perceived value of my work to the person giving me feedback (assuming they put some thought into it, of course).
Finally the suggestions. Here I find that, having spent the time on writing and sorting my list of observations, my suggestions kind of flow naturally from my mind. When it comes to feedback I’ve received, I find that the suggestions I get are more to the point and of use to me than the ones I used to get before we introduced the feedback wraps.
A last observation I’d like to add is that feedback wraps have also given my organization an unexpected advantage. Testimonials are crucial for a business like mine and, since I’ve introduced short feedback wrap follow-up tasks to the workshops I run, I’ve found that the wraps we receive are full of cut-and-paste little ‘soundbites’ we can sprinkle through our marketing materials.
All in all, Appelo’s simple idea of changing the Praise Sandwich into a Feedback Wrap has been a definitive improvement of both the feedback I give and the feedback I receive. Give it a try yourself!
[T]here you are.
Resources:
Appelo, J. (2016). Feedback Wraps in Managing for happiness (pp. 132-146). Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.
Appelo, J. (2017). Management 3.0 Employee Engagement Exercises. (2017). Management 3.0. Retrieved 13 August 2017, from https://management30.com/
Appelo, J. (2015). Â Performance Management with the Feedback Wrap. (video) Retrieved 12 August 2017, from Youtube: https://youtu.be/YTh8bDyDz9c
