How to Give Your Team Feedback
Florence, 1500. The cathedral workshop’s inventory contains an odd entry: "a marble figure called David, badly blocked out and lying on its back." The nine-braccia block was a stone another sculptor had started carving in the 1460s and then abandoned, with the space between the legs already hollowed out. For years it had sat in the courtyard, out in the rain.
On 16 August 1501, the 26-year-old Michelangelo signed a contract to finish this spoilt block. He walled it off with planks and masonry and worked on it for three years without showing it to anyone. The resulting 5.17-metre David was unveiled to the public in the Piazza della Signoria on 8 September 1504.
According to Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, once the statue was in place a visitor came by: Piero Soderini, who had been elected head of Florence for life. He liked the statue, but he had one objection. The nose looked too thick to him.
Michelangelo noticed that Soderini was standing right at the giant’s feet and could not see the statue properly from that angle. Even so, he climbed the scaffolding. He took a chisel in his left hand and a little of the marble dust lying on the planks in his palm. As he tapped lightly with the chisel, he let the dust fall bit by bit. He did not touch the nose at all.
"Look at it now," he said. Soderini was delighted: "I like it better. You have given it life." According to Vasari, Michelangelo climbed down laughing to himself, feeling sorry for people who talk about things they do not understand in order to seem knowledgeable.
Every team has a "the nose is too thick" moment
In this scene, both men lose. Soderini is looking from the wrong place, passes judgement without giving a reason, and nobody pushes back because of his position. Michelangelo, rather than persuading him, humours him. Everyone leaves happy, but nobody learns anything.
This is the most common feedback accident in teams. A manager makes a vague comment, the employee decides it is not worth the argument and makes a token change. Then both sides believe the work is better.
In First Round Review, Katie Dill, then Airbnb’s head of experience design, explains that critique done badly turns into insult and kills people’s desire to do better. For her, critique exists not to air opinions but to reach the best result faster.
How to give your team feedback
First, check where you are standing
Dill describes a time she was designing a wearable device for stylish, thrifty women. Most of the people giving feedback, though, were middle-aged men, who kept asking, "Why doesn’t it have a keyboard?" Once the team described the target user as a real person, the discussion changed. Before you comment, ask who the work is for and what success looks like. Do not stand at the foot of the statue.
Find out what stage the work is at
When an idea is still shapeless, big questions about direction are valuable. A week before delivery, a critique too big to act on only hurts morale. The same comment becomes noise at the wrong moment.
Zoom out first, then zoom in
The person doing the work is very close to it and struggles to see the whole. Your advantage is that you can look from a distance. First check whether the whole thing hangs together, then go into the details and ask whether each part is there for a reason.
Don’t say "it’s not working"; show it
According to Dill, lines like "I don’t like it" or "it’s not striking enough" say nothing. Show what you mean with a concrete example and give your reasoning. "The nose is too thick" is not enough: why, seen from where, and according to whom?
Ask questions instead of giving orders
Questions such as "Have you tried this?", "What other options did you look at?" and "How would the user react to this?" leave the other person, in Dill’s words, as the owner of the work. The point is not how clever you are, but making the next version better.
Say clearly what is good, too
Dill defends the "praise sandwich" that many people dislike: sincere praise, then the critique, and finally thanks for the effort. Her reasoning is practical. If you do not say what is good, the team may remove that too in the next version. There is one condition: the praise has to be genuine, or it does not work.
Critique: passing it through a sieve
The Turkish word for critique, "eleştiri", is a new one. According to the Nişanyan Dictionary, the verb "eleştirmek" was derived from "elemek", to sift; its earliest recorded use is in 1942, in the Turkish Language Association’s glossary of philosophy and grammar terms. In Old Turkic, "elemek" meant to pass something through your hands or through a sieve. The Turkish Language Association’s definition carries the same root: to find and point out the right and wrong sides of a piece of work.
"Critique" in Western languages comes from the Greek "kritikos", a person able to judge. According to Etymonline, the verb behind it, "krinein", means to separate or decide, and the Indo-European root it rests on means "to sieve, to sift". "Crisis" belongs to the same family: the moment when it is decided whether an illness will turn for the better or the worse.
Two languages, unaware of each other, looked at critique and saw the same tool: a sieve. A sieve does not throw everything away. It separates what is useful and keeps hold of it.
A final word
In the third part of An Essay on Criticism, published in 1711, the English poet Alexander Pope addresses critics like this:
"Men must be taught as if you taught them not, / And things unknown proposed as things forgot."
In other words: teach people as though you were not teaching them, and put forward what they do not know as if they had merely forgotten it.
Michelangelo did not teach Soderini anything; he pleased him. The third way Pope describes is harder: asking a question good enough that the other person feels they found the answer themselves. Think about the last feedback you gave your team. Where were you standing? And did they actually improve their work, or just let a little marble dust fall?
If you want to choose the right people for the team you will be giving feedback to, have a look at How to Choose the Right People When Hiring Your First Employees.
