“Feedback is the breakfast of champions.”

(Ken Blanchard)

Sometimes my work involves me delivering feedback. Sometimes people are just interested in the facts, the objective experience. On other occasions they are more interested in the subjective experience – how those facts could be interpreted.

For instance, lets take an everyday experience of visiting a shop.

If I was to give feedback in an objective style of a shopping visit I could describe precisely how many staff were serving, how long I had to wait to be served, how many products were on the shelves etc.

If I was to give feedback purely in a subjective style on the same shopping visit I may say that there were not enough staff serving, that I had to wait a long time and there were lots of stock on the shelves.

I can also blend both objective and subjective feedback, which would give the facts to justify my opinion and interpretations. So I may say that “There were 2 staff serving, which I felt was not enough. I had to wait 5 minutes to be served – longer than I expected.” etc

All forms can be useful depending upon what they are to be used for. Still using the above example, a shop may find the objective feedback useful to determine how that store performed against their policies and use the information for training purposes. The subjective style they would find useful to find out what their customers actually felt about their experience so that they can establish if what they are doing is getting the results that they want. A blend of both can provide information about which parts were working well and which are not.

This seems pretty common sense to many people when they are looking at giving or asking for feedback to or from others. However, I’ve noticed that when it comes to giving feedback about their own work then the style that is most often used is just a subjective one – so they may say things like “It was great” or “I was rubbish”. Without the acknowledgement of the objective facts then it may go un-noticed if that feedback is justified or how it can be made stronger in the future.

I’ve done it myself – when I came back from the recording studio a couple of years ago after recording my first CD my coach asked how it had gone. My initial response was all subjective. With his usual sense of humour he got me to include far more objective responses which made me realise that I’d based my initial response on an expectation of recording the whole CD in “one take.” Including objective feedback about the quality of the content, the sound of the final recording and that actually I hadn’t taken any longer to record than was allotted for a piece of this length, changed my subjective response.

This week I invite you to be aware of the style of feedback you are using for your own work. Notice the difference including both subjective and objective styles makes.

Have a week full of feedback

Love

Jen

This was originally posted on www.YourChangingDirection.com