How can you give and receive constructive feedback?

[Music] Hello, and welcome to Breakaway, Leadership for a Sound Mind and Body brought to you by the University of Michigan Leadership Collaborative, a community dedicated to advancing leadership learning across the university for students who seek to develop and progress as leaders. I'm James McCray, Director of Camp Michigania, and I'm your guide on this podcast journey. In this series, we're asking you to break away from the norms of your daily routines to explore the challenges that leaders face in developing healthy habits that fuel the mind and body, so I'm inviting you to take this opportunity to do something you consider active while we engage you mentally. On today's episode, students of the Barger Leadership Institute, Ananya Mangla, Becky Wolf, and Yena Kwan joined Fatima Hawk in a discussion about the art of giving and receiving feedback. They focus specifically on giving feedback with social identities in mind, and how one can prepare themselves to receive feedback. Let's join them now as we break away. [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, everyone. We are here for another episode of the Breakaway Podcast. My name is Fatima Hawk. I am a program manager and lecturer at the Barger Leadership Institute. And I've been there for six years now, and I teach a few of our leadership classes. And here with me today are some of our leadership teaching fellows. So I'll let them introduce themselves. Hi, my name is Becky Wolf. I'm a senior at University of Michigan studying public health and sociology. My main areas of interest are patient advocacy and patient engagement. And I'm really interested in working on improving the access and equity of healthcare in the United States. And at the BLI, I've taught some leadership classes. I started joining the BLI in first semester of freshman year and joined as a staff member, the second semester of freshman year, and have really been able to take advantage of the awesome programming at the BLI, including teaching courses and fellowships on peace leadership and mindful leadership. Hi, I'm Yana. I'm a business and environmental sustainability student at the University of Michigan. I am currently a junior and I've been involved with the Barger Leadership Institute since my fall semester of freshman year. And since joining, I've been able to be part of the leadership teaching fellow team here, as well as the peace leadership fellowship, the leadership certificate, and the mindful leader fellowship. Hello, everyone, my name is Ananya, and I'm a senior at the University of Michigan studying economics and quantitative methods. I also joined the Barger Leadership Institute as a freshman, and I've been involved ever since. It's been three years now, and over the three years, I've got a chance to also teach the leadership courses alongside Becky and Yana here. And for take in the peace leadership fellowship, the leadership certificate, and also work as a project manager on the ALF team over the years. And it's been super fun. Thank you all so much for being here with us. Just to give everybody who's listening and idea of what our leadership teaching fellows are responsible for, they are the ones facilitating our leadership courses, as well as grading assignments, leaving both the written comments, as well as meeting with teams of students and coaching them and giving them verbal feedback. They also debrief with each other on teaching and facilitation. All three are lead teaching fellows, which means that they are mentoring some of the younger teaching fellows and providing ongoing mentorship. And finally, they are seeking out receiving and giving feedback in one-on-one with me, their supervisor, and it's been a wonderful experience to kind of see them grow and learn the skill of giving and receiving feedback. And I'm so excited for them to share what they've been thinking about. So I'd love to start off with the very general question of, like, if you could describe how your experience and giving and receiving feedback has evolved over your time here at the university. Well, I guess I can start. I definitely coming into college didn't really think that much about the value of feedback. I mainly just had experience from it in high school assignments. And we'll just get feedback on assignments that didn't seem very helpful. So I never really thought that much about how feedback could actually be particularly useful, especially in educational settings, as it hadn't really been for me in the past. But joining the BLI, we do such an in-depth review of how useful feedback is and how to actually provide it in an effective way. And that's a big thing that I think has shifted for me through being involved with the BLI and in college in general. Is that feedback is very important, but the way that we give feedback is equally as important for how it's received and how effective it actually is. So I definitely think getting very intentional feedback from leaders in the BLI as originally a student in the leadership lab was really helpful for making that shift for me to realizing how really specific ideas about how to think deeper into topics could be really helpful for my personal development as well as for projects. I think also a big part of that for me was learning how to use feedback to kind of unpack inequalities that can be internalized that we often don't notice when we're first starting that journey. So really getting feedback on what ideas I might have that are actually maybe not seeing the full picture of certain current events going on or experiences that I don't have was really helpful for building those skills to think more deeply and more critically about the world around me. I can add to that, I agree with Becky. I think before coming to Michigan and starting this position, I had a almost negative perception of feedback and that might have some cultural connotations to it. I am an international student from India and usually feedback in the past for me has always been very blunt and very negative almost and I never thought of it as something to be taken constructively. I think that's been a big shift in mindset ever since starting this position is that there is a intent and a purpose behind feedback and if you keep that in mind when giving and receiving feedback, it makes it so much more valuable and impactful and just having a growth mindset towards feedback has been very important. I always thought a feedback is something I should do differently but always in a critical sense and that is just like I was never something I did or some way I behaved was not good enough but instead thinking about it as a measure to grow and not a comment on you but rather an area for you to grow in has been very important and that's been, I've seen that shift in mindset a lot and it's been something I've been working on actively over the years and I see that coming out more and more now where I'm very comfortable giving and receiving feedback to a point that I actively seek it out. Yeah, I mean similar to Nanya I think before I came to the University of Michigan and before I got involved with the Barger Leadership Institute, my idea of what feedback like consists of and like the purpose of feedback was very cultured, like impacted by my cultural background. So as like a Korean American, my view of feedback was it was a very one-way street where you know people who were newer to the organization or possibly people who were younger would get feedback from the supervisor and it wasn't really a two-way street there. But it was pretty clear from the moment I joined the VLI that it actually is a two-way street and it should be a two-way street. So I think since joining two years ago I've been able to work with like my peers and especially like thoughts on my supervisor to change that mindset in my view of feedback. And I think the VLI has just really equipped me with really actionable and doable tools that I can use within these conversations to really practice giving feedback to people who are older or people who might be considered my supervisor. I think also like y'all are making me think about how I've come to think of feedback from the VLI as being really a gift and a commitment to any kind of dynamic. Like you'll have relationships in life where things don't go well and maybe no one addresses it and a friendship just kind of falls apart or there's just that like rift that grows between people. But I think some of the strongest relationships I have with family or friends is when maybe I do something I do something that someone else doesn't like. or vice versa. And we talk about it. And the way we talk about it really matters not from a judgmental or accusational standpoint, but really giving that feedback honestly with the intention of wanting to strengthen that relationship. Because if we want to make things stronger, it's important to recognize what's not working and how to fix that. So giving feedback to me, I now think of it more as like a commitment to wanting a relationship to be stronger if it's done in the right way. I love this perspective on feedback as an integral part of relationship building. And I'm really curious like all of you talked about feedback with purpose, feedback with intention and strategies. I'm just curious like what does that actually look like in practice? If you could give me some examples and I'll listen to some examples so we can kind of contextualize it a little bit. I think one of the best pieces of feedback I've received, or at least like one that's completely shifted my communication strategy was a conversation I had with one of my parents in late high school. Because I remember we've been having like a lot of disagreements recently. And my dad sat me down. He was like, I really want to hear what you have to say and the things that are like hard for you. But the way you're expressing this to me is not going to meet your goals. So I like I need you to think about how to deliver feedback or how to have these conversations. That's really going to open people up to having that conversation and meeting you where you are. And I really think that got me into a completely different mindset and like now moving forward while I'm giving feedback, especially if it's like a particular situation. I want to address I'm trying to think about what are my goals for this conversation or this relationship in the long term. And like what things should I bring up in order to achieve those goals and what things should I not bring up or like what specific word choice can I use to make this land the way I want it to because a lot of the time how we intend to you know express feedback or express our thoughts is not how it actually lands based on what we're saying and also thinking about like the person we're talking to you know what they've been through what they've experienced and how that's going to impact how they receive feedback. I'm hearing so many important details here things like the you know having compassion and empathy for the person that you're talking to, valuing the relationship, your commitment and renewing that not coming from a space of reaction but actually being very thoughtful and intentional about it. I want to plug a session that we do in our foundations in leadership course which is the art of giving feedback right and where we talk about staying at the level of the descriptive avoiding judgmental and as some to language it and and really crafting your feedback and practicing it before you deliver it so that when it comes to really high stakes conversations it is productive and it is helpful and it actually helps strengthen the relationship and I don't know if but Ananya and Yena if you have examples too that you want to share but I'll open it up to that and also talk maybe talking about the the actual crafting of the feedback. I can definitely speak to it and this might be a little bit of a detour from what we were talking about but I was thinking about feedback in a professional setting more a lot more and this is something that comes up time and time again not just at the BLI but at other professional workspaces outside where you can really tell a lot about about a team of companies culture and spirit by the way they communicate and they give feedback and this is something I think about often is that when you're giving feedback it's really important to ever reflect on the reason you felt the need to give this piece of feedback and recognize your own intentions before you actually say it out loud because giving mindless feedback is honestly one of the worst things you could do to your entire team and through yourself because it's really putting down the morale of the team and the and goal of whatever you're working on and your own value in the team as a leader as a team member and this is something I really try to emphasize when I'm also I am the person who's giving feedback is to think deeply about why I felt the need to give this piece of feedback reflect on what again my intention is in giving this piece of feedback what I want this person to get out of this conversation as Becky said and also like such always end the feedback with suggestions to grow and things that would have actually made a difference if they've done it differently and this is something actually practice a lot in the class is always and every piece of feedback sometimes not always but a lot of times with suggestions because then it's it's giving them a purpose and a direction to move towards it's not just leaving them astray and just saying them like oh you just didn't do this properly or you did do this properly but maybe try it otherwise it's giving them a direction to move towards it's giving them space to grow in and it's again helping them understand the purpose of the feedback and the activity and a lot of those intentions deeply and it also makes a much more it leaves a bigger impact on the person receiving the feedback and I remember I reflected on this in one of my LC essays the leadership certification essays was how I've changed in giving feedback about how before as a freshman I used to give feedback based on just how I felt and I was just like oh I just wish they were not so chatty or wish they were a better listener but now we thinking about that let's say that example of feedback with intent and with giving them space to grow thinking saying instead of saying like oh they're chatty they don't listen saying things like I think they take up a little a little too much space in a group setting which discourages other team members from participating and speaking up and if could derail the conversation and something they could do differently is before speaking take a minute to think and listen to the conversation before taking an initiative to speak or letting others speak before they speak themselves and that's just an example of how you could go about it and that's something I think has been very important yeah I mean it sounds like an onion that trusts in the team and the people you're working with is a huge underlying like foundation that needs to be said and I completely agree that the way a team responds and reacts to feedback is I think like the first manifestation of how like it's like a reflection of the level of trust that's like in the team and I think that was like one of my first lessons that I learned was if you want to give and receive good feedback you need to first build that layer of trust with the people you're working with and building that trust not only requires vulnerability but it also requires connection I'm in really helping the people in your team and yourself feel like you belong there so now the one of the first things that I do when I work with the new team whether it be with the new LTF team or a new student team is really honing in and being intentional on how I build the connection so when it does come time to give and receive feedback we all feel safe and confident in the feedback that we give and receive I'm so glad you mentioned this piece about trust because I think that in my own personal journey with feedback I used to get really defensive when someone would give me feedback that was like critical especially if I think I've done a good job anyway and then you're telling me I would get super defensive and other people can see that right so if they witness that the way you receive feedback is in a very defensive manner then they're not going to trust you and speak up to you so they I look out for that in people I look at to see what their level of reactivity is to feedback and how they come about it and I think one of the things I've encouraged you all to do is like if there's a piece of feedback that you don't know how to handle by yourself sometime you know say thank you for sharing it with me I'm going to consider this or I'll come back to you I have to talk about it with my team and then I'll let you know like any number of those strategies to delay a little bit because our egos as Ananya you were talking about why are we delivering this piece of feedback is this to satisfy our personal egos or is it for the growth of the team the ego piece for me is super important because we all deal with that in different circumstances and if we can kind of like quiet the ego and be really receptive and present with what's being told to us I think that can make a huge shift and thank you Ananya for sharing strategies for building trust I'm curious like are there other things that you've done to help prepare students to receive feedback yeah I think this is something we always do at the BLI but setting expectations Um, I think one of the quickest ways you can get a bad reaction from a feedback is if the other person isn't prepared to receive the feedback. And I think that's a huge component in kind of like creating that environment and setting the intention like, oh, you know, in today's meeting, I really want to go over a couple, like feedback that I have for you or some other team members might have for you. Um, and setting that kind of preps and primes their brain to receive that well. So that's always something I try to do, whether it be with the other LTS, even with Baltimore or my team members is always just setting that as the very first agenda. It's something I want to talk about. Okay, awesome. So earlier, some of you mentioned that your social identities played a role in you receiving feedback, right? So whether it was because of cultural norms where where there might be a system of hierarchy or or it was just not modeled to you in the past, right? So there's power dynamics between Becky, as you were saying between your parents and you as a child or like a supervisor or someone who might be reporting to them. So what roles do you think social identities play in giving and receiving feedback? And if you could contextualize that with some examples you've seen in the classroom. Okay, I was very moved back here to go, but I can definitely speak to it a little bit. I think with my personal experiences and things I've seen in class, I definitely do believe that social identities play a factor in how people given received feedback, especially because number one people receive and give feedback in different ways. And there is an aspect of social identity that plays a factor into it. Some people in some cultures, it's seen a little assertive and aggressive almost to say to somebody's face directly and they prefer feedback in a more non direct way. And those will nuances play a big factor in how people given receive feedback, which I definitely think should be taken into consideration. And again, sort of connecting the dots like those setting expectations are a very important factor in these instances because you're not just preparing the person to receive feedback. So learning how they receive feedback and how to curate it to them specifically, because feedback isn't a one size fits all, you know, you can't give the same feedback to five different people and expect them to receive it differently. And I think in those things taking their social identities into consideration, setting expectations and understanding how they should they would like to receive feedback and again building that trust and bond with them and learning about them at a deeper level helps curate feedback that is meaningful and impactful and that continues to grow on your relationship. And it creates a bridge 100% and I think this is something I've definitely seen in class and experienced myself. And this is something I found by interesting us thinking about that just now, but how like for me specifically so in my social identity, I always thought that feedback was one way with always from the higher up to the person below them and it doesn't go both ways because. Only because they're higher up, they can comment and criticize your work and your actions is what my perception was and I think one of the biggest learning curve for me in the BLI was that here we we treat feedback as a two way street because again it's a relationship that you have with the person on your team or with the family member whoever it is in your life. And so it goes both ways, even if this person is professionally higher up in the hierarchy than you or this person is older than you and this person is just someone who is much more experienced than you. And that's something I think I love that we practice a lot that's been something I find very helpful because it's also helped me shape the way I approach feedback outside and I think the biggest example of that is with you, Fatima is when you actively seek out feedback from us at the end of every session and ask us how did you feel about that and do you think this material could needed a little bit of a little tweak here and there or how could we approach this differently and you ask us for feedback and you form that relationship with us. To extend that now I seek you out when I have ideas and I was just like oh how do you think about if we do this differently like with that wouldn't that be interesting and that's been so helpful for me because now I've been able to practice it outside. Again going back to what Becky said like I've been able to now approach relationships outside in a more constructive manner. I mean, just something that Ananya said that stood out to me was you mentioned how social identities impact like how like that trust is there and the way that the trust like is present in teen dynamics and I think the most difficult part for me and I still have a hard time with it is the fact that you can't see all the different social identities of the people that you're actually working with. That makes it harder to understand how it impacts their understanding of feedback the way they want to receive feedback feedback feedback and I think it's just something that's really hard to navigate and that's why I really appreciate how in both of our classes in both the lab and foundations we have a whole session dedicated to just discussing about our social identities because it kind of builds a the trust. But be it also helps me understand what type of social identities are at play with the teams I work with and to also share the social identities that impact the work that I do with the teams. I know when I first joined I was a freshman when I like joined the teaching fellows team and I really had a hard time giving feedback as a freshman to the team of like juniors and seniors I was working with. And kind of sharing that with the teaching team especially really helped me get the feedback that I needed to build the confidence for that semester especially. Thank you both for sharing all those examples I think they're really helpful insights and I definitely agree like having that mindset or thinking about how social identities impacts how we receive and get feedback is so important because everyone you know has a unique set of personal experiences and that really impacts how we receive things. Whether we receive feedback and feel that very defensively or like you're mentioning earlier and then yet the culture of whether feedback can even be bidirectional because a lot of people don't even think about that and that can really impact how it feels to receive that feedback. Like also what you're saying about how be I really you know encourages this mindset of how feedback is bidirectional and a component for healthy relationships and I think that's so important to be teaching in a college setting to students because we can carry that knowledge with us. I think about our careers or other organizations were in I've had some like professional experiences where I've been giving feedback to people who are way, way higher up than me whether it was like holding you know professional degrees with with an MD or PhD or like you know folks who are leading organizations I've been a part of. It can be scary it can be really daunting and even knowing that that's an option that you have I think is great to be teaching those skills to students now so that we can really build on that. Throughout our experience in the professional world. I think also a big part of why it's so important to think about this in the classroom is that there are some identities we might think we know about students or some things we might think we know but at the end of the day we can't assume where anyone is coming from what their experiences are. And doing so can actually be really harmful and it can actually really impact how students felt seen and heard in a classroom setting. I've even had an experience at University of Michigan where I brought up a concern I had with some of the course content and had an instructor like very incorrectly assume my personal identities and experience with the topic which I was very very much upset by. So I think you know it's also important to consider like how our personal privilege and identities are playing a role into that as well. So I may be giving feedback with a lot of instruction and training on how to deliver that effectively but that might not you know necessarily control the fact that some identities I might have could like have an impact on how I perceive I'm delivering feedback or how the feedback I give is received. So it's important for me to also be thinking about how my experiences are impacting how other people feel safe and heard in a space. So all these things really it's just such a complicated like experience of how to deliver and receive feedback again because there's there's so many things going on for people we can't really just assume what we know what we don't know. And even just slight wording really can impact you know how people receive or give feedback and the relationship. and general in the long term. And here, I'd just like to plug a little bit about this idea of coming from a place of curiosity rather than being so certain about everything. So one of the things that we try to do is ask a lot of questions. So if you don't know something, instead of making an assumption, can you tell me a little bit more about that? Where is that-- like, help me understand, you know? Where are you coming from? I am curious about this piece of what you said. And so constantly reframe me, and instead of assuming as our brains are really, really programmed to do and making all these leaps. So hopefully, something like where Becky, you felt like someone made a lot of assumptions about you doesn't happen because you are coming from it with from a place of curiosity. And we've actually had this happen when one example that stays with my mind so often is like a student came up to an LTF and then to me and said, you know, they didn't understand why these assignments that we were giving in class was helpful. And it was like really stressing out, why did they have to do individual deliverables on type of teen deliverables? And we did. We asked some questions about like, well, tell us about what's been happening. Like, how much time are you spending on these deliverables? What's going on? And through those questions, instead of just writing the student off as someone who's like being rude and not being like here for the class or anything, we learned that the student was spending so much time like hours and hours on the team deliverables overperforming to a point where I think there is a miscommunication with the expectation that we don't expect you to spend eight, 10 hours on one assignment. We actually expect a lot less. And also recognizing that the student was putting in so much effort on the team based project that they had no time to focus on the individual deliverables or reflections. So coming from a space of curiosity, the other thing that I heard you all say talk about and I think it's important to highlight is this idea of like self-reflection. You all are posing questions about yourself and what you're thinking and how you're receiving it or where your ego might be. And it's something that we do a lot at the BLI, which is pause and reflect. In fact, one of the exercises that we do that prepares leadership teaching fellows to give feedback is to first have them think about their experiences and receiving feedback. So in our training, we ask them to think about a time when they receive really helpful feedback or an assignment and what made that helpful, as well as think about an experience to receiving either verbal or written feedback and how they took it, how they responded to it, just to kind of understand themselves a little bit. And if you haven't done that for yourself as a listener, we would encourage like that sort of self-reflection just to kind of know where your baseline is at 'cause it might be that how you receive feedback could be dependent entirely on past negative experiences and so now you're like very guarded against it. Have you all curious, have you all taken, if at all, like social identities of the students that you're giving feedback to? Have you taken that into consideration when you're giving feedback? - I can start us off, definitely here. It doesn't happen often, but there's been a couple instances where I have taken a person's social identities into consideration when giving them feedback, especially in the setting of the class, which is the relationship that the students form with their LTFs can go very deep sometimes, especially in the foundation class, the three credit class that we do in the winter because it's a much thought out much broader class that covers a lot of really thoughtful topics, reflective topics, and one of those topics do include social identities and they play a part in leadership and how people present as leaders depending on their social identities and how that affects team dynamics and sometimes students do reflect on that very deeply and talk about how their social identities play a part in their experience at Michigan and how they affect their leadership styles and their communication styles, and when looking at those assignments, those deliverables as their LTF, it does play a part I do take into consideration their self-awareness and their thoughtfulness in giving that response. And I try to give them strategies that are specific to their social identity. And just to give an example of that, I had a student in the past couple of semesters who talked about how she really disliked speaking up in class and how she always thought of it as very assertive and she disliked when I picked on her to speak in class. And I try to explain my thought process that this is just because I wanted to grow out of her comfort zone and sort of challenge herself a little bit. But over the semester, overlooking at her reflections, I found out that she was already challenging herself to grow out of her comfort zone, but just not in the way that I assumed was necessary. So she was really challenging herself to take on more course load and be the sort of point person for the team project outside, be the person who's emailing everybody and calling everybody and setting up supplies and arrangements. And that was a big factor that I hadn't taken into consideration when giving her feedback, oh, you need to speak up more. And had I not known that, I would have just given her the wrong feedback. So in those situations, I think taking into consideration what they're doing outside and taking into consideration that there might be some other factors playing in the situation that I'm seeing in person, like the fact that they're not comfortable speaking up in class, that could be many reasons for that. It could be that she's exhausted after a long day of school and she just doesn't have the energy. Thinking about everything that the person is giving, going through, like giving them the benefit of doubt and really taking into account the whole picture behind them is very important, I feel like. - Yeah, it sounds like meeting the student where they are is a huge, like was a huge turning point for the way the student and you kind of interrupted in terms of feedback and that took me back to this one experience I had with the student a couple of semesters ago. I noticed the student wasn't really participating much. I had made assumptions that maybe the student is falling behind and after I was able to talk to the student one-on-one, I learned that they were an international student or specifically from like a culture that doesn't use to getting feedback from people who might be younger than them because I had given feedback on how they could contribute more to the team, more tools in like advice and strategies on how to be a more active participant, but I was a bit concerned because that feedback wasn't getting taken in and at that time I was a couple years younger than the student. So I think having that talk with them and like approaching that conversation with an open mindset instead of being accusatory really helped reveal that one identity I didn't know was at play and after that conversation I was able to really kind of pivot the way I delivered my feedback to better help them digest it without completely shocking them with the 180 degree like different approach to feedback that they were used to. So after that I think we were able to really change the way they were able to be present in the team, but before that it took a lot of assumption checking on my end and just like meeting the student where they were and also challenging myself to exercise a different form of feedback giving that I wasn't used to before. It's a really interesting example. I think that really goes to show Yana how like there are so many things that play into how we understand feedback we're given that can really impact how it's received. I think for me the main ways I kind of consider students' identities when it comes to giving feedback in class probably largely comes from their engagement with stakeholders since a big part of a lot of these classes is really encouraging students and their project teams to learn from stakeholders in the community. And so depending on what their project topic is or who they're reaching out to, sometimes it can be really helpful for me to get a better idea of what students' experiences or backgrounds are so that we know how we're engaging with community members. I think this is also really helpful because sometimes when we're part of communities we're trying to help. We can kind of fall into these assumptions that we understand everyone's experiences, but we can ever speak on behalf of an entire group. So it's helpful to think about how our identities can be really informative about understanding a problem and how we can use those identities and relationships to form more connections and hear other perspectives as well. I think also I consider it more within team dynamics, particularly if there's some kind of challenge in a team with like distribution of workload or whether people are speaking up equally and contributing ideas to the project. A big thing that we talk about in training with the other student facilitators is like Fathom I mentioned earlier, having that curiosity mindset and asking questions. So, you know, why is someone not really speaking up as much or why are they not, you know, attending all the project meetings or like what is behind this comment that was made and a lot of times when I've asked these questions, I've had similar conclusions to the two of you and Ananya and Yenna where it's been students who maybe English isn't their first language and they're having a hard time keeping up with the pace of conversation and it's actually not very accessible or other situations where students are taking 21 credits and they simply don't have time to be doing all this extra work outside of class that some of the other students have. Or I've even had conversation with students who are like, I have kids. I can't be coming to class or doing project meetings on the weekends, I have to do childcare. And these are like very real experiences that people are having, but you might not really know on the surface levels, especially in a short term class where we're not really necessarily diving deep into everyone's backgrounds. So really keeping that open perspective and being curious and asking more about where students are coming from and what's going on for them. I think it's so important for being able to work on those team dysfunctions and make sure people feel really appreciated and respected in class. - Thank you all for sharing that. As I'm listening to you and I imagine our listeners two are probably thinking, wow, this sounds like it takes so much time on your part. So could you talk a little bit about like how much time you actually spend on doing this maybe like on average per student, I don't know. - I think, I don't know the exact amount, but I definitely say it gets easier and more automatic over time. It definitely requires more intentionality. I think when I'm starting with a new team or working on a new project or even working on this skill earlier on, but the more you do it, the faster it comes around and the more automatic it is. Sometimes it's more of a subconscious taking note of people's experiences and kind of filing that away as to how I might deliver feedback for them in the future, especially if I've had other experiences giving them feedback. - Awesome, thank you. And I think I would definitely have to agree with that. In any given semester, I could be supervising up to 10 LTFs, right? And individually working with them. I don't think it requires a ton of time. It's just the other things that kind of come naturally which is the building, the relationship, building the trust, having a rapport that you can return to and then constantly guiding and offering suggestions and also being receptive to it. So it does become more natural. We are coming up at the top of the hour of this conversation. So I just wanna ask one final question to you all, which is is there any other pieces of advice or suggestions that you would give to instructors, supervisors, our listeners about how to give feedback and how to get better at giving feedback? - I think one overall impression I've had is that there's a lot of ways to build quick opportunities of giving receiving feedback into organizational structures, whether that's very intentional check-ins during meetings or intentional one-on-one meetings with staff really depends on the capacity of the role but that spending that brief amount of time, getting and receiving feedback is not that much of a commitment but the cost of not doing that, especially with teams and organizations can be much higher. So it really is cost effective and efficiency and relationship standpoint. And like I mentioned earlier, I really do think that it demonstrates your commitment to improving stronger relationships amongst team members. - Yeah, I mean, just echoing Becky, I think it just simply boils down to understanding the team or whoever you're working with before you try to be understood. Just simply listening and really understanding where that person comes from, not only helps with how you give feedback or how that feedback is received but it also impacts the level of trust and ultimately the level and the quality of work that your teams are able to produce. - I agree with everything that both of them said and honestly the only thing I can add on to it is just like thinking of feedback, giving feedback specifically as an opportunity to grow not just for your team member, but for the team as a whole and for yourself too, because when your team member or someone close to you does better, it affects everyone around them and it affects you too. So if let's say an employee's performance improves, it reflects well on the entire team, it reflects well on you and it enables other people to grow on their capabilities. So thinking about it as like a group journey, not just for that person but for every party involved, will help you approach it better and also like thinking of it as like a little step journey. It's not about how much time you give into it at one goal or thinking of it as a chore. It's like small baby steps every day and I think back to every time I've enjoyed building a relationship with a colleague or a professional and getting feedback from them and seeking feedback from them. It's always been people who I was in constant communication with they would take time out of their day or their week to check in with me and ask questions and ask about my progress and then give me feedback and then follow up on it which makes a big difference because just giving feedback and then never following up on it is also a little bit of a missed opportunity because again, it's a constant journey. It's constant, it goes on keeps going constantly. There's always room to improve and room to grow for everybody. So thinking of it as small steps forward and thinking of it as a feedback cycle, working on it, giving more feedback, going back on it, seeing what work, what didn't work, checking in, following up a lot of that is what will make a genuine difference. - This reminds me that at the BLI, we think of feedback as love. So feedback is love in this instance. It is love for the relationships that you have and for the people that you work with and it is a generous thing to both give and to receive. And I will also say that just to be really crystal clear that we think of feedback and not just as constructive all the time, it's also affirming all the things that are going really, really well. So thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and your reflections with us. I mean, I just love listening to you all talk about it and I am so proud of you all for the amazing work that you do for our listeners. We do a debrief after each class to talk about how the facilitation went in the class and these three, I oftentimes will have notes written down and when they say the same thing that I've written down, I just check it off and I don't have to say very much because they're so skilled at it. So I hope that you took something away from this conversation. Thank you all so much. Really appreciate your time. Thanks to our guests from the Barger Leadership Institute for sharing their thoughts on giving and receiving feedback. That brings us to the end of this episode but your reflection on the topic doesn't have to end here. Make sure you visit our website at mle.umich.edu/breakway. There you will find discussion questions as well as more information about our guests. You will also find more episodes in the series there and please don't forget to leave feedback wherever you listen to podcasts. Finally, on behalf of the Michigan Leadership Collaborative, please take care of yourselves. Thank you for listening and go blue.