Do a face-to-face team 360

Giving personal feedback is often overlooked during retrospectives. Teams tend to focus on process or technical issues while ignoring human ones. This means that opportunities for personal improvement are lost or left to an annual appraisal process where feedback could come second-hand through a line manager.

Giving and receiving personal feedback can be a very difficult thing. For feedback to be effective, the recipient has to trust that it is given with good intention, as a constructive observation. The giver of feedback also has to trust that the receiver will receive it in that manner. This level of trust can be hard to achieve and for some just does not come naturally at all.

Trust cannot be demanded or forced, it is built over time. Often a good level of trust may not be reached because team members do not have an environment where they feel safe enough to expose their vulnerabilities. It is much easier to talk safely about processes and technical improvements because these are not personal in nature, nor likely to drive strong emotional responses and cause conflict.

A useful technique to encourage personal improvement is team 360 feedback. Encourage everyone to give feedback on everyone else, each person in turn becomes the subject of feedback. Going round the room, each of the other team members gives feedback while the receiving person notes down whatever they wish to take away and work on. Make sure to time-box the session so that everyone gets enough time and no-one gets rushed at the end or misses her turn for feedback.

The main aim of this technique is to provide richer and more rounded feedback by the inclusion of many different perspectives. The key to this particular type of 360 feedback is the face-to-face aspect. Make it expected and desirable to give feedback directly and in front of the rest of the team, as part of the retrospective session.

Key benefits

Because the expected norm is to provide feedback, opting out of doing it becomes very hard. The point isn’t to make people feel socially awkward, it is to overcome the initial discomfort, enabling personal feedback to become acceptable and forge better understanding. Ultimately it allows people to give feedback they would not have been comfortable initiating otherwise.

A significant benefit of this one is that, over a few runs, it becomes much less awkward to say what needs to be said. Sometimes the pursuit of continuous improvement brings with it the need to surface some sensitive issues. This idea helps make those conversations possible and hopefully lets criticism be given and taken in a constructive manner. If the each team member expects to give and receive direct and specific feedback, avoiding it becomes an effort.

The strength that the team gains from this form of feedback is immense. It may feel strange and uncomfortable to start with, but when it is understood that the purpose of all the feedback is to make the team better, these feelings quickly fall away. Do not forget the positive feedback that team members receive. This appreciation strengthens the team bond and ultimately helps each member understand where on the field they play best for the team.

When the 360 feedback happens regularly, it reduces the potential for a pressure-cooker explosion, where unsaid feedback can leave feelings simmering away for weeks and months, which can be very damaging to a team. The face-to-face nature of this feedback breeds trust. As a member of a team receiving this type of feedback, I know where I am, all my team members have been honest with me and it is now up to me what I do with that feedback.

How to make it work

A technique that works well is for team members to propose one strength, one example where they felt the individual did well, and one specific area for improvement. Other variations of this can be for each participant to score themselves against criteria and the team to mediate their scoring with its consensus being revealed at the end. You will hear things like, ‘John, I don’t think that you are a 4 in that, Sally has herself as a 4 in that and I don’t think you are quite at Sally’s level’. In this technique, the criteria make the feedback more objective. A possible drawback is that a criterion is too specific and team members could be restricted on the scope of the feedback that they give. In addition, if in using this technique, it turns into a tick-box exercise with no discussion of the reasoning, most of the value is lost.

For a bonus point, try including the coach, facilitator or Scrum master, provide them with feedback and receive a different perspective on the team.

Here are some other tips for giving and receiving feedback:

• The only acceptable answer to feedback is ‘thank you’. Don’t defend your position, this may prevent further feedback.
• Saying ‘thank you’ is very powerful. Appreciation will grow trust and strengthen the team bond.
• Use concrete examples. This makes feedback more impactful, more genuine and easier to understand and cement in the mind.
• After the retrospective, refer to someone independent for their opinion on controversial feedback.
• The subject of the feedback might open with an honest assessment of themselves. People tend to be harder on themselves than others, but being self-critical makes feedback from the rest of the team more easy to handle.
• Provide feedback in a sandwich format: two slices of appreciation around an improvement filling.
• As team members get more trusting with each other, use Atkins feedback (no bread, just the meat in the middle).
• Similarly, make the positive feedback related to the improvement idea ‘I like this…. you could improve it by…..’.