Mandatory Positive
In many contexts, such as feedback to a coworker, you may feel that you need to provide positive feedback even if you aren't particularly impressed with their performance. This can be handled by focusing on things that they did right and using neutral language such as "participated" and "contributed."Contributed deliverables on time and participated in design meetings.
Positive
Positive feedback that is genuinely felt seeks to communicate an individual's unique talents and contributions.Leads the team with his technical vision, superior problem solving abilities, significant work output and dedication to help others improve.
Constructive
Constructive feedback identifies ways that an individual can improve. This is usually phrased as an opportunity as opposed to a direct criticism and tempered with a few positive comments.Good design, can we rework it to use our brand colors?
Direct Criticism
Criticism that offers no face saving softness. This can be appropriate when an individual has failed to improve despite frequent constructive feedback.Consistently fails to align designs to requirements such as the use of brand colors.
Face Saving
Feedback may be designed to make an individual feel better about a failure or to help them save face.The first project I managed flopped like that too, you'll do better.
Measured Positive
In many cases, formal feedback may include measurements such as business metrics. Numbers can be colored with language to show how they map to performance. It is common to color measurements in a positive light, even if they are below target.Demonstrated a talent for closing deals by delivering $29,000 in monthly recurring revenue. This was just 5% below target in a challenging environment.
Measured Negative
Measurements can also be presented in a negative light.Missed revenue target by 5% with deals of $29,000 MRR. Failed to close several large deals.
Technical
Feedback related to technical work and skills.Troubleshooted problems to resolve critical issues in a timely fashion achieving a mean-time-to-repair of 22 minutes.
Communication
Feedback related to communication of information and social processes such as influencing.Delivered more than a dozen product demonstrations and effectively addressed customer questions and concerns. This helped the sales team to close several large deals.
Management
Management is the practice of controlling resources and directing people. Feedback in this area is often focused on business results or the perceptions of stakeholders.Helped our team to cut costs by 200k per annum by delivering a data quality improvement project. This reduced the manual effort required to correct billing errors each billing cycle.
Leadership
Leadership is the process of getting people moving in the same direction. This often occurs without formal authority such that anyone at any level can be a leader.Demonstrated leadership by organizing successful team outings and events.
Customer Service
An individual's impact on customer service results or feedback for improvement of customer service skills.Friendly and helpful to customers. As per policy, please avoid having personal conversations with other employees in front of customers as this can be perceived negatively.
Learning Formative
Feedback for students or employee development. This is often formative feedback that is part of the learning process itself.Excellent, you got it working. Is there a simpler design you can thing of?
Learning Summative
Learning feedback that is designed to communicate the results of learning and point a way to improve in future.Developed an effective working knowledge of web design including html5 and css. Designs were attractive but a little complex. Try to think of ways to make your code shorter and more elegant.
Self-Direction
Feedback related to an individual's ability to get things done and solve problems independently.Takes the initiative to identify improvements, gather resources, plan initiatives, overcome problems and deliver value.
Personal Resilience
Personal resilience is an ability to deal with stress. This is a common area for feedback and development.Dealt with difficult customer service situations without losing professional composure.
Creativity
Creativity is the ability to create non-obvious value. Feedback regarding creativity requires specific examples. Otherwise it risks sounding fluffy.Identified creative solutions to complex and intractable problems such as a microservice architecture that allows instances to be aggressively upgraded with security patches without any impact to production. This reduced average patch time from 23 days to 4 days.
Design
Feedback regarding design or design thinking. This can be phased in terms of stakeholder satisfaction or the business impact of designs.Consistently delivered impressive designs that were accepted by clients without major rework. This allowed for high work throughput, with 23 designs completed in the quarter.
Decision Making
Decision making feedback may consider the timeliness of decisions and whether decisions where high quality given the information available when they were made. In other words, decisions aren't necessarily evaluated in terms of results.Quickly made difficult decisions in an environment of uncertainty to push the service launch forward on aggressive timelines.
Work Quality
A common source of constructive feedback is the quality of work products.Delivered code on time. Although code was generally high quality, several defects were checked in that caused significant integration issues. The quality of your code could be improved with more diligent unit testing.
Time Management
Feedback regarding productivity or meeting deadlines.Commitment to project was high with many ideas offered in meetings. However, overall work throughput was low. Demonstrated a tendency to avoid committing to deliverables and action items. In other words, no deadlines were missed but you did not take on enough work in the quarter.
Summary
The following is an overview of feedback with additional examples.
| Overview: Feedback Examples | ||
Type | ||
Definition | Communication designed to provide others with knowledge of performance and knowledge of results. | |
Related Concepts | ||
