Glossary
A feedback culture is a workplace where giving and asking for feedback is expected, specific, frequent and safe, in every direction, and where feedback reliably changes what people do. The last part is the test. Plenty of organisations have feedback processes; far fewer have feedback cultures, because in most of them honest feedback goes nowhere, so people learn to stop giving it.
A feedback culture is not a policy or a review cycle. It is a set of habits that a team or organisation shares about how people tell each other what is working and what is not. It has four parts, and it is only as strong as the weakest one:
| Healthy | Unhealthy |
|---|---|
| Managers regularly ask their teams for feedback, and something changes | Feedback flows only from the top down |
| Feedback is about behaviour and its effect | Feedback is about personality, or so vague it cannot be acted on |
| Most feedback is given within a week of the work | Problems are saved up for the annual review |
| People can name work that changed because of feedback | The same comments come up year after year |
| Disagreement happens in the meeting | Disagreement happens in private messages afterwards |
| Positive feedback is specific enough to repeat | Praise is generic: great job, well done |
Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, in Thanks for the Feedback (2014), distinguish three kinds of feedback that are often confused: appreciation (I see you and value what you did), coaching (here is how to do it better) and evaluation (here is where you stand). Many feedback conversations go wrong because one person is giving coaching and the other hears evaluation. A healthy feedback culture has all three, and people say which one they are offering.
A team has a feedback culture when honest feedback is normal, safe and visibly acted on. Anything less is a feedback process.
What counts as straight feedback varies by culture. Erin Meyer, in The Culture Map (2014), places countries on a scale from direct to indirect negative feedback. People from more direct cultures, such as the Netherlands, tend to use what she calls upgraders (totally, absolutely) and give criticism plainly, even in front of others. People from more indirect cultures, such as Japan, use downgraders (a little, maybe) and give criticism softly and privately.
For global teams this matters more than any feedback model. The same sentence can sound like a mild suggestion to one colleague and a public rebuke to another. A healthy feedback culture in a mixed team agrees its own norm out loud: how direct we will be, in what setting, and how to check that the message landed as intended. Asking how did that come across? after hard feedback is a small habit that prevents a great deal of misunderstanding.
The US Army's after-action review is one of the most copied feedback rituals: after any operation, the team asks what was supposed to happen, what actually happened, why there was a difference, and what to do next time. Pixar's Braintrust, described by Ed Catmull in Creativity, Inc., gives directors candid notes on films in progress but has no power to impose them, which makes honesty easier on both sides. At team level, the simplest version is a weekly habit of one specific piece of feedback per person, with the manager going first.
In short: leaders ask before they give, everyone uses one simple shape for feedback such as the SBI model, feedback gets fixed slots in one-to-ones and meetings, and every change that results from feedback is named out loud. Our guide on how to build a feedback culture covers the seven steps in detail. To see which of the four parts is weakest in your team, the free feedback culture check takes about three minutes.
Tour De Force runs this as live, experiential training for teams worldwide, online and in person. Talk to us, or play The Weekly Challenge from our gamified learning apps to see the method in ten minutes.
Questions
A feedback culture is a workplace where giving and asking for feedback is expected, specific, frequent and safe in every direction, and where feedback reliably leads to change. It has four parts: feedback is given straight, taken well, given often and acted on.
Managers ask for feedback and visibly act on it, feedback describes behaviour and its effect, most of it arrives within a week, people can name work that changed because of feedback, and disagreement happens openly in meetings rather than privately afterwards.
Because problems surface earlier and skills grow faster when people tell each other what is working and what is not. Without it, issues are hidden until they are expensive, and managers lose touch with how their team actually experiences their decisions.
Performance management is a formal process of evaluation: goals, reviews and ratings. A feedback culture is the everyday habit of appreciation and coaching between people in every direction. A good feedback culture makes performance reviews easier, because nothing in them comes as a surprise.
Ask the team short, specific questions about the four parts: whether feedback is specific, how it is received, how often it happens and whether it changes anything. Compare the manager's answers with the team's. The free Tour De Force feedback culture check does this in twelve questions.
Keep reading
Twelve questions on whether feedback gets given straight, taken well, given often, and acted on.
GuideSeven steps, real examples and the habits to drop.
GuideScripts for feedback that lands and changes behaviour.
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