Mastering Constructive Feedback

You've got a colleague about to give an important presentation. They want to practice in front of you, and they say, hey, can you give me some constructive feedback? Well, what do you do? You want to be helpful. You don't want to be negative, but you don't want to just tell them they're great because that's not really going to help them. What is the best way to give constructive feedback to someone on their communication skills, or, for that matter, any of their skills? Well, here's what happens when I do it. Someone speaks. We record the whole thing. We both watch it together before I say anything. Then we finish watching, they turn to me. T.J. what you think? Go ahead, rip me apart. I can take it. I want to get great. Just have at it. Let me have it. They're expecting me to list 93 things they did wrong. And truth be told, I could tell them 93 things I think they did that were less than great. But that's not how I start. The starting point is I asked them, what did you like about it? What are you talking about? I didn't like anything. Let's look again. Everybody does something well in the sense that they didn't make certain mistakes that other people make. Chances are your colleague had a good speaking speed, or maybe their volume was good, or maybe they moved their hands well, maybe their voice was nice and conversational. There's always something people do well. It's important for them to recognize that. Then I'll go through and tell them every single thing they did well. Everything I liked about their voice, their message, their stories, their example, their gestures, their movement, their eye contact, listing every single thing. Now, I'm not doing this to butter them up, and I'm not gonna lie. I'm not gonna say, oh, your volume was great, if they were talking like this and I could hardly hear them. No, I'm not gonna lie to them. I'm giving them sincere praise in the form of feedback because I believe it is legitimate. So that's. We do the second pass going through this speech. So now they're feeling a lot more relaxed. They're like, I thought I was so awful. I had no idea I was doing this many things. Well, something else happens. I have pointed out things they're doing well with their voice. Their hands, their eyebrow going up to look expressive, whatever it is. And I'm giving them some praise that they've never heard anyone say. So what's happening now is they're thinking, this TJ Guy, he must be pretty sharp. He's Giving me specific, positive feedback. No one else has said. My family never said that. My boss never said that. So my credibility is gone. Again, none of this is lies. None of this is bs. It's all sincere, specific praise. And sometimes the praise is simply you didn't say and. And, er, and have a lot of verbal tics the way so many of my clients do. That can relax someone. Now, it may be that their speech is still incredibly BO and awful. It may be that they spoke so quickly I couldn't understand them, but at least they did certain things well. Perhaps it was no ums and ahs. Perhaps they had good hand movement or good eye contact. So we're stressing those positives. And the person is feeling a lot more relaxed. They now feel like this is possible. I'm not as bad as I thought I was. And what's happening is they're thinking, well, this guy TJ seems pretty shrewd. He's giving me all this feedback on things I'm doing well that no one else has said before. And it seems legitimate. He's not saying anything that sounds to me like he's just spinning me or buttering me up or trying to flatter me. It all seems legitimate. So then what I do is I ask the person to give another presentation. We record it, and I say, look, we got all day long to talk about the negatives, and of course you have some things that need to be improved. I'm not going to kid you. You're not perfect. Nobody's perfect. But what I want to do now is do another version of your presentation and I'm going to record it. And the only task is for you to simply do more of the things you like, the things that I noted, the things that you noted, do more of that. We got all day long to talk about the things you don't like. And I have them give the whole presentation again. I record it, we watch it together. I don't say anything yet. And I just ask them, did you do more of the stuff that you said you liked? And typically it's always yes. And I also asked, did you do anything a little bit better this time? Were you able to add on some of the good stuff to make the whole thing seem a little better? And typically the response is yes. So they're already feeling good. They're already feeling like they've made progress because of criticism. But it's criticism in the positive sense, not the negatives. Now is when we're ready to go to flaws, the blunders, the Distractions, the mistakes, the things that really bring people down. But we've started at a high level. The person emotionally is up here. They're feeling good about their baseline. They're feeling good about progress they've made already. So now what we do is we go through. And I'm going to ask them to say, what is the one thing you don't like that you think is changeable? And here's where I point out myself and I say, look, everyone can look at video of themselves and not like something. I can look at a video of myself and say, wow, I wish I had the hair I did when I was 18 years old. Wow, I wish I had the waistline of when I was 18 years old. But we can't change that today. Instead, we're going to focus on how we move, how we look, how we sound, our message, our story. Let's focus on things we can actually change. I want to know what you want to change. And then I will focus on just one thing. And it could be a matter of looking at people more and not staring at a script. Say, why don't we do the whole thing again? But this time let's use a simple outline where there's just a few bullet points so there's nothing to stare down at and look at for three minutes at a time. You can glance down and look at people. I get them to do just one thing. I point out one flaw, but it's a flaw where there is a highly specific action that can be taken by the person to fix it. It's not general and abstract, like, well, it was really boring. I wouldn't want to listen to that. I feel sorry for your audience. Well, that's criticism, but it's not constructive in the sense that it's so general, it's so vague, it's so fuzzy. What do you do with that now? Quite often, people are too boring. And it's because the speaker is delivering 89 message points and it's ratta da da da da. It's just a conveyor belt of data. It's boring. So what I may do in that case is say, hey, let's try just one thing different this time. Let's put the slides away for a minute. And I want you to talk this time and just cover one idea. And let's tell an example or a story to make that come alive based on an actual conversation you had with a client, a customer, a colleague, and we'll record that. And typically when the student is watching it, the client's Watching it, their eyes get wide. They're like, wow, that's so much better. That's so much more interesting. I'd much rather watch this person speak. Okay, so now we have a template. So you had a 20 minute speech before with 189 bullet points that you found boring. Now you just saw a two minute speech. We focused on one idea. What if we just decided to focus on five ideas for this speech and you did essentially the same thing. You introduce the idea and you told a little story or example about it before going to the next one and we only have five. We're in good shape and they may try that. So that is what I find is the most effective way to give constructive feedback. Catalog strengths, then focus on one flaw, one thing that can be improved at a time. Give a highly specific thing that's actionable to do. Record again and just try to do that one thing. When I ask people, focus on improving one thing for this next presentation. Even if I don't give feedback, they'll typically do it. If they try to improve three or four or five things, they will fail miserably. Human beings, myself included, are horrible at multitasking. So if you tell someone, look, you got to move your hands, not do this. You have to use a fuller range of your voice and not speak in a monotone. You have to walk around a little and not rock back and forth. And you've got to give a story for each one. If you tell someone to do all those things in the next presentation, they're going to be worse than before, not better. So it's critically important to get them to focus on making just one improvement at a time. When they can see they've made specific improvement, then you really give feedback and say, look at this, it's great. Focus on making one change and you did it. And that's great. So we have all these strengths. Yes, we still have flaws, we still have problems, but we now have a system. You catalog your strengths. You focused on one flaw and a solution. You fixed that. Let's go to the next one. And sometimes someone might have 27 flaws. Okay, 27 takes later, we've gotten rid of them. Quite often it's really more like two or three or four problems. We fix those problems and we are in great shape. So it could take four different practices on video to get them to that point. The magic moment for constructive feedback when it comes to communication skills is getting someone to the point where they've worked through every flaw, worked on some improvement, and can now watch a video of themselves and say, wow, I can be half as good as that person is. I'm going to be the best person at this company presentation or this conference. And pointing to a video of themselves. Now they have real confidence because of the constructive criticism you gave them.