Giving Feedback
Image courtesy of Unsplash
Much of my consulting work over the years involves providing objective feedback to a client about a situation that they are currently going through. It is one of the most challenging parts of my work, because my clients tend to be extremely experienced executives, with decades of specialized experience in their field - how can I, a generalist consultant, provide useful insight to them, that they haven’t already thought of? How can I ensure that the feedback is received in an accepting frame of mind, instead of defensively?
The truth, you can’t guarantee that someone won’t get defensive when you’re providing feedback, sometimes called constructive criticism, which everyone just views as criticism. That being said, I’ve found a few tactics helpful which I’ll share in no particular order:
Extreme empathy - If the feedback falls under the “your customers find this process confusing or frustrating”, I might go through great lengths to really personify the customer to my client. I might put myself or a fictional elderly relative into the example, in order to highlight different levels of technology affinity or different levels of background knowledge about the process at hand.
Feedback sandwich - This is an old technique, but it works. Simply starting by acknowledging a positive aspect, followed by your critical feedback, and then ending on a positive note. The funny thing is that, even though everyone already knows about this…..it still works.
MECE - This acronym stands for Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive which is a consulting framework that helps one to simplify complex issues by grouping the problems into non-overlapping, comprehensive categories. You can read more about it here. I like to use it as a thought exercise before giving feedback to make sure that I’m being thorough with my observations and there are no scenarios that I’m missing.
Specific, illustrative explanation - It really depends on the medium, but if for example, I need to provide feedback via an email or Whatsapp, I’ll use images and highlight where possible what I’m trying to explain. I might also include a positive example from another industry / website / app so that my client can see the difference between what they’re doing and how others are handling the same situation.
What if I’m wrong - Finally, I like to think through, ahead of time, all the ways that I could be wrong in my analysis. This usually helps me to uncover any biases that I may have, which I’ll typically acknowledge before launching into my feedback for the client. E.g. “Because I’m a former derivatives trader, I tend to really like data-rich UIs with lots of tabular data and charts - so to me, your current interface seems a little sparse”. I’ve found that it helps the client to put my thoughts into context, and a few times, it allows them to say “well Mark, our clients aren’t like you - and we found that this current UX tests better for churn, retention etc”
Hope you find this helpful. I’ll revisit this in future posts and add / modify as necessary.
