Feedback wrap — Developing the skills for better feedback

Nowadays, it is almost impossible not to talk about Feedback. Every leadership course and recognized companies in the world treat this subject with great care and discretion. We used to use a very traditional feedback model where the manager had a script and had to obligatorily speak three positive points and three negative points about his workers

Looking for new, more effective ways of working, we had a very interesting experience using the feedback wrap in our company to generate empathy and learn more about how we can develop a frank and sincere dialogue between people without offending them and understanding our need before people.

We use a criterion for corporate feedback called 3 more and 3 less, where we present 3 people’s strengths at work and 3 improvement points. This was the standard adopted by the company and it generated a lot of discomfort and confusion in our professionals, because they did not know whether they were doing well or not and from our managers they did not feel comfortable being a kind of standard, it did not sound like honestly and freely to talk to people frankly.

We had a very interesting experience using the feedback wrap in our company to generate empathy and learn more about how we can develop a frank and sincere dialogue between people without offending them and understanding our need before people.

We discussed some approaches and one of our managers presented the non-violent communication approach and later the management wrap feedback of 3.0. We decided, in our community of practice, to experiment with the technique, collect feedback, and decide whether or not it applied to our context.

Initially, as people did not know how to use the feedback wrap, they ended up adopting the 5 steps proposed as a cake standard or recipe, as a framework itself. The result generated in the people was not positive and gave the same impression of the feedback’s that we applied other times, without much success.

At this moment, we increment feedback wrap with other technique developed by Matheus Haddad. Your name is feedback canvas. In this technique, the feedback occurs with pairs, then the feedback is more transparency.

I believe this tool makes very match with feedback canvas and help us to better feedback for our teams.

We collected the feedback’s, exercised among peers and saw that when we use the technique without explicit steps, the tool also generates good results and transparency among people.

With this step, we started experimenting with teams giving us feedback on managers and a less formal approach outside the company’s compliance domains, to generate more truth and transparency, demystifying that feedback has to be a formal company move, with standards and methods.