Leadership through Feedback
My journey as an IT Assistant, Diamond Peer Teacher, and developer at USLI has been a continuous learning experience. I’ve often found myself in situations where I needed to provide feedback, both to those who look up to me and those whom I look up to. While I’ve been successful in providing feedback to students in controlled classroom environments, it can be trickier in dynamic workplaces. This led me to search for Linda Croyle’s LinkedIn Learning course, Leadership through Feedback.
There are several things to consider before providing feedback to someone, such as our relationship with the person, their newness to the team, their communication style, the context of the particular setting, and much more that I had not considered before. The ultimate goal of feedback is to come to a mutual understanding of the problem, an opportunity for communication, and clear expectations of what to do moving forward, and it is the responsibility of the person providing feedback to consider all of the aforementioned variables in order to accomplish these goals. I learned the difference between a formal feedback session (such as employee reviews) and informal meetings, where you can provide casual feedback to a coworker/higher-up when you meet with them. One valuable piece of information Croyle stated was that you shouldn’t put any statements in formal writing that you have not articulated verbally or informally already, which is why it is important to provide informal feedback regularly. Croyle also shared the perspective that we need to consider the other person’s communication patterns and biases (particularly their affinity bias) that likely stem from their childhood.