Constructive peer feedback is a core facet of your learning experience in health care innovation courses. And providing effective feedback can be difficult, because people who are invested in their work often feel upset or defensive when confronted with an outside viewpoint. This document offers an approach to delivering constructive feedback in a way your audience can hear, in order to enable dialog and foster improvement.
Guidelines for Feedback
- Balance positive and negative feedback
Both are essential, but people are usually more sensitive to negative feedback. Therefore, give positive feedback more frequently, and try to frame negative feedback to soften the emotional impact. - Be honest, but not brutally so
It does not help to hear that something is great when it is not; but it also does not help to hear only how bad your work is. - Be specific
Specific advice is more actionable and more constructive than a vague overall impression. - Offer advice, not a prescription
It is not your job to fix your colleagues’ work; that may be both unhelpful and unwelcome. Instead, share resources, new directions, and ideas for how the work can be improved. - Avoid getting personal
Focus on the work being critiqued, not on the person who did the work. Feedback that may be perceived as a personal attack is likely to encourage hurt feelings rather than productive change.
Collaboration and Collegiality
As in every aspect of health care innovation courses, we should strive to maintain atmosphere of trust and mutual respect—a safe space where the goal is for everyone to improve. Critique should take a collaborative tone in which the intent is to help each other grow and not just highlight what was done incorrectly. Helpful feedback can energize the person being critiqued. It should be an invitation to a conversation about how all our work can improve.
Adapted from a lecture by Kevin Volpp.