Feedback: Strategies for Engaging in Teams
Feedback is essential in cross-disciplinary team science and collaboration. It is a process based on opening up space for meaningful reflection and dialogue. It requires a humble, empathetic, and humanistic approach that involves asking thoughtful questions, close-listening, managing tensions, perspective-seeking and reflexivity. Feedback holds the capacity to nurture team effectiveness and creativity, and advance scientific inquiry and research. This page introduces some of the foundational elements of feedback. Read on to learn about frameworks and strategies for this complex yet generative process of communication in team settings, and discover how psychological safety leads to constructive feedback experiences.
Many of the resources and all the videos in this section are repurposed from a webinar held in August 2024 on “Providing and Receiving Feedback: Strategies for Engaging in Teams,” presented by Edgar Cardenas, PhD, co-founder and associate director of the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative Center at Michigan State University.
Entering the Process
As you enter the feedback process, consider best practices for setting the stage and establishing conditions that will make the conversation successful. For example, think about the amount of time needed to facilitate the conversation and the relevant people who should be involved. Be direct and specific in the way you communicate while embodying a holistic mindset that is thoughtful in nature, centered around good intentions, and represents a shared purpose.
In the following video clips, Cardenas explores tips for entering the feedback process and setting guidelines to make it productive:
Create Psychological Safety
Psychological safety is foundational to supporting the process of providing and receiving feedback. The practice of psychological safety, which is “the belief that one can speak up without risk of punishment or humiliation,” serves “as a critical driver of high-quality decision making, healthy group dynamics and interpersonal relationships, greater innovation, and more effective execution in organizations.”
In the video below, Cardenas expands on the importance of psychological safety and provides examples of scenarios that demonstrate or lack this type of supportive team environment:
Build Emotional Intelligence
Research shows that emotional intelligence helps us better understand our own feelings as well as the feelings of others. Researchers at Yale University have found that you can improve your ability to provide meaningful and respectful feedback by being:
- Self-aware of your emotional thoughts and reactions, managing and reducing stress, and remaining emotionally present in healthy ways.
- Socially aware of your team’s state of emotions by recognizing and understanding their experiences while staying mindful around the impact of your verbal and non-verbal messages when communicating with them and nurturing relationships.
Consider Cultural Dimensions of Communication
Be mindful of the ways that cultural expectations and backgrounds can influence both verbal and nonverbal communication styles as you engage in the process of providing and receiving feedback. Explore these suggested readings to learn more:
- The Art and Science of Communication: Tools for Effective Communication in the Workplace by P.S Perkins, covers topics related to how you present yourself and the various ways that paralanguage, non-verbal codes, and intercultural relations emerge in communication settings.
- The Power of Talk: Who Gets Heard and Why by Deborah Tannen, explores critical ideas that are still relevant today around the cultural dimensions that intersect with gender and sex.
- Why Inclusive Language Matters and Inclusive Language Guide, from the American Psychological Association, provide useful strategies for developing communication skills that are inclusive and holistic. These skills promote awareness, guide learning, and encourage the use of culturally respectful language that highlights the voices and perspectives of historically marginalized or stereotyped groups.
Fostering Dialogue to Support the Feedback Process
Dialogue is a core part of the feedback process, requiring that you thoughtfully engage in a conversation with psychological safety, emotional intelligence, and cultural awareness, and where various perspectives can be exchanged for deeper understanding.
Establish Ground Rules for Team Dialogue
Articulate simple ground rules (e.g., “be kind” and “stay present”) to create a safe space and promote effective feedback in your work with teams.
In the video below, Cardenas offers some thoughts about what this looks like in a team setting, along with additional dialogue guidelines to maximize the positive impact of the feedback process:
Engage in a Generative Process of Feedback
Language is a powerful tool that shapes our experiences. What we say and how we say it matters for dialogue to be useful. Check out these video clips for helpful tips to facilitate active and productive conversations using guiding questions and inquiry-based phrases:
Another strategy that will help you foster dialogue is posing neutral questions. According to the Critical Response Process by Liz Lerman, neutral questions help remove judgment and motivate the person receiving feedback. This clip highlights additional components of this feedback approach:
Additional practical strategies you can use to cultivate a culture of dialogue:
- Using the “humble inquiry” approach by engaging in active listening and asking genuine questions instead of trying to control the conversation (Schein & Schein 2021)
- Managing tensions that involve recognizing your emotional triggers and how you react (Edmondson 2013)
- Not rushing the process and allowing the conversation to naturally unfold (Edmondson 2013)
- Spending time on building relationships early on as a way to get to know the team and show them you are coming from a good place (Edmondson 2013)
Know What Feedback Is NOT
As you engage with the process, keep in mind some of these common pitfalls shared by Cardenas that teams experience when it comes to providing and receiving feedback:
- Avoid leading with your opinion as if it is the only one that matters in the room.
- Steer clear of directing your focus on what you think is “wrong” and losing sight of the team’s efforts and contributions.
- Move away from giving the “answers” and missing opportunities to engage in productive and fulfilling conversations where you and your team can work through the solutions together.
- Stay away from harsh words as they compromise the team’s sense of psychological safety.
Closing the Process
During the concluding stages of the feedback process, invest time and thought in how you plan to engage in the remaining steps of the discussion. If it feels that more time is necessary before wrapping up the conversation, acknowledge this need by creating another opportunity to continue or follow up on the discussion which can make the process feel less overwhelming.
Below, Cardenas provides some examples of questions that you can utilize as a way to think about these next steps to move the process forward:
As Cardenas underscores in his presentation, feedback is a gift when done right. By fostering a positive culture of feedback that recognizes the generative qualities and impact of the process, you can enhance the team’s communication strategies, promote cross-disciplinary efforts, improve productivity, nurture innovation, and advance scientific inquiry and research.