Kindly Review E-Book

Dawn Crawford

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 242

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Unlock the creative and innovative potential of your team members with a new approach to feedback and review In Kindly Review: The Secret to Giving and Receiving Feedback to Make Your Ideas Great is a transformative new approach to taking the sting out of the review process and unlocking the innovative and creative power of your teams. You'll learn to regain control over your work processes, from project start to completion, and get products to the finish line quickly and efficiently. The author identifies eight "classic" styles of giving feedback and contrasts them with the effective Kind Review process, a system for creating respectful, collaborative, and innovative working environments. You'll find: * Strategies for gathering, receiving, and giving feedback respectfully, productively, and kindly * The reasons why receiving feedback can be so painful in the first place, and ways to reduce the emotional impact of critical and negative responses * A comprehensive model for respectful workplace collaboration with team review and feedback at its foundation A can't-miss roadmap to unlocking freedom, creativity, and innovation amongst your team members, Kindly Review belongs on the bookshelves of leader at for-profit firms, nonprofit agencies, and government departments looking for new ways to approach team leadership.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

Eight Feedback Styles

Pushing Past Style to Completion

Collaboration Is Key

Note

1 Why Feedback Hurts

How the Human Brain Processes Feedback

Better Feedback Can Be Learned

Completion with Kindness

Notes

2 The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Review

Defining the Creator‐Reviewer Relationship

Good Feedback Is about Feeling Safe

What Is Kind Review?

Feedback Is Always Personal

3 Receiving Feedback: Tough Skin, Tough Love, or Tough

Face Your Anxieties

Learn the Levels of Feedback

Manage Feedback Before You Burn Out

4 Giving Feedback

Polish the Idea to Make It Shine

Improve through Process

Editing Is Not Creating

Take a Hot Minute and Reflect

5 Taste Is an Unconscious Bias

Feedback Is a Personal Opinion of Quality

Risk Avoidance Can Be an Unconscious Bias

Use Taste to Be Inclusive

6 Feedback Styles

The Eight Review Styles

When Styles Meet

It's Part of Who You Are

7 Kind Collaborator

Attributes of the Kind Collaborator

How to Manage a Kind Collaborator

How to Become a Kind Collaborator

8 Perfect Pass‐Through

Attributes of a Perfect Pass‐Through

Why a Perfect Pass‐Through Is Dangerous

How to Manage a Perfect Pass‐Through

What to Do If You Are a Perfect Pass‐Through

9 Vague Vocalist

Attributes of the Vague Vocalist

Why the Vague Vocalist Is Dangerous

How to Manage a Vague Vocalist

What to Do If You Are a Vague Vocalist

10 Land Mine

Attributes of a Land Mine

Why a Land Mine Is Dangerous

How to Manage a Land Mine

What to Do If You Are a Land Mine

11 Silent but Deadly

Attributes of a Silent but Deadly

Why a Silent but Deadly Is Dangerous

How to Manage a Silent but Deadly

What to Do If You Are a Silent but Deadly

12 DIYer

Attributes of a DIYer

Why a DIYer Is Dangerous

How to Manage a DIYer

What to Do If You Are a DIYer

13 One and Doner

Attributes of a One and Doner

Why a One and Doner Is Dangerous

How to Manage a One and Doner

What to Do If You Are a One and Doner

14 Rage Reviewer

Attributes of a Rage Reviewer

Why a Rage Reviewer Is Dangerous

How to Manage a Rage Reviewer

What to Do If You Are a Rage Reviewer

15 When Style Meets Process

Whack‐A‐Mole

Master the Two‐Round Review

The Kind Review Process

Remember the Review Styles

Embrace Change

16 The IdeaStorm: Kickoff to Success

The IdeaStorm

Who Needs to Attend

Setting the Scene

What to Discuss

Carve a Path to Success

17 Project Planning

How It Works

Deadlines Are Your Friend

Plan for and Respect the Reviewer's Time

Drive to Completion

18 Creating Your Satisfaction

Kiss It Goodbye

Use Your Whole Ass

Don't Confuse the Process

Protect the Gems

19 Mastering the Feedback Process

The Magic of Two‐Round Review

Avoiding Ambiguity

Two Rounds to the Finish Line

20 Preparing Others to Give Feedback

Words Matter

Frame the Type of Feedback You Want

Build the Box of Review

Just Start

21 Gather Feedback on Your Ideas

Collaborate to Make an Idea Big

Get to Work: Round 1 of Feedback

Find Peace

22 Find Strength in Collaboration

Prepare for Idea Growth

Work Time Is Round 2

Final Step: Make It Strong Again

Untangle Painful Review Processes

Make Your Own Magic

23 Making Kind Review Work for You

Path to Completion for Creators

Getting to the Finish Line for Reviewers

Process Takes People

24 The Dreaded Redo

Get the Specifics to Make a Change

Strive for Failure

Save Your Idea Seeds

Savor the Energy of Ideas

25 Surviving Group Review

When the Review Goes Sideways

Being Fed to the Hyenas

Being Pecked to Death by Ducks

Herding Cats

26 Ready for Completion

Don't Let Perfect Get in the Way of Great

It's the Final Countdown!

Slamming on the Brakes Sucks for Everyone

It's Not the Destination; It's the Journey

27 Failure to Communicate

Don't Mess with the Bear

When the Review Gets Personal

Life Is Too Short for Bad Vibes

This Life Has an Expiration Date

28 Perfection Is Impossible, but Collaboration Is Magic

My Imperfection Makes Me Perfect

Perfection Is Impossible

Fight for Completion, Not Perfection

Collaboration Is Magic

Acknowledgments

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

Acknowledgments

Index

Wiley End User License Agreement

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Kindly Review

The Secret To Giving and Receiving Feedback To Make Your Ideas

Dawn Crawford

Copyright © 2023 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data

Names: Crawford, Dawn, author.

Title: Kindly review : the secret to giving and receiving feedback to make your ideas great / Dawn Crawford.

Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : Wiley, [2023] | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022056048 (print) | LCCN 2022056049 (ebook) | ISBN 9781394182879 (cloth) | ISBN 9781394182893 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781394182886 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Feedback (Psychology)

Classification: LCC BF319.5.F4 C739 2023 (print) | LCC BF319.5.F4 (ebook) | DDC 153.6—dc23/eng/20230217

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022056048

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022056049

Cover Design: Wiley

To Brian and Katrina, thank you for being perfect to me.

Introduction

I have had over 100 bosses in 10 years. I can hear you say, “Wow, how did you screw up so bad?” So let me explain. As the owner of a communications agency since 2010, I've had the privilege of supporting over 100 different nonprofit clients to help them amplify their good through effective communication strategies and tactics. That's over 100 different people giving me feedback and reviewing my team's work. Thus, 100 people pay me and are my bosses.

That's also a lot of humans to learn from over the years – a lot of personalities to navigate and to receive input from regarding our work. It's a lot of opportunities to understand how humans provide feedback and review work products.

I've also learned that, more often than not, feedback can be hurtful. It can feel like people don't appreciate your idea or the hard work it takes to get something done. Unfortunately, we've experienced an increase in painful feedback and creative review processes in the past few years. This increase in blunt, unhelpful feedback inspired me to write this book.

Here's a revolutionary idea: you can control the feedback you receive. You can control the way it is given, its energy, and even the amount of it you get. As a result, you can create a feedback process that is kind and leads to better results.

Kind Review is a revolutionary process that helps you understand the feedback styles in your work life so you can get your creative projects done quicker and with more collaboration. This process will help you feel more confident about sharing your ideas at work. It will help others receive your ideas in a way that allows you to include their input without losing your stake in the idea. This process also produces better ideas, ones that reflect a team of smart collaborators. Through Kind Review, you can make your ideas better.

Being kind is not the same as being nice. I can hear folks saying that being nice results in subpar results. I'm not encouraging a nice review that is “pleasing, agreeable, delightful.”1 We're not here to agree on everything. We're here to create a process that hones good ideas until they're great ideas.

Truth be told, I'm not a nice person. I am hardly agreeable. I'm that woman who gives off big “don't mess with me” energy – so much that even when I was pregnant, people didn't hold the door open for me. But I am kind.

Kind is “having, showing, or proceeding from benevolence.” Kind is an action. Nice is a feeling. Kind is collaborating with others to make the world better. Nice is not upsetting the boat. We're here for action, collaboration, and kindness.

This book gives you the tools to take action and develop a creative review process that will produce better results more efficiently and help save your sanity. Kindness is the key. It's the feedback in the act of being helpful and well‐meaning. It's reframing errors as changes. It's about creating a team process for creative production.

Eight Feedback Styles

A lot of my job is adapting to human personalities to get our work done to the customer's satisfaction. I must read my clients quickly to see how I can best work with them. The ability to do it quickly is a secret skill. It's about realizing that there are general categories of review personalities.

I've discovered eight feedback styles in the workplace. They range from the Kind Collaborator, who helps your work live its best life, all the way to the Rage Reviewer, who intends to burn your work to the ground.

In this book, I'll share all eight types of review personalities. Spoiler alert – only one style is kind and helpful. You get to discover your style and figure out how you can best use it to get your work done. Most importantly, you'll learn how to manage other people's personality types successfully to find the compatibility that leads to kindness in the review process.

While every person is unique and special in their way, we also all fit into patterns. It's only human to want to classify everything into categories. We thrive on grouping items from salty to sweet to better predict the outcome. This book helps you apply categorization to feedback styles. While people will not be cookie‐cutter, I'm sure you'll see attributes of yourself and your colleagues in this book. So lean into learning how to manage each style best.

Pushing Past Style to Completion

Once you've mastered review styles, how does a project get to completion? Through the Kind Review process, you can get your creative work to completion with rich feedback and little pain. The key is efficiency and clear expectations of collaboration. Collaboration is the key to a Kind Review. Only through working together as a team can we ensure ideas become great.

In the second half of this book, you'll learn our proven process to get projects done with two rounds of feedback. Yep! Two rounds of feedback allow everyone to contribute and feel heard.

Ideas become great when a group of people works on them. It's through the thoughtful process and managing review styles that you'll be able to complete your work faster.

Good examples of collaboration are everywhere. There is a reason that actresses thank a long list of people when they receive awards. It takes a team to make a star. Your work is the same. It's essential to receive helpful feedback to polish your good idea into a great one.

Collaboration Is Key

Does it work 100% of the time? No. But we get about 90% of our contracts to completion. We've only had to quit about 10 clients since the start of our agency. That's a pretty good success rate and a lot of adaptability. It's a ringing endorsement of Kind Review.

But why did we quit that 10% of clients? Why did we leave money on the table and cut our losses? It was due to a lack of feedback on the client's part and disrespect for the process. Their feedback showed they lacked an understanding of collaboration, so much so that we couldn't get a project to completion. They were so toxic in their feedback style that it wasn't worth the money to hurt my team anymore. If my team is hesitant to work with a client, it's usually because of their feedback style.

Collaboration and feedback are essential to successful creative work. Everyone thinks they can do creative work, and it's often true. But doing it well at work takes an open, collaborative team.

In this book, I'll give you the keys to unlocking collaboration by creating an environment that promotes a kind, thoughtful, and respectful review process. By learning about yourself and the others on your work team, you'll gain the tools to carry out Kind Review.

Poor feedback styles produce poor work. Not learning how to manage toxic or lazy feedback styles will lead people to make crappy products or, worse, quit you. In a world where quality is our biggest measure of good, learning to improve feedback styles is key to a successful creative project.

We're all humans, but we don't need to be shitty humans. Finding kindness in your creative process will produce better work and better people.

Note

1

Kelly Shi, “Being Nice vs. Being Kind: Are they the same?” Santa Clara University, April 26, 2016,

https://www.scu.edu/the-big-q/being-nice-vs-being-kind/

1Why Feedback Hurts

Sharing your ideas in a professional environment can be terrifying. Lots of people are not brave enough to try. First, congratulations for wanting to put your ideas into the world and see if they take flight.

We've all received feedback and input our entire lives: that first smile as an infant when we finally pooped for the first time. High fives and raises for a job well done. But also frowns and disapproving tones when we've missed the mark.

In this book, we're talking about feedback on your creative work – in essence, your ideas. A creative idea can span a wide range of work. It can be writing, graphic design, presentation, or new product pitches. I am a writer with a BA in journalism who now produces communications products for a living, so I'm mainly writing this book from the perspective of communications and marketing. Still, it can be applied to any creative work or ideas. It's the process, not the purpose, that is important.

Beyond my time as a consultant, I've been brave enough to share my creative work since I was a child. I've also been giving feedback and critique to teams on their creative work since high school. I've received critiques and given feedback on creative work since age 16. That's a lot of time to process my reactions to feedback and give thought to how it can be better.

But for me, it all starts with a red pen.

My first memory of hurtful feedback was in third grade. I remember giving my mother a story I had written. I was so proud of the work I had created. It was a story about a cat who went to Paris. After 15 minutes, she gave it back to me. Red, marked up, and bloody. Slashes through words. “I don't know what this means” scribbled in the margin.

“What did you think of it?” I asked.

“It needs work,” she said.

I crumbled. I cried.

“You need to get a thicker skin,” she said.

I was crushed.

I also remember giving my first feedback.

Named high school yearbook editor at 16, I helped writers craft better ledes and less awkward sentences. I remember sitting down with a writer and telling her, “You can do better. Write less. Don't make it so hard.” It felt good in the moment to have the power to direct the outcome of an article, but was it enough to help her succeed?

From there, it's been a career of giving and receiving feedback. I thrived, completing a college journalism degree – which is essentially four years of feedback – and then went directly into a nonprofit communications career at age 22. I started giving feedback to communications interns by the age of 25. As a communications director, I had my first employee added to my team at age 28. I started my communications agency at age 30, where I juggle feedback daily from our clients and give direction to my team.

Getting feedback is a deeply personal experience for many people. It still is for me. It's hard to create. “It is easy to write. Sit in front of your typewriter and bleed,” Hemingway said. Creating in any form is putting your mind on paper or screen or stage. It's much easier to edit and give feedback.

Critiques can be empowering and transformative when delivered in a kind and respectful way. But our brains override many positive experiences to focus on the bad.

How the Human Brain Processes Feedback

Most humans have a negativity bias. According to psychology, a negative bias is our tendency to remember negative situations or feedback more often and then obsess about them more often than not. This thought process is also known as positive‐negative asymmetry. Negativity bias means we tend to focus on the bad comments and forget the positive ones.

As humans, we tend to:

Remember traumatic experiences better than positive ones.

Recall insults better than praise.

React more strongly to negative stimuli.

Think about negative things more frequently than positive ones.

Respond more strongly to negative events than to equally positive ones.

1

This obsession with the negative helped our ancestors survive. Avoiding risk and dangerous situations allows us to pass on our genes. When a Homo habilis grunted negatively at her clan mates about not eating poisonous red berries, it saved their lives. On the flipside, that toxic‐positivity Homo habilis was probably killed by thinking he could love a poisonous snake into submission.

Risk avoidance also happens when your coworkers find flaws in creative work. We focus on what needs to “change” instead of saying what we love about the idea. We point out the danger of typos and grammatical errors. We grunt to our clan mates that the threat of being misunderstood or ridiculed is in our future.

This focus on remembering negative experiences can manifest as mental health challenges from anxiety to narcissism. It can stymie us enough that we're not brave enough to share our ideas or voice. It can freeze our brains. I've struggled with managing my ability to receive criticism. It's comforting to know that the struggle is only human.

What happens inside our brains when we receive feedback and critiques? Our brains are simple sometimes – they want to reduce risk and maximize reward. However, when we feel threatened, our brains have two options: fight or flight. We either rise to the challenge of fixing the problem or flee that painful experience.

According to science, our brains are working against us when we receive too much negative feedback. The brain's amygdala receives information through our senses and translates them into emotions. The amygdala is also the part of the brain that triggers our fight‐or‐flight response. Situations and emotions trigger our danger response, telling the brain to avoid a threat. When the brain perceives a threat, the amygdala is “hijacked” to prevent that threat – leading to reduced analytical thinking, creative insight, and problem‐solving.2

This trigger in the brain is precisely what happens when we receive only negative feedback on our work and ideas. We lose our ability to find a path to fix the problems. Our brains get tired. We start looking for the easy way out or completely flee the situation.

Receiving only negative feedback is exhausting and draining. We've experienced the tendency of virtual teams to fall into the trap of telling people only what needs to be fixed. When teams see each other in the office every day there is lots of opportunity for tiny positive feedback comments in meetings and personal interactions: complimenting outfits, giving people a smile for a good idea, and asking about what people did on the weekend. Without these tiny human interactions, we drain our positive feedback banks. We see interacting with people on our team only as the way to get things done correctly and with as little effort as possible. This is not the way.

It's time to take control of your feedback styles so you can fight back and rise to the challenge of fixing the problems to make a better product. If someone's feedback makes you feel like your only option is to flee, it's time to have a tough conversation with that person. There is a kind method of confronting unkind feedback, but it takes building both a process and trust with the team.

Better Feedback Can Be Learned

I have had the rare opportunity to work with the same client for over eight years. In consultant time, we're an old couple. Heck, we're a rarity in a modern boss‐employee expectancy. Pam Miller is the founder and CEO of SAFE Haven for Cats. My team at BC/DC Ideas has been her outsourced communications department, with responsibility for managing her strategy and serving as the voice of her organization though all her communication channels. I've hired many folks to create content on this account, but I've been Pam's primary point of contact through weekly phone calls.

Our feedback relationship is amazing. I can confide in Pam; she's my role model as a strong woman leader, and we've tackled some big challenges over the years. I've learned a lot from Pam's leadership.

A few years back, we got to a point where we almost didn't make it due to poorly delivered feedback. I felt hurt that our trust was eroding. I felt that my work and my team's work was getting nitpicked without a clear improvement path. I thought we could not live up to an unrealistic standard.

This negative feedback was usually due to poor processes. For example, not enough information was delivered at the start of the project. There were midway changes or vastly different editing expectations from our established brand voice. My team lost our ability to bounce back from criticism and felt we couldn't do anything right. We were making more stupid errors and passing through too many typos. We were shutting down creatively. I was sending smoke signals that this wasn't working for us, but Pam responded kindly.

She recognized that we were getting too much input from too many people. We narrowed our input process to filter through her. She realized the overly critical feedback was coming from one of her team members and had the opportunity to address it. At BC/DC Ideas, we retooled our internal review process, giving me more time to review content before we sent it to her for review. We fixed the process and kept the people.

We changed how we managed our feedback process to make it kinder and more productive. From our work over the years, I can now recognize “seasons” when Pam is stressed and her feedback can be more direct. I also see times when she's excited and new ideas flow, which usually means more or new communications. She recognizes when I'm stressed or spread too thin and addresses it with kindness on our weekly calls. We are two people trying to save the most cats and produce excellent communications.

Completion with Kindness

Giving and receiving feedback can be less painful and more constructive. Every great writer has a good editor. Feedback and revision are critical components in the process of making powerful products. It takes respect and a shared process to make the collaboration work.

Lean into your collaboration process and find the joy in working with a team to make great things happen for your organization. Hold true to respecting yourself and your ideas. The Kind Review process will help you polish your ideas. It will take effort to identify the pain points and address them, but it's worth the effort.

Remember: feedback doesn't have to hurt.

Notes

1

Kendra Cherry, “What Is the Negativity Bias?” Verywell Mind, September 14, 2022,

https://www.verywellmind.com/negative-bias-4589618

2

Blue Beyond Consulting, “This Is Your Brain On Feedback: How Understanding a Little Brain Science Can Make a Big Difference in Your Next Feedback Conversation,” no date,

https://www.bluebeyondconsulting.com/thought-leadership/this-is-your-brain-on-feedback-how-understanding-a-little-brain-science-can-make-a-big-difference-in-your-next-feedback-conversation/